
Facebook Pages: Why I don’t like Nest thermostat or anything else anymore - Shpigford
http://ninjasandrobots.com/facebook-pages-nest-thermostat
======
cletus
This is pretty simple: just don't "Like" anything. Seriously. It didn't take
an oracle to figure out that "Likes" were always going to be a gateway to
direct advertising.

And for things you "need" to "Like" (eg to enter a contest or get access to
something) then just use a dummy account like many do for playing Facebook
games, for much the same reason: (almost) no one wants to spam their friends
with "I milked a cow!" messages.

This is Facebook's (and Twitter's for that matter) biggest problem: their
apparent monetization paths are at direct odds with the user experience.

~~~
jetti
The problem with this is that at the time, to my knowledge, Facebook wasn't
doing the "Social ads show an advertiser’s message alongside actions you have
taken, such as liking a Page" kind of thing. Since they keep all of this data,
anything you do today could be used to promote something in the future without
your knowledge. Hell, even visiting a group/business may pop something up
"jetti came and saw [insert business here]...shouldn't you?". If they are
changing the rules but applying them retroactively, it becomes a situation
where you either stop using facebook, log in and do nothing or get them to
stop using past and current actions to promote ads.

~~~
saurik
You can disable this functionality: they allow you to explicitly set whether
your actions are allowed to be used together with advertisements to your
friends; they call this "social ads".

To control this, go to "Account Settings", "Facebook Ads", "Ads and
friends"/"Edit social ads setting", and tell it to "Pair my social actions
with ads for" "No one" and click "Save Changes".

[https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social)

~~~
jetti
That was in the article. This shouldn't have to be disabled, this should have
to be enabled. If you are going to enable it by default, how is it ok to show
history? There is no possible way you couldn't opted out to a feature that
didn't exist when something was liked 3 years ago.

~~~
pdenya
Is this definitely enabled for everyone by default? Mine was already set to
"No One" and i'm fairly certain i've never seen that page before.

~~~
mietek
This was enabled for me by default, and I'm certain I've never seen that page
before. I created my FB page in 2008.

------
wmeredith
>> This has to stop. There has to be a setting to turn this shit off.

You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. It is the
nuclear option, but it's one that more and more of my friends (tech geeks - so
who cares, right?) are doing.

I think the real problem here is headlines like this. OP's blog post title
says "I don't like NEST" this is a problem for their brand and all the other
companies that support Facebook's business model. If they start leaving
because Facebook's UX opacity hurts their brand more than it helps, then it's
lights out.

~~~
warpspeed
As much as it's good to "fight the good fight" against FaceBook, it's fast
becoming an expected means of communicating. Believe me, I deleted mine years
ago and finally had to come back because I realized I was actually hindered in
real ways by not having an account.

I personally think FaceBook will reach an inflection point where public
interest will wane and people will use it less and less... but still have
accounts. Then something better will come along and there might be a mass
migration. For now though, the reality is it's somewhat essential.

~~~
mshron
In what way were you hindered? I deleted mine years ago and the only downside
is that I occasionally can't see a photo album someone sends me. It's not like
photos only exist on Facebook.

I can't speak for other people, but the effort it took to maintain a Facebook
presence (deidentify unflattering photos, take a few minutes every day to get
caught up on people's minutiae) was far greater than the benefit it brought
me.

People who want to talk to me know my email address and phone number.

(edit: clarification, first paragraph)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm keeping my account because it's the tool 90% of my friends - including my
wife - use to plan social activities. I can see which events I'm invited to,
and who's coming over to our house next saturday for dinner.

We could use Google calendar for this, or any number of other tools, but that
would put a burden on our other friends to learn a new system. The end result
would be that some people would flat out not attend the event, and some others
would attend but not RSVP, throwing off guest counts, etc.

