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Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

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Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#71

Oh wow, this app got pulled from everything because it's an unofficial 3rd party client for Instagram? I'll say it again, companies should be legally forbidden from blocking 3rd party clients. They don't have to explicitly support them, but taking action to explicitly thwart them (and writing ToS that forbids them) should be outlawed. There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and ad…

Without control of the client, it gets much harder to fight abuse.

I agree with you, but specifically, I believe it is the user which should have this control. This prevents abuse by the service provider.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#72
post #29

If it was a really good app you made, why not also make your own backend and completely decouple from meta? If you build an app using the meta platform in a way that is a clear violation of their tos, the app will obviously be killed the second it gets popular. If I was running a service and another company attempted to do this to my service (violated my TOS, built on top of my private API in a way that striped all m…

Because the backend is the difficult part that tends to cost a lot of money in resources/infrastructure.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worth noting that the app received $1M in preseed funding Guess the investors should have stuck to real estate

Great due diligence on this deal. Who thought it was okay to rip off the old UI and reverse engineer the API?

Investors barely know head from tail, you're expecting way too much. It has to sound cool.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#74

Oh wow, this app got pulled from everything because it's an unofficial 3rd party client for Instagram? I'll say it again, companies should be legally forbidden from blocking 3rd party clients. They don't have to explicitly support them, but taking action to explicitly thwart them (and writing ToS that forbids them) should be outlawed. There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and ad…

Every time this kind of thing happens I just remember how much bigger Twitter got with the help of third-party clients, and then implemented terrible login token limits to prevent any from becoming as good as their own offerings once traction picked up.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#75

Oh wow, this app got pulled from everything because it's an unofficial 3rd party client for Instagram? I'll say it again, companies should be legally forbidden from blocking 3rd party clients. They don't have to explicitly support them, but taking action to explicitly thwart them (and writing ToS that forbids them) should be outlawed. There's no reason I should have to be subjected to untold tracking, snooping and ad…

Without control of the client, it gets much harder to fight abuse.

Well, if valid uses for clients are outlawed then the only people buying clients will be the ones trying to abuse the system. So really all the policy does is change the market.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They tweeted that they reverse-engineered the Android API, which would likely get personally you banned anywhere The question is - how do we even allow it do be legal? Not being able to reverse engineer applications running on your own devices is some kind of bullshit dystopia, tolerated only because average citizen is not technical enough to realize how dystopian it is.

I have some trouble with "telling a third party developer they can't replace parts of your server-driven app for their own profit is a dystopia."

Are you using any browser extensions that do something with website content?

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#78
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what definition of free market would exclude the idea that private companies can take actions to protect their property.

The kind that realizes that government is not the only threat to a functional free market, that does not devolve into feudalism. I am pointing out the failure of lack of antitrust enforcement, not claiming that an unrestricted free market is the ideal, no matter where it leads.

Agreed about antitrust enforcement, Instagrams marriage to Facebook should have never been allowed to proceed. At some point we let “free market” supersede a market with competition. When you become large enough that you can leverage non-tangible assets to borrow enough money to buy out all your threatening competition. Or when you become large enough that you can secure patents for every little obvious development, original or not, and litigate every potential competitor out of existence. At that point I don’t think it’s a free market. Throw in some lobbying, protectionists policies, and now you have a captured market.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#79
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what definition of free market would exclude the idea that private companies can take actions to protect their property.

The kind that realizes that government is not the only threat to a functional free market, that does not devolve into feudalism. I am pointing out the failure of lack of antitrust enforcement, not claiming that an unrestricted free market is the ideal, no matter where it leads.

The disagreement seems to be other what "free" means and to whom "free" refers.

Re: Meta has banned the personal Facebook accounts for everyone on our team

#80
post #24
post #3

These companies can ban the US President from their platforms. What makes you think they can't ban yours - you don't even have any nuclear launch codes...

Obviously they can , the surprise is that they did . Vindictive actions like this are rarely profitable, they tend to scare people off from doing business with you.

Unless you're a monopoly and then you can do whatever you want because your customers have no alternative. Which Meta is (well, it's a duopoly with Google).

Anyway Meta's customers, and the only entities it cares about, are large ad buyers. None of them will give a crap about this random app and these random human beings getting banned. This has zero impact on their ability to continue writing checks to Meta and continue getting in front of your eyeballs.

If anything Meta's customers will be happy about the ban since this app caused fewer people to see their ads.

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