15 ms·

Exiled from the Metaverse before it even started: Facebook bans are for life

251 points by lofties 5y ago

conradfr 5y ago
Is there any hope besides the EU regulating bans by Big Tech?
j_m_b 5y ago
Metaverse, the next 3D television.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  This is a decent comparison. Metaverse is going to have most of the same issues with eyestrain, even more motion sickness and bulkier headgear. It might be a fun curiosity for some but it won't gain the mainstream appeal that Facebook has (or at least once had).
  - cma 5y ago
    There will be varifocal displays eventually.
- haxiomic 5y ago
  You’re wrong on this one, pre-“metaverse” it was just called social vr, and that universe is really something special. The creativity and energy in there is like nothing I’ve ever seen before and it’s very very exciting Not the vision you’ll get from Meta however
bebna 5y ago
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Unfortunately, network effects are in play. Lots of people use facebook for things trivial and important. Local municipalities using it for events, etc. If you're not on it, you don't have a voice.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > If you're not on it, you don't have a voice. Depends on what you’re trying to say doesn’t it? But I’d challenge this overall sentiment. I haven’t had Facebook since 2010 or so. Nothing bad happened. I have a large and loving family and lots of close friends that I spend time with. I didn’t lose my voice. If I’m angry I call my representative or show up at their office. If a company does something I disagree with I don’t buy their products and I leave feedback on their website. It’s an illusion that we need Facebook or any other company as a conduit for feedback. We are choosing that path. It’s not one we need to take.
    - Gualdrapo 5y ago
      > It’s an illusion that we need Facebook or any other company as a conduit for feedback. We are choosing that path. It’s not one we need to take. But it's a decision we took as a collective. Same as with many other things - we (people) use Facebook/Whatsapp/etcetera because _others_ are using them, not always because we need to. If you as an individual decide to pull the plug off that stuff while people, groups or others around you that you're in touch with are still using them, you're risking to become a digital outcast. (I used Facebook from 2012 until 2018 and yes, it became a little harder to get in touch with people or many things that just assume everyone uses Facebook)
      - ericmay 5y ago
        I wonder at what point I’ll be a digital outcast. What will that look like? Will my wife just sit on the couch and only message me through Facebook? Will my 3 friends I’ve known since high school not send me a text message to get together to play tennis and organize virtual tennis on Meta and not invite me? I think more likely is that this concept is overhyped and fragile. Maybe you can think of something I’m missing here that not having Meta is causing ruin in my life for?
        mysterydip 5y ago
        A few close contacts are easy to maintain with traditional means. Many of the hobby groups I was a part of have moved to either facebook or discord, and old presences like individual forums or websites have disappeared or are shells of their former selves. If you aren't in a lot of groups, maybe this doesn't affect you the same?
- arthur6667 5y ago
gtsop 5y ago
Wish you get a lift of the ban. Meanwhile, I can't wait to see another episode of "vip complains online about bigtech ban and an insider helps him out while the rest of the plebs struggle with their permabans"
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  Classic "honest mistake"™. Followed by people calling for immediate cease of any critique since "they are very sorry and corrected the error". In all seriousness though: It's time to find some name for this behaviour where the only chance for support or help is being a VIP or making the news headlines somehow.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    Plebanning? The act of banning a John Doe that will never have the connections to revert the ban. "I'm a VIP, you can't pleban me." Any other term more fun and memorable?
  - bryan0 5y ago
    How about frontpaged? “Zuck permabanned me but I frontpaged to get back my account”
    - gtsop 5y ago
      I like this more because it doesn't focus on ban, sometimes it is an issue of lost access and inability to recover. Also it highlights the channel of recovery, which is the frontpage of some site
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      ... and it turned out it was just an oops-ban. (?)
      - barbazoo 5y ago
        Folks, you're on fire :+1:
sshine 5y ago
I’ve made sure to delete or render inactive all social media accounts. Yes, even GitHub. And you know what? Life continues.
- benmarks 5y ago
  Are forums like HN not also a social medium?
  - VLM 5y ago
    At some point drift in language will change the definition of "social media" from the former definition of trying to profit off users self-generated content, to the modern "in practice" definition of a for-profit heavily politically censored propaganda channel. So, no, under the old def HN was never about becoming trillionaires by selling our accts to google or whatever. And under the new definition HN has intense political leanings but is still primarily technical in nature and doesn't censor as much as Reddit or other fundamentalist or inquisition like as sites.
  - kibwen 5y ago
