Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#61

Post by blibble » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

lancewiggs wrote: post #55

blibble wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so say a new shiny product (an extension) is produced by a newly founded company (smallco). bullyco decides they don't like this and sues smallco. what's the most the owners (shareholders) of the smallco can lose? their share capital (likely £1).

And then they sue the directors. Limited liability is sadly inadequate in today's world. On the other hand it's also good to be able to go after the people behind companies that are truly fraudulent.

there's nothing fraudulent or criminal about what this extension is doing, at most it's breach of contract and possibly tortious interference, neither which would allow the 'injured' party to go after the directors

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#62

Post by jrockway » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 12:48 AM UTC

I'm not a lawyer, but the ToS says you may not interfere with the rendering of the page, but it doesn't say that you may not provide software that interferes with the rendering of the page. Anyone with a pair of scissors, a microwave oven, or black piece of paper could interfere with the rendering of Facebook for a particular user, but I doubt the ToS applies to them. Not to mention browser bugs, or OS bugs, or video driver bugs.

I think this is too broad to be meaningful. I sort of get what they're getting at ("don't post broken Javascript that fucks up the page for everyone"), but it's not what they wrote. What they wrote is laughable.

All I can say is: I hope you prevail in your battle. Content creators have absolutely no right to tell users how to render the HTML they deliver; the HTML is advisory, not mandatory. If you want to control rendering, buy a billboard.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#63

Post by bookface » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:19 AM UTC

RexRollman wrote: post #49

pdonis wrote: post #9

From 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…

"Facebook gets its revenue from ads" It is interesting to think about today's big tech companies and how they make a majority of their money. Facebook, Google, and Twitter = advertising. Microsoft = software. Apple = hardware. Of the three companies who make most of their money from advertising, Twitter seems to be the most ethical, although going public might change that (Facebook is creating profiles of non-Faceboo…

What makes you believe that Twitter isn't doing that? If you're willing to speculate that Google is creating "shadow profiles", why not Twitter?

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#64

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:31 AM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #42

javajosh wrote: post #38

This story should cause outrage among the users and developers (and any potential users and developers) of any software that is like Social Fixer, that is, any software that stores, manipulates, and presents proprietary data in ways that the "owner" (e.g. Facebook) of said data did not intend, for the use of a first party. The thing that makes the FB legal threats against Social Fixer different, and more troubling th…

Doesn't Facebook have some right to choose what type of content they want to host? The only thing that's happened is Facebook has decided they don't want to host his page. [Er, oops. Ignore this part. Reading fail] I mean, seriously. FBI? What do they have to do with this?

Hmm,

Doesn't Comcast have the "right" to decide what content it wants to scan, alter or otherwise mangle on the way to and from the Internet? Well, we know Comcast doesn't have the right to just mangle your Internet. But Facebook represents this weird gray area. The content published on Facebook isn't Facebook's content but "our" content, a wide variety of users' content. Facebook has become something like a social public utility - for good or ill, possibly for ill. Facebook rose by willingly hosting "just about anything" and it's users count on it not for its contents but for posts from their friends.

And yeah, maybe FB just throwing monopolistic weight around 'cause it can is perfectly legal and it might be morally Ok in your world but I consider your point of view evil, twisted and despicable.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#65

Post by pdonis » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:45 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #57

pdonis wrote: post #9

From 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…

> 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. Citation needed. Also, this is a false dichotomy. Nobody is splashing patchouli on their tie-dyes before marching on Menlo Park to demand that Facebook's servers be liberated for the masses. The only dispute here is whether Facebook's short-term fixation on c…

The only dispute here is whether Facebook's short-term fixation on control is bad for the long-term health of their ecosystem, which is by far the company's largest asset.

But what is FB's "ecosystem"? Is it just their current users? Or is it all their potential users, including those who do not yet use FB at all? I think FB believes that it's the latter, and that it can capture the most value from all those potential users by exerting tight control over the FB user experience.

More precisely, I think FB believes that the costs of exerting tight control over the FB user experience (i.e., the discontent it causes among some fraction of existing users) are far outweighed by the benefits of capturing as many potential users as possible and making them stay within the FB walled garden. To capture new users, the UI doesn't have to be good; it just has to be good enough, and "good enough" to someone who hasn't yet used FB at all is a low bar.

