>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.