5 ms·

Facebook Banned Our SaaS Website

63 points by hermitcrab 6y ago

tmilard 6y ago
So interesting... If only facebook had a bit of a real competitor, I am positively sure that would put a real support 'human' service to help their partners/clients... But until then, apparently, they just do not care. So sad to see a young company (10 years is still young) being so old in the way they care of one only thing : cash
- kurthr 6y ago
  The fact that other companies can sell "support" for $500 is even more shady. Add in that they were banned likely because "a botnet was sending fake abuse reports to ban our website" and it's even worse. Catering to automated criminal/blackmail attacks isn't a good look.
  - alacombe 6y ago
    > The fact that other companies can sell "support" for $500 is even more shady. $500 is pretty cheap compared to other proprietary vendors.
1cvmask 6y ago
Wonder how things would change if Section 230 were altered??
- 1cvmask 6y ago
  Wonder why I was downvoted for what I think is quite relevant. Do we not think that their whole business model will have to adjust accordingly? For good or ill. And that will affect the whole nature of services offered. Including either better service, “curated” content or complete removal of such services.
  - 1over137 6y ago
    >Wonder why I was downvoted... I suppose because Trump is against section 230, and everything Trump does is automatically bad.
  - alacombe 6y ago
    > Wonder why I was downvoted for what I think is quite relevant. Because Section 230 is one of the 5 pillar of Sillicon Valley big-tech impunity-while-at-the-same-time-manipulating-content dogma. Criticizing section 230 is akin to blasphemy, no less. [reference to a well-known intolerant religion totally intended].
- tzs 6y ago
  I don't see how section 230 has any relevance here. Section 230 protects against liability for not removing user provided content. Removing user provided content was fine before 230 and 230 did not change that. What section 230 did is make it so that for user provided content that appears on the site if someone has a beef with that content it is the user that provided it that bears responsibility, not the site that is hosting it for the user.
imgabe 6y ago
> But there are businesses that are much, much more dependent on Facebook (or Instagram, Youtube, etc). And if your business is built entirely around piggybacking one platform, it can go belly up overnight. This is the real takeaway. Don't build sharecropper businesses that are dependent on someone else's platform. Facebook, YouTube, Apple, etc don't care about making your business viable. Don't depend on them.
- bragh 6y ago
  I am not sure how good of a comparison this is, but relying on one client or one platform in business feels like going all-in in poker. But in these kinds of relationships, you are definitely not the shark.
- sneak 6y ago
  Furthermore, stop giving them ad money, and stop donating free content to them to make them more attractive to end users. The only way they go away is if we stop giving them money and attention.
  - danlugo92 6y ago
    > content Not sure if you mean user-content or 3rd party content (e.g. something from TV or some content producer and reposted in Facebook). Demographics: Latin America I've noticed that younger audiences tend to post low-effort meme pictures, sometimes TikTok reposts and selfies. But older audiences seem to repost a lot of low-quality video content (that I only see there, really) such as religious stuff, cooking videos, "fails", etc. I feel my IQ going down in real time as I scroll down on any of these wall/feeds. Think about it. Is this really something that should be worth billions? Billions of people mindlessly scrolling down. Reminds me of the people mindlessly staring at the Casino roulette machines pulling down the lever every 5 seconds in monotome fashion. Craziest shit is this is not at all unethical. Nobody is being coerced into this. You could make a case for banning it like gambling is banned in many jurisdictions, but passing such legislation would be a big tall order. We really do have people in this world, who value their time and don't waste much time on those platforms and either prefer to pursue real-life experiences or education/career/wealth advancement. Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire because we give him our free time, meanwhile he had 18 hour coding sessions in college.
bragh 6y ago
The link to the Youtube video in the previous to last paragraph is not working for me even after removing the extra space after ?v= Does anyone know what the mentioned infamous example is about?
- jverrecchia 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/z4AeoAWGJBw https://youtu.be/z4AeoAWGJBw
pkaler 6y ago
There was a similar ML bug on Instagram last year. I had a 5-letter username that hackers would constantly try to take. They somewhat succeeded this summer by having my account deactivated. There is no real recourse on my end since Instagram/Facebook doesn't have customer support. My real fear is that someone will try to impersonate me in the future.
- namanaggarwal 6y ago