~~~
grannyg00se
Does facebook really provide that much value add over a simple email invite?
Every response you get can go into a special folder for that party. When the
party is over, you delete the folder - or leave it - maybe even put it in an
"old parties" folder.

~~~
nvr219
Using facebook for events provides a few benefits over email: 1\. You don't
need to know your friends' email address 2\. You can add pictures/video from
the event 3\. It automatically generates maps, directions. 4\. People not
interested in getting emails every time someone responds with "I'll bring the
salsa!" can choose not to get notified.

------
neya
This is a really really valid point. This is a HUGE problem, believe me. In
fact, here's what happened to me - I got notified in my feed that a friend of
mine kept liking her ex-boyfriend's music page, and I got this continuously,
consistently for several weeks in my feed. After a while, I got pissed off,
sent her a long E-mail , advising her to forget the past and move on. At that
time, I didn't know Facebook was the culprit. She naturally was
shocked+agitated and defended herself after which I thought she was lying and
deleted her from my list. Today, we both are no longer friends. All thanks to
Facebook. So, atleast in my case, it did more harm than good.

~~~
driverdan
If you stopped being friends (I assume you mean real friends, not FB friends)
with someone because of a single FB like you couldn't have been very good
friends to begin with.

~~~
neya
No you didn't get it, I stopped being her friend not because of the like, but
because I thought she was _lying_ , as I had data that spoke exactly the
opposite of what she said.

~~~
mcpie
That's not facebook's fault. You just handled it incompetently. The way you
brought it up would turn anybody off, facebook or no facebook

------
ghshephard
I started to see this slippery slope about a year ago, saw my name (and face!)
appearing in advertisements on friends feeds, saw messages from me appearing
in my friends feeds without me being (totally) aware I was about to spam them,
saw timelines of my entire life with pictures that other people had taken and
I was only vaguely aware I had noted I was in them.

I just deleted my facebook account.

With the exception of technical friends who have children, and are trying to
find an easy way to share pictures with the grand-parents/inlaws/family, the
majority of my colleagues in the valley have just stopped using, and in many
cases, have deleted their facebook account.

End of problem. No more intrusions of this kind.

Not the solution for everyone, but it's a pretty straightforward mechanism to
eliminate this problem, and, in my case, really cost me nothing.

Now, if I had to delete my Amazon account to avoid those tracking ads, that
would be a whole new level of pain. I don't know if I'm ready to do that, yet.

~~~
alphang
Agreed. The social ads, creepy frictionless sharing, the history of privacy
issues, the "hidden options" UX, the lack of anonymity, and the lack of
support for multiple facets to our identities -- these issues all combined
together made me deactivate my account.

I'm still trying it out to see if I can live without it for a year. But I'm
hoping to delete it altogether.

~~~
breckenedge
I made it about 10 months before I caved in and recreated an account. It's so
ingrained with my family and friends. But, just don't log in and cancel all
the email notifications, works pretty well.

I've had friends say "oh we forgot to invite you to the party because you
weren't on Facebook." I'm glad of the friends that use evite.

~~~
chris_wot
I'd seriously find some new friends.

------
tthomas48
The solution in this post doesn't work. It just changes your settings for the
ads on the right. Not the ones in your feed.

~~~
zach
Exactly right. Here's a Facebook help page of interest:

"Can I opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories?"
<http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/>

------
webwanderings
How long before Twitter goes the same route? You are asking for people to
follow you "safely" on Twitter. Don't hold your breath, you have not seen the
future, nobody has.

These are the reasons I don't click on Like anywhere, certainly not on brands.

Facebook has been a mess since they have introduced the promoting stories.
They have even added an additional Page Feed, which in my case, has been
sitting idle gathering unread counts.

Update: IMHO, the best is to use Facebook publicly in a read-only mode. If you
must follow the updates from someone, follow their RSS from their website or
their email newsletter, they must have one or the other, or else they are not
worth it. It is also better to keep yourself logged out of Facebook when you
don't need to use it. Twitter is not that bad right now but it still shoots
spam messages with bad links without you knowing about it. So your actions or
inaction on any social media can directly or indirectly affect your
relationship with your friends/contact.

