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Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

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21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#21
Well that's nicer than what they used to do.

I remember in the very early days of Facebook Pages, as soon as they came out I created "Honda" and "Subaru", both with a substantial number of Likes (they were called fans back then, I think?)

I kept my posts on those pages strictly factual, and really just parroted emails from the two companies and occasionally asked for the audience's opinion.

After about a year both of them were shut down by the respective real car companies, and I tried to email their PR about how if they can be reactivated I could just hand them over, since the fanbase was relatively large at the time, but neither ever responded to me. Oh well.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#23
> Why does the other page have the original likes?

Because Facebook doesn't know how to deal with changes to pages. Seriously.

Facebook has unilaterally changed my affiliations on me at least twice. There are probably others that have changed, like things I've 'liked', but two really stand out for me.

First, they decided I didn't actually go to the Canadian college that I'm quite sure I attended. They decided instead that I had gone to a similarly-named university in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the old page/affiliation, but Facebook couldn't handle it.

Recently, I discovered that one of my former employers had been acquired and changed/lost their Facebook page. Now, Facebook is trying to convince me that I actually worked for a band with a similar name to the former name of the company I had worked for.

In neither case was I informed of the change. Several of my friends are still considered to have gone to the American university. I assume some former co-workers are similarly affiliated with the band, but I haven't gone to the trouble to check.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#24
post #10

I think Fans of Sherlock just jacked ModernSherlock, the vanity url.

It's actually my page!! I'm so confused. 750 likes?! but at least the content is back: http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png

Yes, at least you have the page back. Grats. What I'm noticing is that my same 3 Facebook friends like both your fan page and the TV show's page. But that's possibly a strange coincidence.

This might be the work of FB running some categorization cleanup. Your fan page is now sub-categorized as a Community Page for the Sherlock TV show.

FB doesn't seem to have all popular fan pages sub-categorized. For example, fb.me/fansofapple, isn't shown connected to Apple at all.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same argument could be flipped on you! I believe you post a lot on Hacker News, but you don't own the code, servers, etc. You are a volunteer commenter. What if someone blocked and deleted all of your comments? Wouldn't you feel the slightest bit of loss?

I would feel freedom. At that moment, my involvement in HN would come to an end, and I would find another way to use the 2 hours or so a day I spend on it. Think about what I could do with 700 hours/year. Indeed, I would embrace that deletion.

That's good for you, but most likely the average HN user would cry foul and over zealous moderation.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#26
post #5

The moral of the story here is that you shouldn't invest your time and emotional energy into things that actually belong to other people. You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database ow…

I hate not to sound empathetic but, this is a very good point. You basically just built a sand castle on somebody else's private beach for 2 years and are now crying that it's gone. It's sad & I'm sure it's depressing, but... you owned absolutely nothing you were creating.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same argument could be flipped on you! I believe you post a lot on Hacker News, but you don't own the code, servers, etc. You are a volunteer commenter. What if someone blocked and deleted all of your comments? Wouldn't you feel the slightest bit of loss?

I would feel freedom. At that moment, my involvement in HN would come to an end, and I would find another way to use the 2 hours or so a day I spend on it. Think about what I could do with 700 hours/year. Indeed, I would embrace that deletion.

This is why I create a new throwaway account whenever my HN karma gets too high. No attachment, no loss.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#28
post #14

Most likely your page and its fans have been appropriated by the content owner. This is a feature YouTube & others now offer content owners as a way to steal a ready-constructed online fan base from real fans who invested their own time building a community around the brand. There's a moral to this story: industrial production of culture is not beneficial to its consumers.

He ruled that out (though not intirely) by the fact that a previous page was appropriated and Facebook notified him. Also, if that were the case it would have probably been redirected/converted to an official page.

I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that companies shouldn't produce TV shows (I assume that's what you mean by industrial production of culture).

Edit: They have now emailed him, but I doubt it was the same kind of email he was sent before, since it doesn't mention a company.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#29
post #5

The moral of the story here is that you shouldn't invest your time and emotional energy into things that actually belong to other people. You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database ow…

I feel the exact opposite. The trend in SV seems to be building communities around your product. This is an example of a product that did it very well...someone was so entrenched in the community that it became a huge part of their life. To take that away seems to go against the idea of community.
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