    We should not pretend that message boards are not subject to many of the same pitfalls as more conventional social media. At the same time, we should not be so overbroad as to lump message boards and social media into the same category. On a message board, 1) I don't have a profile that's rich with personal information, 2) I don't have a dedicated wall for my musings, 3) I don't have an individually-curated timeline, and 4) I don't have first-class social connections embedded in the platform. Point 1 means that there is much less ability to identify me for the purposes of advertising, which avoids much of the perverse incentive that comes with monetizing social media users. Point 2 means that I have much less personal attachment to this place as an outlet for creative self-expression, which helps to defuse both a sense of toxic entitlement that I might feel on behalf of the platform providers, as well as the sunk-cost fallacy that might keep me active here even if I no longer experienced pleasure from being here. Point 3 keeps filter bubbles from fractally proliferating; there is still one bubble, but it's the bubble that everyone else on the platform inhabits. Point 4 provides a mixture of all of the above benefits. Again, this isn't to say that message boards are perfect or that social media must be inherently bad, but IMO the differences are important.
sys_64738 5y ago
Being FB free, forever, is to be celebrated.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
robg 5y ago
Maybe my age (finished grad school in 2004) but I never created a Facebook account. Seemed like a waste of time and energy. And now? I’d gladly buy an Occulus but nope, need a Facebook account. Seems like a horrid company and where the cigarettes analogy seems apt and I used to smoke Marlboros as a kid. A lot of kids are now addicted to a product that actively harms them, Instaspam especially. Frankly love that FB makes it so hard to read stuff posted. Every time I’m linked to something there and it requires an account, I nope right out. I’ve banned Facebook from my life. Highly recommend not what you’ve lost, but what you’ll find instead.
- skylanh 5y ago
  This is a similar issue I have with Twitter. Direct link to the material--I can see it, if I'm trying to find additional material, nope. The negative patterns are too bold.
  - dreen 5y ago
    Tbf its hard to find specific things/tweets you're looking for on Twitter even if you do have an account. At least that's how it was until I stopped logging in about a year ago. But I can still access linked content. On mobile, I just have to paste the url into the browser address bar and it works.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > But I can still access linked content. Yeah but it feels like navigating around gets weird if you're not logged, because any link from the direct-linked content (original tweet for RTs, comments, etc...) will navigate then immediately hide the information behind a big popup, and if you close that popup... it sends you back where you came from.
      - kittywav 5y ago
        It's a recent anti-pattern they added. Possible solution: replace the "twitter.com" portion of the URL by "nitter.net" and you won't be nagged by things like that.
Yaa101 5y ago
Wear it like a badge of honor...
TrevorFSmith 5y ago
If this headline bothers you then go help the open immersive web become the actual metaverse.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  The aptly named Matrix might end up being the perfect OSS Metaverse. It will require people to actually bother to build it though. Identity is going to be key and we should accept no substitute for the federated variety. So, matrix has that and the brand. And conveniently, Facebook has nothing else than a vague idea of what they think they might need to build, which is basically Whatsapp and Instagram but with AR goggles, in their narrow minded heads. Which, is they same as saying that they have no clue whatsoever. That's good news! Whatever, it's going to be, it's not going to be theirs to own in perpetuity. Matrix is for now one of the few actually federated things (in addition to email) that still has a chance of not failing. As such it's a good basis for people to build a Metaverse on top of. Of course it is going to require people actually showing up and doing that. Email completely destroyed it's competitors by virtue of "you can email everyone instead of just the morons that bought the exact same shit that you bought". Thirty years on, nothing has changed. Whatever it's going to be, Zuck's ffing walled garden ain't it. Neal Stephenson has been repeatedly answering the question what he thinks about the whole Meta thing as part of his recent book tour for Termination Shock. He'd be the person that coined the whole notion of the Metaverse in Snowcrash in the early 90's. He does not seem very impressed with this effort by Facebook and nor did Facebook bother to even talk to him about their plans. I think that is probably a tactical mistake by Facebook and it kind of outlines how desperate they are.
  - ztjio 5y ago
    Speaking of Matrix and the implied association, Keanu's not too impressed by Facebook's hijacking of Neal Stephenson's term/concept either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZyu0_vYhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZyu0_vYhs
albybisy 5y ago
I'm banned from Instagram and i can't create new accounts because they banned my phone number. So if i want an instagram account i have to buy another number. No way. I can still live without instagram, but this is the way Facebook inc/Meta do business. For me Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatApp have to die!
varelse 5y ago
