the solution to this sort of thing is to always wrap yourself in a limited company...
company formation in the UK costs around £20 and then you're personally immune to this sort of legal bullying
Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
11–20 of 103 posts
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#12The real fix is not to use Facebook in the first place.
Yup! That is what I finally fell back to. At first I was worrying about all the stuff that I will miss but realized that as long as I was worrying I will never stop using Facebook.
Btw, do you still use Facebook?
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#13From the article: every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt. Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, no…
> they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders
I wish the meme that this is the only thing a public company can do would die. It's not true in any way.
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#14From the article: every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt. Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, no…
[deleted]
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#15I think it is a bad decision from Facebook to go after Social Fixer. From the Chrome extensions page they have ~200K installs. This is peanuts compared to Facebook's user base(compared to Google where number of Adblock installs are ~40 million combining Firefox and Chrome, it hurts Google more they can't say much about it because of fearing of criticism from their core supporters). But future will be bright for them because people are accessing Facebook more from mobile devices where default mobile browsers are very restrictive and the trend will not change for foreseeable future.
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#16From the article: every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt. Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, no…
> they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders I wish the meme that this is the only thing a public company can do would die. It's not true in any way.
I too wish the meme would die, but not because it's not true, rather because it's overused a lot as a reply.
As I understand it these companies do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to make every move be one that benefits their shareholders. Can you please voice your thoughts on how that is not true?
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#17About 6yrs ago my friend made a script, which was essentially a pyramid scheme for adding friends. Basically it helps you find other people who want to add you, to inflate each other's egos. It blew up & I was called in to fix the performance, part of that entailed moving it to my server - about a week later Facebook sent me a cease & desist & demanded the domain name be transferred to them. Pretty lame move on their part, because we were having fun hacking the code to handle the load, etc..
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#18About 6yrs ago my friend made a script, which was essentially a pyramid scheme for adding friends. Basically it helps you find other people who want to add you, to inflate each other's egos. It blew up & I was called in to fix the performance, part of that entailed moving it to my server - about a week later Facebook sent me a cease & desist & demanded the domain name be transferred to them. Pretty lame move on their…
You realize any non-law entity can't forcibly compel you to do things, right? They can talk a big game, but it's up to them to file legal proceedings if they really want to shut you down.
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders I wish the meme that this is the only thing a public company can do would die. It's not true in any way.
I too wish the meme would die, but not because it's not true, rather because it's overused a lot as a reply. As I understand it these companies do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to make every move be one that benefits their shareholders. Can you please voice your thoughts on how that is not true?
Any good faith business decision counts as a move meant to benefit shareholders, especially where there are tradeoffs involved. If you make user experience worse to boost advertising revenues, you can argue that was the right call because you get more money. If you make your user experience better in a way that hurts advertising revenues, you can argue that it was the right call because it improves user loyalty and user perception of Facebook, making it more valuable in the long run. Even if it turns out that your decision was wrong, it's an honest mistake and you're allowed to make those. There's no way shareholders could ever win a lawsuit by second-guessing business decisions they disagree with! About the only thing you can't do is outright embezzle money from the company or something.
Now, for a public company, lots of investors base their decisions on the GAAP numbers companies are forced to report, so there are incentives to improve those numbers each quarter if you want to boost stock price. But if you communicate a long-term strategy to investors and seem competent enough to pull it off, you're Amazon and your stock price does well anyway, even if you lose money.
Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
#20Watch out, when I ran into a similar situation with my extension, unedditreddit. Reddit, was able to convince google to simply remove the the extension from the webstore.
Chrome makes it really difficult to install a non app store extension, so your normal user will not do it.
On the other hand, google and facebook have a more competitive relationship so maybe there is less to worry about.