  Disclosure: Facebook employee, Opinion are my own. I think you were looking for a support email. I think at facebook's scale its a bit difficult. I would recommend you to head over here https://www.facebook.com/help/1306725409382822 https://www.facebook.com/help/1306725409382822 and someone will help you out. This page can be easily found in our Help and Support section
  - g42gregory 6y ago
    This page says "Help With a Hacked Account". How would anyone even know to look for "help with a hacked account" when FB bans your page? This is clearly not a general support email. This does not sound right.
    - namanaggarwal 6y ago
      My comment is on the query for account takeover if you notice
  - alacombe 6y ago
    > I think you were looking for a support email. I think at facebook's scale its a bit difficult. Only because facebook is greedy as fuck and prefers massive amount of unethical profits than actually providing a good service.
    - lazylizard 6y ago
      the profits scale. but the support cannot??? yeah. right.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sneak 6y ago
It's getting to be that there are very few places where you can reach an audience of millions that are not heavily censored by a small number of giant, unaccountable corporations. Email is the last one, and already Google is starting to censor that one, too, by rewriting links in messages to go to google.com instead of the original email as sent.
- 1over137 6y ago
  They rewrite links?! Why? When?
  - sneak 6y ago
    In gmail's web interface they have ~always done this. In IMAP-accessed accounts, they are doing it if you have advanced protection turned on for your Google Account. It breaks PGP signatures, among other things. There's no way I found to turn it off, and there was no announcement that they were starting. I submitted it around the day it started (~2 months ago) but my submission was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182
  - netsharc 6y ago
    Probably for protection against malware and phishing. Huh, Outlook 365 has been doing this for a while (it prefixes the url with its domain), I've only realized now how privacy-breaching it is.
jariel 6y ago
Same thing with Google search. At a certain scale, there has to be some regulatory oversight. The 'we don't need actual employees' form G and FB is enough - they are excessively profitable, and some of this profit comes from assertively skimping on reality. If there were true competition, it wouldn't be a problem but aside from arguments over monopoly, there is materially very little choice. If AT&T or Verizon denied you telephone service ... there would be recourse.
crb002 6y ago
I would file a criminal complaint in Iowa with the Altoona Police. Tell them you suspect an unauthorized employee accessed their systems to disrupt your business https://law.justia.com/codes/iowa/2011/titlexvi/subtitle1/chapter716/716-6b/ https://law.justia.com/codes/iowa/2011/titlexvi/subtitle1/ch...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justiceforsaas 6y ago
Facebook is probably a bad acquisition channel for many SaaS businesses, especially after this week news on FB managers trashing their own ad targeting [1]. I do a little project where I analyze founder interviews, trying to discover which acquisition channels consistently work for founders [2] and around 90% of founders who mentioned FB as an acquisition channel working for them, also mentioned at least 2-3 more major channels (like AdWords, partnerships, SEO, etc.) [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25529479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25529479 [2] https://www.firstpayingusers.com https://www.firstpayingusers.com [3] The only exception were e-commerce companies, they were much more likely to rely solely on FB vs. SaaS Companies
matt_oriordan 6y ago
We have had this same issue. We are migrating from our old ably.io domain to our new domain ably.com. We've been contacting Facebook through public channels, and private channels (our network) for around 7 months, and we're hitting a brick wall. Facebook is touting how they are doing what they can to validate what people are publishing on their platform, yet they incorrectly classify our domain ably.com as "the content doesn't meet our Community Standards" yet won't reclassify, respond, or engage in any way to change that (see https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=ably.com https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=ably.com). Like Alex from JitBit, Facebook truly is a tiny channel for us, but we have found it has a wider impact for us it stops people sharing links with the domain in it in other Facebook owned media too. If anyone knows how on earth we can actually get Facebook to respond, I'd be hugely in your debt. This issue has blocked us for 6 months in migrating over our primary traffic from www.ably.io to ably.com. Contact me at matt at ably.com
herbst 6y ago
I dont even remember how many facebook accounts and domains i burned for legit business. Working in the FB environment always feels like a hack because i know its going to break. Soon.