And that's why you probably should have had a separate account for running your business. I don't use Facebook for anything except some of the groups that remain there and which are relevant to my hobbies. Strong opinions get you suspended because there will always be someone offended by what you say.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  I think business accounts have to be linked with personal accounts, and Facebook requires users to use their legal name. They also do phone verification for signups now so it's not trivial to get around their requirements
  - lofties 5y ago
    You're 100% right. A few years back you could sign up for business accounts which were seperate from your personal identity, but 2 or 3 years back this practice was cancelled and you had to start linking your business account to your personal account. Also having two facebook accounts is not allowed by their TOS. That's the first thing our partner manager asked me: "do you have multiple accounts by any chance? That often gets people banned".
    - lupire 5y ago
      You need to hire a burner person in your legal corporation, to be the owner of your FB accoubt. Bonus: economic opportunity for lower class.
rvz 5y ago
Sorry for your banishment. Now you're a lifetime member of the lost and banned.
lil_dispaches 5y ago
Calling facebook "meta" is the ultimate in marketing people their own conceptual understanding of things back to them. Truly FB is trying to ZUCK the internet. This meme takeover is the worst part, speaking as a mostly non-user of FACEBOOK products. I dreamed of a OS filter that lets you turn "meta" back to "facebook" where appropriate. We can't bring AI to the OS fast enough.
Overtonwindow 5y ago
I don’t understand Facebook bans. A lot of people I know have multiple Facebook accounts. Why don’t you just create another account?
- lofties 5y ago
  I've done and created a second account, which was reduced to a limited account the minute I linked my secondary phone number. Probably used that number on my old account already, so they were quick to strike it down. I could not link a phone, but I need to link my phone number if I want to get access to more advanced functionality such as running ads, pages, et cetera. Surely there are a thousand other ways I could sign up again -- but to be honest I don't want to jump through those hoops. I just want my account back. And since that isn't happening, I hope my tale serves as a warning for people never to rely on Facebook as they can take your access away if their bots think you're suspicious.
  - Overtonwindow 5y ago
    You give Facebook your phone number? Why? Is this a new requirement for an account?
    - frabcus 5y ago
      In my experience, yes. Also a few weeks into using an account I made for testing a product that uses their signin system, it asked me to scan in and upload my passport. Luckily it wasn’t a core part of my job so I just gave up having any kind of Facebook account. They really care that you have exactly one account in your real name.
      - chris_wot 5y ago
        If you screw up your personal details, you won’t be able to get back in. No matter how you try. It’s one of the best things that can happen to you, to be honest. Facebook is a cancer on society.
  - 5y ago
29athrowaway 5y ago
Using a different e-mail or phone number should be enough to evade the ban.
b0rsuk 5y ago
nickdothutton 5y ago
In the early 90s I ran a BBS and was a USENET user and administrator (ISP) for years. The SnR of major social media platforms is so poor now. I find it hard to even explain to the young how much better such forums can be.
numpad0 5y ago
One thing I don’t get about Facebook’s Metaverse push is that Metaverse is just an alternative name for VR, and V stands for virtual. If you’re going to disallow disconnection between meatspace and VR, there’s nothing virtual left in it.
aidog 5y ago
Nevermind FB. We miss you on twitter man.
CommieBobDole 5y ago
It amazes me that on the one hand, people keep getting banned from Facebook for odd inscrutable reasons, while on the other hand, none of the spammers or scammers I've reported ever get banned, no matter how obvious. Literally yesterday, I was looking through my ignored friend requests and found some random profile that had thousands of 'friends', and all the posts in his timeline were ads for dodgy weight loss and/or boner pills, with hundreds of people tagged in the photos. Dozens of posts a day, every post title full of punctuation-as-text to avoid triggering spam filters. Reported it as a spam account, got a response a few hours later that they had checked the profile, determined it didn't violate their community standards and that it would not be removed. I guess it's just fascinating that with all that money and power, they've managed to build a moderation system with such a high rate of both false-positives and false-negatives. You'd think they could at least constrain it to being terrible in one direction.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals.
  - georgeecollins 5y ago
    They probably have to have a higher threshold to ban people on a thing like marketplace. It's very hard to sell anything without someone complaining sometimes. Sometimes the complainers are scammers. And maybe they make money from it, so they don't want to kill the goose. I would also guess that heavy FB users are a terrific concentration of suckers.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    My friend keeps getting his posts banned for selling firearms. Like the Apple Mac tower and a generator... very dangerous weapons.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals. That's why burglars and shoplifters call it Fencebook.
champagnois 5y ago
My family will never own Oculus products or anything connected to Facebook. Block and filter anything related to their platforms.
- amelius 5y ago
