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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#231
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always worry with plane tickets because I have a middle name on my passport but many buying services don't take middle names into account. Also the name of my town has a "Ą" letter in it, which also is problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead just to be on the safe side.

By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the passport too. Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work. Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2…

Ah, it's so interesting to contrast different approaches.

For example, in Latvia, the legal treatment is that if you have two first names (two is the legal limit) then they are space delimited and if you have two surnames (it's becoming popular to join the surnames after marriage instead of changing the surname of one spouse) then they are hyphenated.

So if you see "Alpha Beta Gamma" then that means Alpha and Beta as given names and Gamma as the surname; and "Alpha Beta-Gamma" means that Alpha is the given name and Beta-Gamma is the surname, so the name in any official documents can be unambiguously parsed.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#232
I also had my website "reported" as suspicious in facebook. There is no official way to get more information or unblock your website. I see this as a darker pattern where facebook algorithms are tuned to block 3rd party external information content. In this way facebook is promoting sharing information only created within facebook platform.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#233
post #15

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators ca…

There is a better answer and that is to not use Facebook, because we don't need it.

Search is altogether another problem, because we really do depend on it.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#234
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so muc…

Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents. I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.

Why would they pay out all their net income, provide better customer contact/service, and go from being massively profitable to break-even?

What’s in it for them to do that?

Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a stronger company in the long-term? That they don’t do it suggests they don’t think it would.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#235
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is for Facebook's ad targeting. They want advertisers to be able to advertise to 21-24 year old women in California.

They can probably infer it as accurately as asking people. The inference isn't always accurate, but people don't always tell the truth, either.

They can do both. Someone lying or their inference being wrong about their gender is yet another new data point.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I bought a laundry washer and dryer set. They were nice, mid-range units and I was pretty happy with them. About a year after purchase, the plastic clips that held the handle on the dryer broke off. I called the phone number on my warranty papers and spoke to a human being in Tennessee. I told her what happened, and she asked me for the model number and my address. They shipped a replacement that arri…

How many of those washer/dryer units do you think they sold? Hundreds of thousands? If it's a super common model, maybe millions? Google and Facebook each have 3-4 orders of magnitude more customers. I'm not sure manning phones is realistic.

If the problem is too big for Google and Facebook to handle, maybe Google and Facebook shouldn't exist

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#237
post #104
post #15

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators ca…

We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to employ only 125 people. And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. T…

While this outcome isn't best for the economy, it is a good solution for the environment, and perhaps that was the goal of the Netherlands.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#238
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents. I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.

Why would they pay out all their net income, provide better customer contact/service, and go from being massively profitable to break-even? What’s in it for them to do that? Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a stronger company in the long-term? That they don’t do it suggests they don’t think it would.

25% would probably be vast overkill. The point is they could have say 100,000 people doing customer support without a massive hit to their profitability, especially if that support ended up increasing revenue.

In other words the real limitation isn’t their current number of employees or really their business model. They are simply acting like a monopoly which lacks competition. I am sure they think simply buying any social network that starts to get traction is cheaper than providing a better product.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#239
post #15

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators ca…

What fraction of the 2B actually post vs “just” read & like?

If it’s 1% then the moderator to writer ratio is 1:1000 instead of 1:100,000.

And presumably the moderators are working full time (?) whereas the posters hopefully don’t spend more than 1h or so on average per day writing. So the moderator hours to writer hours ratio may be closer to 1:200?

Add some AI based admin tools and it doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous?

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really need a library for that? Why can't you leave the name as it was entered by the user, without making further assumptions?

Because people will abuse everything. Whether it's curse words or porn websites or whatever.

Making assumptions about name formatting doesn't stop name fields from being abused in those ways.
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