------
ericdykstra
Wow, I thought when I opted out of having my names next to ads that I wouldn't
show up in the sponsored stories of people, either, but apparently that's
completely different, and I can't turn it off. (see:
<http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/>)

Is there an easy way to "un-like" everything? Facebook automatically made me
"like" everything that I had on my interests a long time back, and now that's
turning me into an advertising icon for those brands to my friends? No thanks.
So do I have to go through each one individually, or is there some way I can
get rid of all these "likes" at once?

~~~
halefx
<https://www.facebook.com/browse/other_connections_of/>

------
HyprMusic
"I was actually experimenting with how these “like gates”, as they’re called,
work because for my own company we were also playing with creating tools to
encourage people to like someone’s Facebook page."

Sounds a little hypocritically for criticising facebook about these dirty
tricks and then building a business around them. That feeling you get when you
see these adverts with your name on? That's the same feeling I get when I'm
forced to unnaturally 'like' something on facebook in order to see something
else.

~~~
nate
Sorry if I made the timing not clear. It definitely would be hypocritical if I
was building this business after I wrote this post.

I had no idea these sponsored posts ended up in people's timelines in such a
way no one could tell what's real and what's bullshit. I stopped development
on any "like-gating" tech over a year ago for a bunch of reasons. The tech is
still up on a website in demo mode, but I don't sell it anymore or intend to
revisit selling it again. I wouldn't want to work on encouraging likes again
if this sponsored post thing continues to be used like I describe in this
post.

------
pasbesoin
As soon as they insisted that one's likes be(come) public, I decided that that
was the end of that (for me, at least).

Remember: Likes (or whatever they used to be called back then, e.g. items
listed on your profile) used to be content you could restrict to your friends.
Pointers for them to stuff you found cool and interesting. Then FB assigned
them to the "forced to be public" part of your profile. Now, eventually,
they've become primarily a vehicle for 1) Gaming people to participate (self-
serving contests), in order to 2) Spam their graph.

Likes no longer represent user-generated content.

------
cs702
When it comes down to making money, FaceBook is acting exactly like every
other big media & communications company: they are doing everything in their
power to extract economic rents, to the extent permitted by law, so long as it
doesn't annoy or push away too many customers. This isn't really news.

~~~
moultano
Blanket cynicism doesn't add anything to the discussion.

~~~
cs702
moultano: my comment was not meant to be cynical; I'm sorry if it came across
that way. In hindsight, I could and probably should have worded it
differently.

My main point: this is not an isolated incident of FaceBook pushing the
boundaries of what's considered acceptable by users to make money; there have
been other such incidents in the past. Given the history, should we really be
surprised?

~~~
coldpie
If they're toeing the line of acceptability, they're bound to cross over it at
some point. This is a discussion about how one user thinks they've crossed
that line, what effects that might have on their business and their users and
customers, and what can be done to bring it back into line.

Must every article and discussion be about something "surprising"? Meta-
discussions like this are dull; if you're uninterested in an article, ignore
it.

------
BenoitEssiambre
This! My fb news feed is heavily spammed by products a few of my friends
'liked'.

Making the situation worse:

\- Some ads, one example for me is TD Bank, are shown repeatedly and
redundantly months after months. You'd think they would know I am not
interested by now.

\- On 4.7" screen phone, these are almost full screen ads.

\- I'm pretty sure the people who 'liked' these companies aren't aware they
are continuously spamming me.

I usually don't mind a few ads if it will pay for a free service and when they
are well targeted I might even click on them. Just the other day, a fb ad
reminded me to go to a delicious local burger place I don't enjoy nearly often
enough. However the current level of ad aggressivity is way past the limit of
what is acceptable.

------
mzuvella
Amazing to me how many people bitch and whine about a free service. If you
paid for Facebook access then it would be completely understandable, but you
don't. So change the settings or go to Google+ (if that's still around).

------
sumone4life
I hardly go on Facebook anymore mostly because of all the advertisements that
get interleaved into the news stream. It's definitely a case of, if you don't
like it then don't use it. There is no one forcing you to use Facebook and if
they have a user base that is willing to put up with an Ad supported
experience then so be it. AdBlock helps a lot in keeping at least the right
hand ads to a minimum. It's funny going on a friends computer who doesn't have
AdBlock and being surprised at the amount of advertising on Facebook. As an
aside, I love my Nest thermostat.

------
moultano
Wow. You can't opt out. That's pretty disgusting.
<http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/>

------
savories
Massive overreaction. It's very obvious that these news feed posts are
sponsored. It clearly says so. 99% of users won't even notice this or care.

------
jusben1369
An interesting wrinkle on this was the recent Presidential election in the US.
Some of my contacts "Liked" Romney's or Paul Ryan's page (or both) Every 3rd
or 5th day they were there when I looked at my feed "Romney is great" and your
3 friends liked this etc. My first reaction was "Wow, my friends are pretty
hard core Romney fans if they're liking every new post he puts up on his page"
So from endorsing him once they sent the message indirectly to their friends
about 8 - 12 over a two month period that they're a supporter. That's probably
a lot more in your friends' face with your political belief than most realize.
It's like the guy at a BBQ who casually says "I think I'm voting for Obama" vs
the friend whom every time you see them in the build up to the election wants
to talk about their candidate and you're voting for him right?

------
brown9-2
Related to liked pages, I've noticed a few times in the past month or two that
friend's months-old status updates that have links to products on Amazon.com
now re-appear in my current news feed as "sponsored posts".

So it seems like advertisers can also sponsor posts containing links to their
domains to re-appear in your feed.