  Never buy anything that is tethered by the vendor. From Nespresso cups to Apple IDs. There should be a "no-tether" law.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    What about vendors that add tethering after the fact? That’s far worse behavior, but even that has not been enough to change the status quo. My GoPro camera once worked fine without signing into their service. Then one day they forced me to create an account and log in, just to continue to use the app to control my hardware. This pissed me off so much that the camera was “accidentally” destroyed not long after, but not before thinking hard about tying it to a brick and returning it via their corporate office window. Now, I tell everyone that will listen to avoid buying their products. Shame on them and any company that does such despicable things to their own customers.
helsinki 5y ago
This reads a bit like a plea to Facebook for account restoration.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  Well, he is pretty open about this, despite his ambivalence to Facebook he even says he realises that it has more a hold of him than he thought it would. Hang in there. De-Zucking your life is a net positive.
- lofties 5y ago
  I want my account back, I even said so at the end. But I also want to let people know that, despite having access to some high level people inside of FB, I most likely won't get my account back. So it's two-fold: I want people to know they can get banned, at any time, for life, without much of a warning. And two: you might depend on Facebook more than you'd like to, so plan accordingly. I really hate that I can't talk to James anymore. I didn't even bother to swap email addresses.
account-5 5y ago
This is one of the reasons I don't have any FB (or FB owned) account. You're at their mercy, with all your eggs in their basket you have to hope they don't decide you're not allowed your eggs. It's not the only reason. Not even at the top on my list for reasons. But if there is going to be a metaverse, Facebook cannot be the gatekeeper, or any other US tech company that randomly and for no given reason permabans you cough Google.
superkuh 5y ago
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. This person chose to get into a business run entirely on someone else's property and now they're paying the price for that bad decision. They lampshade this in the first couple paragraphs but that doesn't change the relevance.
joeman1000 5y ago
I was unfairly (and unprofessionally) pressured into using fb for a group project chat at uni this year. I tried to create an account about 5 times but was completely unable. Each time I logged in or created an account, I was shown to have ‘violated community standards’ and promptly kicked off. This was on brand-spanking-new accounts. I must have really pissed someone off at fb over the years.
- InGoodFaith 5y ago
  By any chance did you have an initial picture without your face? Over recent years Facebook has been clamping down with those same sort of messages (sometimes it will appear after a few days or weeks for people I know) and for better or worse the main fix was having a picture with a face on a brand new account. Older accounts don't have this problem though. It's a similar tactic to how in recent years twitter lets you sign up without a mobile number but after some time you will suspiciously get your account locked until you "verify" with a mobile number.
comeonseriously 5y ago
How can I get banned? This sounds great!
slightwinder 5y ago
Let's see whether this will remain legal. It seems EU has some laws impacting these cases, according to rumors. There recently was a case of someone who went to court and successfully revoked his lifetime-ban on a certain platform. This was for a business-account and nothing is really public yet regarding the case and laws involved. So I'm not entirely sure whether it was settled outside of court at the end or whether a law forced the judgment. But this case gives me some hope that we do move in the direction where we limit the power of platforms in favor of the customers.
kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
I found out recently that I'm "pre-banned" from Facebook. I don't know why, nor do I care. I stayed off of Facebook for a long time, because I figured it was a stupid idea. In a moment of drunk weakness I decided to sign up because I was bored and curious (~2019?). Nope, not allowed to sign up. No idea why, no reason given. The email address and my real life identity is never used in any offensive way (or really in any way at all). I don't have some weird name that sounds offensive either. They didn't offer any way to remedy, no way to contact, no way to do anything about it. I just said screw it, I probably shouldn't be on there anyway. Yet what I know about it and what I've seen of it, people I've known are perfectly acceptable posting hate speech, violent threats, spreading misinformation about people for lulz deliberately, etc. Why is this company not considered the same as 8chan? I don't really care if it exists, just why culturally is it considered some sort of bastion of existence and 8chan is demonized when I see them as equals?
- incompatible 5y ago
  If your email address is banned, presumably you can still create an account with a different address. I can't imagine that they ban real names, given the massive duplication of names in the real world, but even in that case it wouldn't be hard to vary it a bit. I guess you don't care enough to try such experiments, but for somebody who was kicked off and actually wants to be there, is there any special obstacle to creating a new account?
mwattsun 5y ago
