
Facebook won't let you type this - jarcane
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/05/technology/facebook-tsu/
======
bicknergseng
>> Tsu users were creating fake accounts to boost their pages. Facebook says
its users started reporting Tsu.co links as spam, which Facebook defines as
"sending bulk messages, excessively posting links ... and sending friend
requests to people you don't know personally."

TL;DR: tsu.co spams Facebook. Facebook brings the banhammer in the same way
they ban every spammy app that does the same thing today, including removing
posts of a lady who draws dogs and links to her tsu.co account. Tsu tries to
play the victim.

Nothing to see here folks.

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CM30
Well, if you spammed any other forum or social network, what do you think
would happen? You'd probably get banned, and potentially get blacklisted. Same
thing happened to Tsu. It's not surprising.

As far as the concept of the site... I strongly doubt it's going to succeed in
the long run. Tsu's revenue sharing was already tried a bunch of times in the
past, there were actually add ons for that sort of thing for many different
forum scripts. Sometimes it was based on who made the original post/whose
profile it was, sometimes it was based on some sort of percentage system where
X percent of the site ads would go to a user based on how active they were.

It usually failed. People treated the site like a source of free money, and
the inevitable result was a huge gold rush that ended up bringing in hordes of
morons looking to get rich quick by putting in the minimum amount of effort.
Fake users, thousands of spammy or low quality posts... it eventually made the
world of Idiocracy look like something out of Shakespeare. Digitalpoint was a
good example of one of the sites who tried and gave up this idea.

Either way, I'm not surprised they're blocked, and while I wish them the best
of luck, I suspect they really won't like the results of this 'revenue
sharing' gimmick.

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kup0
Tsu.co looks very similar to a pyramid/MLM scheme. When there's a growing tree
of users making money from inviting other users, that is encouraging behavior
that will end up being very spam-like, as has already been proven by users'
activity so far, such as creating fake accounts to boost their own pages. I
see no issue with Facebook's actions here. Plus it is their own platform, they
can control it however they wish.

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minimaxir
Almost every Tsu submission to HN (and Reddit) has a received an incredibly
suspicious amount of upvotes, which coincidentally demonstrates why it's a
problem.

~~~
eridal
We'd see how much upvotes this history gets --although the fact that we're
talking about that in here could bias the results?

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justinpombrio
> The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems
> detected to be unsafe: tsu.co

Is it just me, or is this Facebook lying to its users about security? If they
want to block it for spam reasons, they should say so.

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oneeyedpigeon
At least the 28-year-old model quoted at the end has enough wisdom to make
this a non-story:

> "Very few people even know about Tsu," she said. "I don't believe that
> Facebook and Instagram want Tsu to go viral. it would cost them a lot of
> money."

Yeah, no kidding. Facebook isn't a public utility, it's a private company
whose interests are best served in squashing all competition and doing
whatever it can to maximise profit. If anyone is remotely surprised by this,
they need to re-enrol in Capitalism 101.

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gull
A business model like Tsu's can kill Facebook.

Facebook keeps 100% of ad revenue; Tsu keeps 10% and pays 45% to it's users.

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johansch
I know some people will argue that FB can and should be able to set their own
laws. I disagree. FB has reached such dominant status that behavior like this
- blocking possible competitors should be fought by laws.

~~~
sbuttgereit
Of course not. If this is a meaningful afront to Facebook customers, those
customers should leave Facebook. There is no valid moral principle by which
the shareholders of Facebook should be forced to subsidize their competitors.
Period.

Putting a gun to their heads (which is all a law really achieves) and telling
those people that have invested, for their own self interest, that they now
have to fund someone else's self interest is in fact, immoral.

~~~
johansch
What's the difference between Facebook in 2015 and Windows in 1998
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.))?

Both are software platforms bound by network effects which have reached
monopoly situations and then abuse(d) their situation by attempting to use
their dominance in one area to reach dominance in another area.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
It used to be said that it was impossible for a website to have a monopoly
because the cost of switching is zero. I rather think that facebook's
dominance has disproven that rule, though; in the world of the social network,
switching is actually much more difficult than we ever expected.

~~~
johansch
Google was the champion for that idea, regarding their Google Search product.

That is still valid - there are no (strong) network effects involved with a
web search engine.

