I feel like I'm repeating myself daily at the moment. If you're not paying for it, you shouldn't expect anything. If people paid for the services they used, they'd have recourse and the interests of the provider and the consumer would be aligned. As it stands, why would or should Facebook give a shit?
Brands building their online presence via Facebook are mad as far as I'm concerned, Facebook owns that content, they can do with it what they want and as this demonstrates, zero recourse.
I am paying for it with a very valuable commodity: my personal information. I have every right to complain about getting the crappy end of the stick when stuff like this happens in the same way you have the right to complain about a crummy contract with AT&T or your roofer.
Just because the currency in question is not (directly) the USD doesn't mean I'm not paying for it.
I have every right to complain about getting the crappy end of the stick when stuff like this happens in the same way you have the right to complain about a crummy contract with AT&T or your roofer.
You get to complain about AT&T and your roofer because you have a contract with them entitling you to a certain level of service in exchange for your money. Your only agreement with Facebook is Facebook's AUP / ToS / privacy policy, which gives you no such rights. If you don't think it's an equitable agreement, don't accept it!
If your boss paid you via an excel spreadsheet of personal data every month I think you'd give a bit of pause on the real value of the dollar vs. personal information.
Sure you are giving them personal information that is valuable, but I don't think the datacenter power company is going to take that as a monthly payment from Facebook each month the bill is due.
You do have the right to complain, as everyone does, but since you aren't giving them actual $, they have the right to really not give a damn.
That analogy does not really hit the mark. Facebook lays claim to the data you upload to its website, and profits from that information.
Sure, it's not quite the same as a financial exchange, but at the very least they should treat their users well -- their virtual monopoly isn't gonna last forever.
Really I think it translates to any company the size of Google or Facebook. It would be impossible for them to have the same level of face to face service that a ma and pa shop with a userbase of 100 people provides. You might not like it, but if 500 million people had an easy way to lodge complaints for whatever they wished, their helpdesk/support staff would probably be larger than their engineering team .
This is exactly it. Facebook is 2000 people serving 600 million. They all work 10-12 hour days and still can't keep up with all the work thrown their way. Its not that they don't care, they are just swamped.
Agreed. Companies like Facebook, Google, eBay, etc. serve a staggering number of users with a relatively modest number of customer-facing staff. They're able to do so because they have very sophisticated software systems that can handle an awful lot of things automatically. But run into something that requires a human to do something and stuff breaks down. They're just not staffed for it.
And it's not clear they realistically could be staffed to handle it well. Though Amazon seems to do a better job than the others. So arguably you can provide better service if you're willing to invest in it. But for Facebook and Google, beyond some VERY base level, better customer service is a cost that probably wouldn't drive much in the way of revenue.
You may well be repeating yourself daily. This "if you're not paying for it then you're not the customer" meme is getting really annoying, partly because it is repeated so often (whenever anyone complains about a free service on the internet) but mostly because it is true.
The trouble is, Facebook don't have any viable competition any more. If someone leaves Facebook in disgust then the consequence is that they no longer use a social network. If a respected site like Ars Technica don't like Facebook's policies then, as you say, they have zero recourse.
Given the above, what would you advise Ars Technica to do, other than complain loudly and hope that Facebook smile favourably on them?
Because, as ars points out, the system is ripe for abuse. I could make an auto complaining bot that aims to take down every page with a copyright complaint. Eventually facebook would be a waste land with large groups of alienated folks bad mouthing facebook and seeking an alternative.
Ultimately, facebook needs to resolve this issue, even if they need to charge a fee.
Comcast Internet Video Package (YouTube and Hulu): $79.99/mo.
Comcast Social Media add-on (Facebook, Xfinity Friends, NYTimes): $14.99/mo.
Point being, a large number of paid providers becomes inconvenient if not impossible for an individual to maintain. This creates a market for a gateway provider to aggregate payments and subscriptions, which role the big media companies have traditionally fulfilled. While it's true that dependence on Facebook leaves you with little recourse if things go wrong, individual payments for social media services seems untenable. There must be some better way of addressing the issue, as you cannot necessarily afford to ignore Facebook, Twitter, etc.
But brands must be built on something, right? That's why google, facebook, twitter exist. It's a mutual relationship, facebook cannot go on screwing users, developers, advertisers, etc. for ever. At the moment, facebook's support gets an F- from me in all departments: user support, advertiser support, FB credits support, platform developers support.
Unfortunately, as long as facebook keeps growing without going public, their staff is kept busy with other things, like calculating their stock's valuations.
Brands building their online presence via Facebook are mad as far as I'm concerned, Facebook owns that content, they can do with it what they want and as this demonstrates, zero recourse.