5 ms·

It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like

It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like you would refuse to do this on principle). I never receive emails from Facebook. I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"

pen2l 11y ago
> I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa... I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
- alonmower 11y ago
  I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top) :(
  - pen2l 11y ago
    > I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
    - dave2000 11y ago
      I don't get any emails from Facebook. Have you not set up the account the way you like it? Do you still have stock wallpaper, ringtones etc on your devices? I find out about events in Facebook at the right time; when I'm using Facebook.
      - maus42 11y ago
        Did you miss the point where the poster said "had a FB account for a couple of hours"? I assume this means they deleted their account.
- berntb 11y ago
  You made me feel ashamed for being angry for a really petty reason. :-) L-in bought Pulse for my iPad and closed it down to replace it with something else. If they instead had extended the app with their social network, I'd have grumbled but started to use it. I'm hardly alone, so they shot their own foot, too.
Tepix 11y ago
Exactly. If it's 5 minutes per 1 billion customers, 5 billion minutes wasted. That's 9512 years. 135 lives.
- resu_nimda 11y ago
  I can think of many things waste more of my time than having to delete promotional emails here and there. I get that it's annoying, but let's have some perspective... Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.
- jbbarth 11y ago
  This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time. That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
  - emiliobumachar 11y ago
    I don't see the fallacy in it. It's just pointing out that a little time wasting at scale actually has a big impact.
    - jbbarth 11y ago
      The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale. 135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
      - justinclift 11y ago
        If you're one of the 135 people's lives they've wasted... you might take it a bit more personally. :D

pen2l 11y ago

> I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa... I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.

alonmower 11y ago
I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top) :(
- pen2l 11y ago
  > I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
  - dave2000 11y ago
    I don't get any emails from Facebook. Have you not set up the account the way you like it? Do you still have stock wallpaper, ringtones etc on your devices? I find out about events in Facebook at the right time; when I'm using Facebook.
    - maus42 11y ago
      Did you miss the point where the poster said "had a FB account for a couple of hours"? I assume this means they deleted their account.
berntb 11y ago
You made me feel ashamed for being angry for a really petty reason. :-) L-in bought Pulse for my iPad and closed it down to replace it with something else. If they instead had extended the app with their social network, I'd have grumbled but started to use it. I'm hardly alone, so they shot their own foot, too.

Tepix 11y ago

Exactly. If it's 5 minutes per 1 billion customers, 5 billion minutes wasted. That's 9512 years. 135 lives.

resu_nimda 11y ago
I can think of many things waste more of my time than having to delete promotional emails here and there. I get that it's annoying, but let's have some perspective... Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.
jbbarth 11y ago
This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time. That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
- emiliobumachar 11y ago
  I don't see the fallacy in it. It's just pointing out that a little time wasting at scale actually has a big impact.
  - jbbarth 11y ago
    The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale. 135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
    - justinclift 11y ago
      If you're one of the 135 people's lives they've wasted... you might take it a bit more personally. :D