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Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

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Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#41
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 actually came to write that the big takeaway for me was to care about things that actually exist. Pouring your life into a fan site that can one day disappear seems incredibly depressing. In that time others have built companies, relationships and a happy life and you have built: a collection of fan art for an obscure tv show. Isn't there something better one could be doing?

Wow. Not only is this totally insensitive, and completely fucking rude.. it's also widely naive.

He obviously built value for a lot of people. In addition I'm sure developed some very portable skills. Helping to curate a site that brings that many people joy? We should all be so lucky.

The idea that the rug could be pulled out is indeed a significant lesson, but it's frankly one that both sides of the coin need to learn. Platform sites that encourage users to invest in and create content for will suffer if that content isn't taken good care of, in the long haul.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#42

There should be some way to distinguish between a fan page, and an official page. So, that people who want to follow either have a choice.

There is: it is called a "community page". This person flagrantly violated this mechanism, against Facebook's terms of service, in order to capitalize on the fame of a television show he did not create and was not involved in.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#43

> 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…

Similarly, I was apart of a fraternity that was local to my school. But then a female sorority with a few more people came on Facebook, took/stole/transferred the likes, and now I have a pink flower where a black and white crest once was, and no way to reclaim all the old posts or pictures. It's very weird.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#44
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…

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?

Actually, that is one of the things I rather like about HN. The "loss" is built in: after a couple of days, nobody is going to read or respond to any of my comments. Everything I write here will effectively disappear several days from now. And that, somehow, is very refreshing: I don't have to worry about posterity or the future.

HN is my way of indulging in the present. No plans, no worries, no future. Very relaxing.

It's also a way of tricking myself to write. In high school, I never liked writing much and, consequently, was never much of a writer. Now I like it more; hopefully my writing improves correspondingly. HN is obviously no way to become a writer, but that is not my goal: I just want to be able to write clearly, nothing more, nothing less.

If I was doing something more lasting, I would not want to trust a single entity. This is why all my code on GitHub is also backed up at home with the most important projects also backed up on my school account: losing that would actually be painful. Losing my comment history here? Trivial.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#45
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 don't downvote often, but I've downvoted your comment here because it's just sanctimonious empathy-free wankery that adds nothing at all to the conversation.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#46
My name is Fred Wolens, and I work for Facebook’s Policy Communications Team. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused by the migration of the Page’s content and Likes. We have already restored the Page, and there shouldn’t be any remaining issues.

Unfortunately, the Sherlock Page was not the official BBC fan Page for the show; this caused the Page to be flagged as a violation of our terms and we mistakenly removed instead of migrated the Page. After we found out about the problem, we renamed the Sherlock Page to Fans of Sherlock to comply with our policies and migrated the fans + content. We’re sorry for the trouble caused and we’re constantly iterating on our processes to improve the accuracy of our reporting system.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#48
I remember the 90s, when we all just built fan pages directly on the Internet itself.

Well, ok, that's not fair. We also made fan pages on AOL and Geocities, but we got rid of those after a while since gated Internet couldn't compete in the long run with regular Internet.

I guess now we have Facebook, though, and it's different... though I forget how.

Remind me, why did we make yet another gated mirror of the Internet?

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#49
post #37

It looks like he got his likes back? http://www.Facebook.com/ModernSherlock

Yep! Very pleased that's happened. Seems like a lot of people missed the page.

Still wondering about the other page though... ModernSherlock page no longer shows up in search though.

Re: Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

#50

My name is Fred Wolens, and I work for Facebook’s Policy Communications Team. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused by the migration of the Page’s content and Likes. We have already restored the Page, and there shouldn’t be any remaining issues. Unfortunately, the Sherlock Page was not the official BBC fan Page for the show; this caused the Page to be flagged as a violation of our terms and we mistakenl…

Hi Fred.

Thank you for posting this explanation -- I do have a question though, the current "Sherlock" page -- is that an official page?

How long will it take for these changes to appear in Facebook search?

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