The real test will come when the market saturates and the above reasoning no longer applies. Based on what other companies in similar positions have done in the past (with Microsoft being the #1 example), I don't expect FB to loosen control very much, and to the extent they do, it will be, as I said in another post in this thread, more to allow third party developers to do market research for them than anything else. But we'll see.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#66

Post by deong » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:46 AM UTC

yason wrote: post #54

This isn't a Facebook app. This isn't using Facebook API. It's effectively as if he had written a custom browser that displays the Facebook page in a way he likes: a script like that is basically a functional rather than visual stylesheet. Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers. If I understood that correctly then Facebook has absolutely no say about that piece of software. Because if they…

Presumably they can terminate his account for any reason they like. There's no legal right to a Facebook account, so they don't have to hunt for any terms he might have violated.

But yes, I don't see how they could expect to win in court if they decided to go further than that, but in losing they could ruin his life.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#67

Post by pdonis » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 1:52 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #58

mbesto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not true in any way. Care to elaborate? This is pretty fundamental to almost every single business I have ever heard of...

See, for example, "Maximizing Shareholder Value: The Dumbest Idea in the World": http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi... The "maximize shareholder value" chant is a piece of MBA dogma that, although accepted by many as an immutable law of the universe, is a relatively recent American invention. It's not a law, managers don't go to jail if they don't do it, other countries do it differently, an…

The "maximize shareholder value" chant

I didn't say "maximize shareholder value". I said FB has to make decisions that benefit their stockholders; that's not quite the same thing.

Also, as I pointed out in another subthread, there's a big difference between a company that gets revenue from users directly (like Amazon, the example brought up in that subthread--or like a car company) and a company whose users only generate revenue indirectly, as FB's users do (through ads). The latter kind of company has a much weaker link between benefiting users and benefiting shareholders than the former does. I've outlined in other posts in this thread the strategy I think FB is following, and it's not a strategy that's focused on maximizing their short-term return on capital, but it still makes them act in ways that make at least some subset of their current users dissatisfied.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#68

Post by magicalist » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 2:54 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #39

michaelt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matthew Yglesias described Amazon as "a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers." [1] There are many things Amazon could do to transfer cash from their customers to their shareholders. Bezos justifies not doing these things because he claims there is more value in long term customer loyalty and trust. Because it's a good faith business decision, I don't s…

it would be easy for Facebook to say "we think there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us" It would be easy for them to say it, but first they would have to believe it, and second they would have to believe they could convince investors of it. it's a good faith business decision, why would they get ousted or sued…

> It would be easy for them to say it, but first they would have to believe it, and second they would have to believe they could convince investors of it

You're moving goalposts. That's a completely different statement. Whatever it is they truly believe is totally different than "they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt".

> It's not a question of being sued, it's a question of having the stock price go down. Investors don't have to sue to do that; they just have to sell.

Again, this has nothing to do with fiduciary duty, which was the topic that the original comment was responding to. The fact remains that for-profit companies do not have some kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over them, waiting for them to make a decision that costs stockholders value.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#69

Post by angkec » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 3:01 AM UTC

oneshotreply wrote: post #59

babs474 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have a point about naming, I don't know. In my defense a bunch of reddit tools do the same thing: metareddit.com, uneddit.com, redditenhancementsuite.com But I'm really curious about what you said regarding sidestepping delete functionality. How do you view search engines indexing and caching of reddit and other sites? Does the Barbara Streisand effect apply? I think that the issue is way more nuanced than…

Do something for the improvement of the human race instead. If you can't, please stop releasing idiotic extensions that bring individual human beings more suffering than benefit.

How do they suffer by reading reddit comments? Just curious.

Re: Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

#70

Post by JacobJans » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 3:04 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #62

I'm not a lawyer, but the ToS says you may not interfere with the rendering of the page, but it doesn't say that you may not provide software that interferes with the rendering of the page. Anyone with a pair of scissors, a microwave oven, or black piece of paper could interfere with the rendering of Facebook for a particular user, but I doubt the ToS applies to them. Not to mention browser bugs, or OS bugs, or video…

Actually, content creators get to ask you to agree to a "Terms of Service" that gives you access to that content. If you don't like the terms of service, you could say they are "laughable," but that doesn't mean they don't exist, or have a specific meaning.

It seems very clear to me that a page that promotes the removal of Facebook ads, via its software, fits squarely in violation of the agreement.

Facebook seems very reasonable in this -- they're giving him a second chance, after blatantly violating the terms of service. And yes, it is blatant. Anyone who thinks that removing Facebook's ads are compliant with the Terms of Service is living in the world they wish exists, and not the one that actually does.