I bought an Oculus headset before it required a Facebook login. I haven't used it since that requirement was added. The metaverse I envisioned comes from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, not a sanitized and sexless universe where Code of Conducts written by Home Owners Associations are strictly enforced and LinkedIn type interactions are the norm. Bill Gates recently said all business meetings would be on it in three years. I don't like to criticize people personally, but billionaires have so much power I think it's ok: Bill G is not exactly a tech visionary, famously having to rewrite his book "The Road Ahead" because he missed the internet happening. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg loves it because his personality already seems blank and smoothed over like an avatar. Do I want to live inside a sappy television commercial where Coke teaches the world to sing and everyone smiles and expresses only approved virtuous thoughts? Nope.
- mindcrash 5y ago
  > I bought an Oculus headset before it required a Facebook login. I haven't used it since that requirement was added. They recently reversed this decision. Facebook is no longer required, and your Oculus account is your primary way to sign in again.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    What happened once can happen again, and has a funny way of doing so with Big Tech.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    My rant was more about the Metaverse as proposed and controlled by Meta. Funny, after I wrote this I watched a Eric Meijer video and he talked about the 10th man, a concept new to me. I was being the 10th man for a moment. In a group of 10, one is designated as the 10th man (or person, but I'll go with Erik's term.) When 9 people agree, the 10th man is required to disagree. This throws a monkey wrench into groupthink. 2016 - One Hacker Way Rational alternative of Agile - Erik Meijer (at minute 25:00 in case the time param doesn't work) https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=1499 https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=1499 Edit: He's now Director Of Engineering at Meta so maybe he can be the 10th man at Meta https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikmeijer1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikmeijer1/
smsm42 5y ago
I see a lot of people saying "who cares, it's just a site, so what if you're banned". But I am reading about people losing connections with relatives, friends, business partners, unable to access services and have their lives upended because somebody, somewhere, for some undisclosed reasons, and without any recourse, decided to cancel their account. I suspect it's going beyond "just some site". And we either need a public awareness campaign for people to stop their reliance on such sites so much in their public lives, or find some solution to the immense control that companies like Facebook have on people's life and how abusive this control has become. People that have platforms with millions of listeners should start using their platforms - not just to make their friend unbanned this one time, but to illuminate the dangers of the dystopian situation we're sleepwalking into. People should know that facebook is unreliable, erratic, capricious platform, where you could get randomly excluded for life without any recourse, and friends shouldn't let friends use facebook, at least not for anything remotely important.
- kova12 5y ago
  Another thing that irks me as blatantly wrong is that those account bans just cut the people off the network cold turkey. Even criminals don't get such treatment. You don't just "disappear" if you are convicted. But with facebook you just vanish. Nobody tells you "your account will be banned in 7 days, please close up the convos". You can't post "hey, I'm getting off facebook, contact me by email at xxx". There's no autoreply. People you were having dialog with don't know what happened, just assume you blew them off. And also facebook (and google for the same matter) is used by many sites as an identity provider, which has an effect of severing your access to sites that may or may not want that, and likely don't even know. What if you are in the middle of financial transaction, which you can not complete now because account is banned? This is such a clusterfuck
specialist 5y ago
How do I get perma banned? I'd pay to be preemptively banned. Huh. Potential future social media conceirge service. I already waste too much personal time on junk mail, spam, robocalls.
airbreather 5y ago
This is stupid because if the overall societal goal was to create better behaviour, then a lifetime ban totally removes any possibility of engagement and education, which could result in improvement and rehabilitation. (I am aware the language here potentially indicates willing participation in some kind of arbitrary totalitarianism, but it's for the point of discussion) So this is an equivelent of a life sentance, what's next, special towns where only people banned by facebook live? Or maybe execution. From Facebooks business model perspective, this probably doesn't hurt them while the numbers stay under some smallish magic threshold, but cross that threshhold range and all of sudden they might find they have banned themselves into irrelevance and be just be another MySpace.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
And nothing of value was lost.
anonimamente 5y ago
Nearly no one in software development, particularly VR, seems to care about the morality of supporting Facebook. Are we too mesmerized by their latest shiny toys, Quest 2, et. al.? Doing a search for anything concerning the ethics of feeding the Meta beast led me to this scant result.