63 points by hermitcrab 6y ago

So interesting... If only facebook had a bit of a real competitor, I am positively sure that would put a real support 'human' service to help their partners/clients... But until then, apparently, they just do not care. So sad to see a young company (10 years is still young) being so old in the way they care of one only thing : cash

kurthr 6y ago
The fact that other companies can sell "support" for $500 is even more shady. Add in that they were banned likely because "a botnet was sending fake abuse reports to ban our website" and it's even worse. Catering to automated criminal/blackmail attacks isn't a good look.
- alacombe 6y ago
  > The fact that other companies can sell "support" for $500 is even more shady. $500 is pretty cheap compared to other proprietary vendors.

1cvmask 6y ago

Wonder how things would change if Section 230 were altered??

1cvmask 6y ago
Wonder why I was downvoted for what I think is quite relevant. Do we not think that their whole business model will have to adjust accordingly? For good or ill. And that will affect the whole nature of services offered. Including either better service, “curated” content or complete removal of such services.
- 1over137 6y ago
  >Wonder why I was downvoted... I suppose because Trump is against section 230, and everything Trump does is automatically bad.
- alacombe 6y ago
  > Wonder why I was downvoted for what I think is quite relevant. Because Section 230 is one of the 5 pillar of Sillicon Valley big-tech impunity-while-at-the-same-time-manipulating-content dogma. Criticizing section 230 is akin to blasphemy, no less. [reference to a well-known intolerant religion totally intended].
tzs 6y ago
I don't see how section 230 has any relevance here. Section 230 protects against liability for not removing user provided content. Removing user provided content was fine before 230 and 230 did not change that. What section 230 did is make it so that for user provided content that appears on the site if someone has a beef with that content it is the user that provided it that bears responsibility, not the site that is hosting it for the user.

imgabe 6y ago

> But there are businesses that are much, much more dependent on Facebook (or Instagram, Youtube, etc). And if your business is built entirely around piggybacking one platform, it can go belly up overnight. This is the real takeaway. Don't build sharecropper businesses that are dependent on someone else's platform. Facebook, YouTube, Apple, etc don't care about making your business viable. Don't depend on them.

bragh 6y ago
I am not sure how good of a comparison this is, but relying on one client or one platform in business feels like going all-in in poker. But in these kinds of relationships, you are definitely not the shark.
sneak 6y ago
Furthermore, stop giving them ad money, and stop donating free content to them to make them more attractive to end users. The only way they go away is if we stop giving them money and attention.
- danlugo92 6y ago
  > content Not sure if you mean user-content or 3rd party content (e.g. something from TV or some content producer and reposted in Facebook). Demographics: Latin America I've noticed that younger audiences tend to post low-effort meme pictures, sometimes TikTok reposts and selfies. But older audiences seem to repost a lot of low-quality video content (that I only see there, really) such as religious stuff, cooking videos, "fails", etc. I feel my IQ going down in real time as I scroll down on any of these wall/feeds. Think about it. Is this really something that should be worth billions? Billions of people mindlessly scrolling down. Reminds me of the people mindlessly staring at the Casino roulette machines pulling down the lever every 5 seconds in monotome fashion. Craziest shit is this is not at all unethical. Nobody is being coerced into this. You could make a case for banning it like gambling is banned in many jurisdictions, but passing such legislation would be a big tall order. We really do have people in this world, who value their time and don't waste much time on those platforms and either prefer to pursue real-life experiences or education/career/wealth advancement. Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire because we give him our free time, meanwhile he had 18 hour coding sessions in college.

bragh 6y ago

The link to the Youtube video in the previous to last paragraph is not working for me even after removing the extra space after ?v= Does anyone know what the mentioned infamous example is about?

jverrecchia 6y ago
https://youtu.be/z4AeoAWGJBw https://youtu.be/z4AeoAWGJBw

pkaler 6y ago

There was a similar ML bug on Instagram last year. I had a 5-letter username that hackers would constantly try to take. They somewhat succeeded this summer by having my account deactivated. There is no real recourse on my end since Instagram/Facebook doesn't have customer support. My real fear is that someone will try to impersonate me in the future.