~~~
alphang
Ugh. So even if you don't Like anything, your shared links can become
promotional stories. Terrible.

------
lukejduncan
There is no word for this except spam.

I am so tired of seeing that a very weak connection has liked Samsung
Mobile... every... single... freaking.... day...

As a result, I've contacted friends in the exact same manner: "Hey, can you
unlike this product, I'm tired of seeing it every day for the last few
months."

~~~
mrknmc
Why don't you use AdBlock?

~~~
lukejduncan
And, to be honest: I don't think I'd mind as much if it wasn't the exact same
ad multiple times a day, every day, for over a month

------
jere
I've always seen those like ads and wondered... why?!? I can understand liking
a struggling business or artist, but in what situation does it make sense to
like Visa or Walmart or Sprint or whatever? It doesn't. It should be pretty
obvious that everything you do on Facebook these days will be monetized. And
Facebook hits the jackpot when you explicitly state a preference for a
particular corporation.

When Facebook took my comma delimited list of "interests" and turned them all
into ads, I figured out Facebook had _sold out_. Call me melodramatic, but
this was years before Zuckerberg claimed "we don’t build services to make
money; we make money to build better services."

------
ColinDabritz
I've never been a fan of Facebooks behavior and attitude toward users. I
signed up for an account a while back mainly to make it harder for anyone else
to 'be' me. I watched as the privacy continually eroded. ( an excellent 2010
chart here: [http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-
Er...](http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Erosion-
Strategy.html) ) I've been forced to sort out privacy snafus several times
over the years, as they added new on-by-default options that I don't want. I
think it's time to leave.

------
codva
I don't ever "like" major brands. But I do click like on small local
businesses, or things my real-life friends are involved with. For a small
business, every little bit of free promotion helps.

------
bsg75
Why do people (professionals who are not in marketing) use Facebook?

As a user of HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet, I honestly don't
see the attraction. Seems like it is fraught with annoyances.

~~~
liotier
Facebook is where the clueless people are. Unfortunately, I love quite a few
of those clueless people - so I join them where they are.

When all your friends decide to meet at that fake corporate fac-simile of a
cliché pub, you go there too because you like your friends and might meet some
nice girl there too. You may suggest a place with beer that does not taste
like llama piss, but you drink that beer with a smile anyway because in the
end it is all about people, even with stupid UI, satanic EULA and sprawling
ads.

~~~
alphang
I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I wouldn't call them "clueless" -
maybe unaware, or unconcerned.

------
languagehacker
This kind of crap is why I unliked everything I possibly could, and then
created LikeBuster. I don't want people getting the wrong idea about me
because of an ad I didn't actually promote. I honestly think Facebook makes
everyone they use for their ad platform look foolish, and I'd prefer not to
see my friends insulted like that.

There are Chrome and Firefox add-ons for LikeBuster linked at
<https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster>.

------
NoPiece
Good post, as someone who occasionally uses promoted posts, it made me realize
it is a little weird to target friends of fans, which I believe is the FB
default.

