
Building, and Losing, a Career on Facebook - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/02/03/512473383/building-and-losing-a-career-on-facebook
======
mooreds
I have sympathy for these folks. The internet opened up wide worlds of
possibilities for one person businesses, especially because of the wide reach.

But when you build on someone's platform, you play by their rules. The first
thing I'd do if I had a significant FB following would be to drive folks to my
website so that I could begin to own the relationship, rather than FB owning
it. Hopefully these stories will circulate and cause current FB entrepreneurs
to do the same.

~~~
moxious
In the early days of the wide public internet it began with walled gardens
like AOL.

They're bad for users, but they're great for the gardener. Looks to me like
Facebook is a new way of making a closed ecosystem of posts, accounts, and so
on, aiming to grow to encompass shopping and all other functions so you don't
need to leave.

Their corporate policy tends to block some of the weirder and more deviant
things that make the Internet the Internet. It's a shame.

~~~
alaskamiller
The early internet needed AOL.

Do you remember what the alternative was? You be really chaotic nerdy and use
Lynx, Usenet, BBS to find what you want? So that you can write it down on a
txt file just to remember to check it again later or store it for later?

No one's got time for that.

AOL was the rubber floaties around your arms as you first took a dip into
cyberspace. AOL scoured, organized, and packaged the internet into consumable
portions and served it up for 50 hours a month.

This walled garden idea only makes sense when what is outside the wall is
better than what's inside the wall. And even back then it took awhile before
you made the jump from AOL wrapped MSIE to paying for Netscape.

The world always needs malls. That's just how humans socialize. When the deep
web gets colonized, it too will inevitably get its own mall. Facebook put
together that mall now, it serves as land lord and it polices itself somewhat
to the extent of not pissing off its users to the extent of serving its own
needs.

That's not a very hard intuitive idea to pick up. Piss off Google, get
delisted, and poof, same thing. Piss off Ebay, get banned, and poof, same
thing. Piss off Uber, get blacklisted, and poof, same thing. Piss in the
community pool and get kicked out.

So here's the big so what: saying screw it and doing it yourself is also
really, really hard. Try to match up the vanity facebook numbers yourself on
the wild wild web. Explain to the average person how to buy a domain name,
setup web hosting, login to FTP, setup a blog, add content, add social sharing
plugins, comments plugins, recommendation plugins, then convince millions to
pay attention without the benefit of a push-pull network in effect.

That's not even what the writer's intent is with this article. All of that has
been stale since the IPO days. We're way past the IPO days--Facebook is a
great walled garden. We're also way past the privacy days--privacy is dead.

We're now at the part asking: is Facebook a public utility or not? Does it
want to be? Does it want to be treated as such? Does it deserve to be treated
as such? Will it then kowtow to serve the public as such?

That's what all these recent #facebook posts are really wagon circling around.
Wondering out loud why Zuckerberg doesn't want to run for office as president
with the dawning of the realization that as a corporate master, he doesn't
have to to be presidential.

PS: The internet at 100MM people was pretty f-ing great. But the internet at
7B scares the living bejesus out of me. But I'm not going to be running to
declare make the internet great again. There is no shame in this. Just
rational and pragmatic decisions to be made to keep going forward.

~~~
mooreds
> why Zuckerberg doesn't want to run for office as president. He doesn't have
> to to be president.

Reminds me of the scene in snow crash with a vastly diminished POTUS.

~~~
alaskamiller
When will the clock reset and kids grow up to remember something besides 70's
pulp scifi as a reference point to what dystopian future was suppose to be
like? Maybe something good will come out next year.

~~~
striking
Considering George Orwell's "1984" hit the top of the Amazon bestseller list a
little while ago, I think the classics are here to stay.

That said, no one's stopping you from "resetting the clock" yourself. If you
were to write some decent dystopian-future novels, I know a few people
(including yours truly) who would appreciate it.

------
milesf
Moral of the story: Don't sharecrop

Building something on the web on your own platform means you own it, control
it, and are not beholden to anyone or any company provided you are reasonably
within the law.

Building an app for iPhone? You're sharecropping. Android App? Sharecropping.
Facebook? YouTube? You guessed it.

My friend Ryan Bates build railscasts.com but has been on hiatus for almost 4
years. Even so, his site still has value, and at any time he can pick it back
up again and start rebuilding. If you love freedom, I don't know why you would
pour your life, mind, and skill into anything that's sharecropping.

~~~
mooreds
Hmmm. The trade-off that might cause one to "share crop" (which is a great
analogy) is the reach one can get. It is a lot easier to build an audience on
Twitter or Facebook than on the open web, because that is where the people
are. Building an app for the iPhone or Android markets? That's where the
people are (though fewer folks install apps than in the past).

The key is to know that you will be forced to transition off that platform,
and to build for that day. (Instagram lived through this, meerkat did not:
[http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks-
ins...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks-instagram-
friend-finding-api) )

~~~
lj3
There's no trade-off. You can use platforms like facebook or twitter to
increase your exposure and reach, but make sure the real content is either
hosted on or duplicated on a site you control. That way, if one platform
decides to kick you off, you're not completely toast.

Unfortunately, that's not an option for iPhone app makers. Those people (and
their incomes) are at the mercy of Apple.

~~~
hkmurakami
Doesn't FB specifically reward users who use its native (captive) tools? If so
there's a reward to being a sharecropper and thus there is a trade off.