namanaggarwal 6y ago
Disclosure: Facebook employee, Opinion are my own. I think you were looking for a support email. I think at facebook's scale its a bit difficult. I would recommend you to head over here https://www.facebook.com/help/1306725409382822 https://www.facebook.com/help/1306725409382822 and someone will help you out. This page can be easily found in our Help and Support section
- g42gregory 6y ago
  This page says "Help With a Hacked Account". How would anyone even know to look for "help with a hacked account" when FB bans your page? This is clearly not a general support email. This does not sound right.
  - namanaggarwal 6y ago
    My comment is on the query for account takeover if you notice
- alacombe 6y ago
  > I think you were looking for a support email. I think at facebook's scale its a bit difficult. Only because facebook is greedy as fuck and prefers massive amount of unethical profits than actually providing a good service.
  - lazylizard 6y ago
    the profits scale. but the support cannot??? yeah. right.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sneak 6y ago

It's getting to be that there are very few places where you can reach an audience of millions that are not heavily censored by a small number of giant, unaccountable corporations. Email is the last one, and already Google is starting to censor that one, too, by rewriting links in messages to go to google.com instead of the original email as sent.

1over137 6y ago
They rewrite links?! Why? When?
- sneak 6y ago
  In gmail's web interface they have ~always done this. In IMAP-accessed accounts, they are doing it if you have advanced protection turned on for your Google Account. It breaks PGP signatures, among other things. There's no way I found to turn it off, and there was no announcement that they were starting. I submitted it around the day it started (~2 months ago) but my submission was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818024 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10173182
- netsharc 6y ago
  Probably for protection against malware and phishing. Huh, Outlook 365 has been doing this for a while (it prefixes the url with its domain), I've only realized now how privacy-breaching it is.

jariel 6y ago

Same thing with Google search. At a certain scale, there has to be some regulatory oversight. The 'we don't need actual employees' form G and FB is enough - they are excessively profitable, and some of this profit comes from assertively skimping on reality. If there were true competition, it wouldn't be a problem but aside from arguments over monopoly, there is materially very little choice. If AT&T or Verizon denied you telephone service ... there would be recourse.

crb002 6y ago

I would file a criminal complaint in Iowa with the Altoona Police. Tell them you suspect an unauthorized employee accessed their systems to disrupt your business https://law.justia.com/codes/iowa/2011/titlexvi/subtitle1/chapter716/716-6b/ https://law.justia.com/codes/iowa/2011/titlexvi/subtitle1/ch...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

justiceforsaas 6y ago

Facebook is probably a bad acquisition channel for many SaaS businesses, especially after this week news on FB managers trashing their own ad targeting [1]. I do a little project where I analyze founder interviews, trying to discover which acquisition channels consistently work for founders [2] and around 90% of founders who mentioned FB as an acquisition channel working for them, also mentioned at least 2-3 more major channels (like AdWords, partnerships, SEO, etc.) [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25529479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25529479 [2] https://www.firstpayingusers.com https://www.firstpayingusers.com [3] The only exception were e-commerce companies, they were much more likely to rely solely on FB vs. SaaS Companies

matt_oriordan 6y ago

We have had this same issue. We are migrating from our old ably.io domain to our new domain ably.com. We've been contacting Facebook through public channels, and private channels (our network) for around 7 months, and we're hitting a brick wall. Facebook is touting how they are doing what they can to validate what people are publishing on their platform, yet they incorrectly classify our domain ably.com as "the content doesn't meet our Community Standards" yet won't reclassify, respond, or engage in any way to change that (see https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=ably.com https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=ably.com). Like Alex from JitBit, Facebook truly is a tiny channel for us, but we have found it has a wider impact for us it stops people sharing links with the domain in it in other Facebook owned media too. If anyone knows how on earth we can actually get Facebook to respond, I'd be hugely in your debt. This issue has blocked us for 6 months in migrating over our primary traffic from www.ably.io to ably.com. Contact me at matt at ably.com

herbst 6y ago

I dont even remember how many facebook accounts and domains i burned for legit business. Working in the FB environment always feels like a hack because i know its going to break. Soon.