
Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes - veb
http://spottedsun.com/someone-stole-sherlocks-300000-likes/
======
goodside
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 owned by a multi-
billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and
after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed.

You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now
on.

~~~
ryguytilidie
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?

~~~
jquery
A more Zenlike takeaway would be to realize that everything has an end and to
accept that. There is nothing that can't be taken away from you.

~~~
GoodIntentions
I read that as "there is nothing that can be taken away from you"

Same frame of mind I think, slightly different way of expressing it. :P

~~~
danabramov
“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy

------
AgentConundrum
> 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 that I had gone to a similarly-
named university in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the old
page/affiliation, but Facebook couldn't handle it.

Recently, I discovered that one of my former employers had been acquired and
changed/lost their Facebook page. Now, Facebook is trying to convince me that
I actually worked for a band with a similar name to the former name of the
company I had worked for.

In neither case was I informed of the change. Several of my friends are still
considered to have gone to the American university. I assume some former co-
workers are similarly affiliated with the band, but I haven't gone to the
trouble to check.

~~~
DannyPage
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.

------
fredwolens
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.

~~~
veb
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?

~~~
Meist
Yes. The current Sherlock Page (<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherlock>) is
official. Search should populate in the next couple days, the re-crawl
shouldn't take more than a week or so.

------
simonsarris
Well that's nicer than what they used to do.

I remember in the very early days of Facebook Pages, as soon as they came out
I created "Honda" and "Subaru", both with a substantial number of Likes (they
were called fans back then, I think?)

I kept my posts on those pages strictly factual, and really just parroted
emails from the two companies and occasionally asked for the audience's
opinion.

After about a year both of them were shut down by the respective real car
companies, and I tried to email their PR about how if they can be reactivated
I could just hand them over, since the fanbase was relatively large at the
time, but neither ever responded to me. Oh well.

------
mocko
Most likely your page and its fans have been appropriated by the content
owner. This is a feature YouTube & others now offer content owners as a way to
steal a ready-constructed online fan base from real fans who invested their
own time building a community around the brand. There's a moral to this story:
industrial production of culture is not beneficial to its consumers.

~~~
simonbrown
He ruled that out (though not intirely) by the fact that a previous page was
appropriated and Facebook notified him. Also, if that were the case it would
have probably been redirected/converted to an official page.

I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that companies shouldn't produce
TV shows (I assume that's what you mean by industrial production of culture).

Edit: They have now emailed him, but I doubt it was the same kind of email he
was sent before, since it doesn't mention a company.

------
Ashoke
Hey Mike, your page was incorrectly flagged and removed. Facebook has restored
it now and changed the name of the page to more accurately reflect what your
page is about. Sorry for the inconvenience.

<https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202753086436852>

------
pud
Looks like it's back now, with 300,000+ likes. Thanks on behalf of the
internet, whoever works at Facebook and saw this. :-)

<https://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock>

~~~
veb
Definitely. Thank you Internet, and thank you to the people at Facebook who
looked into this.

------
brownbat
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?

------
GoodIntentions
Having a hard time understanding why anyone would put unfettered effort into
building up content on a platform where they have absolutely no right of
access save at the pleasure of the platform owner.

Take that love of the show and build a fansite or better yet something where
you don't have to worry about the copyright holder shutting you down.

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

~~~
veb
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.

------
pritam2020
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.

~~~
saurik
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.

~~~
veb
This feature wasn't exactly around when the page was made.

------
stephensprinkle
Exactly why I don't build or put marked amounts of time into platforms I have
no control over.

------
artursapek
Cache. Not sure what's up.
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://spottedsun.com/someone-
stole-sherlocks-300000-likes/)

------
nothacker
Don't stop with this post. I think the girl with blog of the school lunches in
Scotland showed a modern method to solve any similar customer service issue.
Start a blog and continually update it with whatever your issue is in a
factual non-opinionated way. Wait for them to try to shut you down, then go to
the media and social avenues so that it becomes hot topic, and they'll fix it.
Then they may screw you again and you'll have to go to the media again and
then they'll fix it again. Perfect solution.

------
nkwiatek
Not to make light of your situation with this tangent, but I must say that
that is a cool 404 page.

~~~
simonbrown
I can't reproduce it (perhaps because I don't have a Facebook account).

------
hanapbuhay
I think Fans of Sherlock just jacked ModernSherlock, the vanity url.

~~~
veb
It's actually my page!! I'm so confused. 750 likes?!

but at least the content is back: <http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png>

~~~
hanapbuhay
Yes, at least you have the page back. Grats. What I'm noticing is that my same
3 Facebook friends like both your fan page and the TV show's page. But that's
possibly a strange coincidence.

This might be the work of FB running some categorization cleanup. Your fan
page is now sub-categorized as a Community Page for the Sherlock TV show.

FB doesn't seem to have all popular fan pages sub-categorized. For example,
fb.me/fansofapple, isn't shown connected to Apple at all.

------
silentscope
"yes I know, first world problems."

yep. nice post.