Agreed that Twitter does not have such tools.

~~~
slouch
FB certainly shows posts with photo and video uploads attached to more users
than text and link posts.

------
a_c
Facebook is comparable to opium in the 18-19th century. Dictated by powerful
organization, some considered it harmful but most considered it normal,
addictive in nature, and people consuming it wastes precious time. In no way I
am saying facebook equals opium, just pointing out some aspects of it is
potentially dangerous to our generation (So as many other stuff, e.g tobacco,
alcohol, etc).

------
mark_l_watson
I agree with other commenters that we should post our original content on our
own domains. That is what I do and then use social media platforms to point
back to my domain.

That said, even with some danger of depending on other peoples platforms,
there is a revolution happening that involves platforms that connect creators
and users/customers.

I depend on Leanpub and Amazon to publish my eBooks and as a new business I am
implementing mobile apps for both Apple's and Google's platforms. In the
antifragile sense (from Nassim Taleb's book by that name), even though access
to one of these four platforms might go away, access to each being fragile,
spreading out over four platforms hopefully makes my business antifragile.

~~~
closeparen
>post our original content on our own domains

I don't have $50,000 to buy a memorable, pronounceable .com off a squatter.

Like San Francisco real estate, domain names work for the people who were
lucky enough to get them while get getting was good. The rest of us are
screwed.

99% of the value Facebook provides is a "DNS" for real names which resolves
collisions nicely using your social graph (i.e. it knows which John Smith you
mean).

~~~
Buge
I've bought many memorable, pronounceable .com domains and never paid more
than $12.

~~~
wbillingsley
Absolutely.

(It is pronounced "ziff-skick-squirtle-ubb-liorate" not "ziff-skick-squirtle-
oob-liorate" isn't it?)

~~~
Buge
I mean 2 very common English words put together.

For example I just thought of 2 common arbitrary words, tried them, and it's
an available domain: roundwagon.com

------
OJFord
> _blocked from Facebook after using its messaging tool to share sensitive
> photos_

A few months ago there was a report (that got a won't-fix response from the
bounty programme) that images shared privately over messenger are accessible
by API if a guessable ID is known.

That's one thing, and obviously conversations are not encrypted, but now the
above quote - not only are they insecure, but they're actually being actively
snooped on.

I've nothing to hide, etc. - but I'm talking to my friend; not to Facebook -
and it's from my own country's police service that I've nothing to hide, not
some private-sector company in America.

------
mtnygard
As a society we are going to have to figure something out: if intellectual
property has value, then content contributors are adding value. That means
kicking them off is depriving them of the value of their labor.

In the public sphere, we would say they are being deprived of property without
due process. In the world of private companies, there is no such protection.
For one thing, all the mechanisms we create to ensure due process, ability to
appeal, know the charges against you, and seek redress... those cost time,
effort, and money.

Platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube/Google occupy an
interesting space. They sometimes act like common carriers and most users
implicitly assume the company doesn't meddle or play favorites. False. The
companies can and do play favorites (who supplies the highest quality
impressions? who has the best conversion rate? who pays back the most in ad
dollars?)

Contributors kind of just assume they have some property rights in the things
they create. False.

Contributors assume they have some means of redress when an unjust action
occurs. False.

The "sharecropping" analogy is apt, but even sharecroppers had better
contracts than content creators today have!

Historically, whole systems of government have been tried and replaced to work
out fair and just (or at least acceptably unjust) systems. The European
revolutions of the 1850's were largely about land use conflicts. Part of the
French Revolution was about the conflict between renters and landowners.

------
passivepinetree
It's pretty crazy that it took that long (and pressure from a very public
entity like NPR) to get this lady Facebook access again.

"Move fast and break things", indeed.

~~~
mooreds
Yes, after two behind the scenes Facebook contacts at that. Seems like
Facebook would benefit by putting a better process in place, though of course
we don't hear about the reinstatements where everything went swimmingly.

------
quickConclusion
>So Nyaira decided to share the photos with him on Messenger (Facebook's
private chat tool).

>That was a big mistake. Almost instantly, Facebook's computer software
deactivated her.

I thought Facebook was using the Signal protocol from Open Whisper for
Messenger, so that even Facebook cannot access the content.

Are pictures/attachment in clear? Or was it the previous version? What's the
situation today?

~~~
tdkl
E2E encrypted chats aren't by default. But they did achieve what they planned
- you thought they were because you saw it mentioned sometime somewhere, but
didn't look into the fine details. When reading headlines, a person might
memorize "facebook encrypted chats available", but the devil is always in the
details.

~~~
quickConclusion
Thanks

------
nitwit005
This is imagining humans to be useful in a way I wouldn't expect. You have a
guy who posted a lot of paid ads despite warnings, and a woman who genuinely
did post child pornography. Do we really imagine that reaching a human would
have somehow changed the outcome?

They definitely did violate the rules, so I imagine the call center employee
would just confirm it, tell them as much, and hang up.

~~~
neotek
In the second case, at the very least there were rational, honest reasons for
her doing so, and a human being is at least capable of discerning context and
making a judgement call, even if it's just to kick the issue up the chain to
someone who has the authority to rule on the issue.

~~~
nitwit005
Sure, it's _possible_ for a human to make such a judgement call, but most of
the time call center staff are going to be working from a script and trying to
get done with your call as fast as possible.

There's not going to be a path on their script for "was indeed child porn, but
it seems okay", except perhaps for account theft.

------
ladzoppelin
Well written article and actually impressed if they made the guy prove his
income.

------
KON_Air
"meme-maker"

[A Tirade Filled With Seething Rage]