------
icesoldier
I was under the impression that these were the user-facing side of Promoted
Posts that go to friends of friends. So I see that one of my friends liked the
GRE several times. But I also see "Sponsored Story" under that line, so I
ignore it and blame the page itself. On the iOS app at least, it tells me when
the Like occurred, which felt a little comical when a friend's Like from 2008
gave me a Sponsored Story a couple weeks ago.

------
fidotron
Until people start being willing to pay for services like Facebook or Twitter
these kind of antics are inevitable.

Unless you're paying you're the product.

~~~
icebraining
Are we the product of HN, then? Or if HN is "not the same", how are Identi.ca
users its product?

It's a nice soundbite, but it's oversimplified. There are many business
models, and some don't involve neither direct payments nor ads/tracking, and
others have ads even when you pay (e.g. Cable TV). It's just not that simple.

~~~
krickle
You know we are a highly technical audience and YC companies can advertise
jobs, etc. here, right? I think that post is right, and things like cable TV
or Hulu are just squeezing some money out of their product before they pass it
on.

~~~
icebraining
OK, how are we Wikipedia products?

Advertising (users as products) and charging are just two characteristics that
may appear in a business model together, or just one of them, or none,
depending on its design. There's simply no rule that makes ¬paying ⇒ product
an inevitability.

------
throwaway1979
Did Facebook change something related to the use of Likes recently? They just
managed to tick me off this morning. My nephew's like of a product showed up
as an advert for me - and I'm sure he didn't know this was happening.

Between this and their social plugin (I've tried disabling this many times), I
am a hair away from disabling my account.

------
RandallBrown
Facebook likes have been showing up on advertisements for years. The fact that
they're in the news feed now is all that's new. I've mistaken a few of these
ads for new posts from friends as well, but it became immediately apparent
after my friend like Samsung USA for the 2nd time that it was simply an
advertisement.

------
danvoell
I agree. They are going way to far. I don't care if they want to mislead
people, but please don't do it on my behalf.

When I logged in to cancel "Ads shown by third parties" which you linked to, I
had a new notification (normally reserved for my friends information) which
was a Groupon of the Day. WTF? Seems like two sinking ships.

------
justinph
With gmail you have a marketplace. Gmail might be nice, but email is a
protocol and you can take your business elsewhere. Not so with facebook.
They've built what's essentially treated as a protocol, but it's completely
under their control. Clearly, this makes it rife for what we might perceive as
abuse.

------
marknutter
This is an unfortunate title. It should read: "Facebook Pages: Why I don't
like things anymore". There are going to be more than a few people who might
have been on the fence about buying a Nest thermostat and will make a snap
judgement based on this title.

~~~
JeffL
Maybe they should stop advertising with Facebook?

------
rcavezza
I learned recently that legally, "liking" something on Facebook is considered
an endorsement of that product or service. I'm sure the law still needs to
catch up to technology, but this news stopped all my "liking" activities.

~~~
snowwrestler
What does it mean to "legally" endorse a product or service? What are the
legal consequences of this? I've never heard of this concept.

------
jameswyse
I've removed all my likes to try and clean up my news feed, though my facebook
profile still says I still have 110 'likes' , I'm guessing those are websites
without a facebook page and I've no idea how to remove those.

------
leeoniya
this is why i only "like" something by consciously posting about it in my
status via a link to product or article. i always found those "like" buttons
to be completely moronic and entirely out of my control.

------
bgruber
businesses have recently been complaining about facebook forcing them to pay
to reach their 'likers', but this is the flip side. I'm seeing more and more
sponsored stories about things my friends like, and not seeing the updates
from the pages i really do want to see. even in 'most recent' view, facebook
fails to show me updates from the pages i have explicitly told it to put in my
news feed. which means i'm going to get those updates by other means. which
means i'm going to use facebook less.

------
miop
Facebook should offer an ad-free membership level for a monthly or yearly fee,
or give people the option to ignore/hide "Likes" from showing up in their
newsfeed.

~~~
ZanderEarth32
I think they've figured out that you as a user is worth X amount more to
advertisers than you're probably willing to pay a year. Would most people be
willing to pay $100 a year if that is what you are worth to Facebook's
advertisers?

~~~
preinheimer
People who have $100/year to drop on facebook are also people with enough
disposable income to be worth advertising to.

------
daem0n
Great description of what really happens in these situations. Scary.