251 points by lofties 5y ago

conradfr 5y ago

Is there any hope besides the EU regulating bans by Big Tech?

j_m_b 5y ago

Metaverse, the next 3D television.

tjpnz 5y ago
This is a decent comparison. Metaverse is going to have most of the same issues with eyestrain, even more motion sickness and bulkier headgear. It might be a fun curiosity for some but it won't gain the mainstream appeal that Facebook has (or at least once had).
- cma 5y ago
  There will be varifocal displays eventually.
haxiomic 5y ago
You’re wrong on this one, pre-“metaverse” it was just called social vr, and that universe is really something special. The creativity and energy in there is like nothing I’ve ever seen before and it’s very very exciting Not the vision you’ll get from Meta however

bebna 5y ago

mysterydip 5y ago
Unfortunately, network effects are in play. Lots of people use facebook for things trivial and important. Local municipalities using it for events, etc. If you're not on it, you don't have a voice.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > If you're not on it, you don't have a voice. Depends on what you’re trying to say doesn’t it? But I’d challenge this overall sentiment. I haven’t had Facebook since 2010 or so. Nothing bad happened. I have a large and loving family and lots of close friends that I spend time with. I didn’t lose my voice. If I’m angry I call my representative or show up at their office. If a company does something I disagree with I don’t buy their products and I leave feedback on their website. It’s an illusion that we need Facebook or any other company as a conduit for feedback. We are choosing that path. It’s not one we need to take.
  - Gualdrapo 5y ago
    > It’s an illusion that we need Facebook or any other company as a conduit for feedback. We are choosing that path. It’s not one we need to take. But it's a decision we took as a collective. Same as with many other things - we (people) use Facebook/Whatsapp/etcetera because _others_ are using them, not always because we need to. If you as an individual decide to pull the plug off that stuff while people, groups or others around you that you're in touch with are still using them, you're risking to become a digital outcast. (I used Facebook from 2012 until 2018 and yes, it became a little harder to get in touch with people or many things that just assume everyone uses Facebook)
    - ericmay 5y ago
      I wonder at what point I’ll be a digital outcast. What will that look like? Will my wife just sit on the couch and only message me through Facebook? Will my 3 friends I’ve known since high school not send me a text message to get together to play tennis and organize virtual tennis on Meta and not invite me? I think more likely is that this concept is overhyped and fragile. Maybe you can think of something I’m missing here that not having Meta is causing ruin in my life for?
      - mysterydip 5y ago
        A few close contacts are easy to maintain with traditional means. Many of the hobby groups I was a part of have moved to either facebook or discord, and old presences like individual forums or websites have disappeared or are shells of their former selves. If you aren't in a lot of groups, maybe this doesn't affect you the same?
arthur6667 5y ago

gtsop 5y ago

Wish you get a lift of the ban. Meanwhile, I can't wait to see another episode of "vip complains online about bigtech ban and an insider helps him out while the rest of the plebs struggle with their permabans"

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
Classic "honest mistake"™. Followed by people calling for immediate cease of any critique since "they are very sorry and corrected the error". In all seriousness though: It's time to find some name for this behaviour where the only chance for support or help is being a VIP or making the news headlines somehow.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Plebanning? The act of banning a John Doe that will never have the connections to revert the ban. "I'm a VIP, you can't pleban me." Any other term more fun and memorable?
- bryan0 5y ago
  How about frontpaged? “Zuck permabanned me but I frontpaged to get back my account”
  - gtsop 5y ago
    I like this more because it doesn't focus on ban, sometimes it is an issue of lost access and inability to recover. Also it highlights the channel of recovery, which is the frontpage of some site
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    ... and it turned out it was just an oops-ban. (?)
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      Folks, you're on fire :+1:

sshine 5y ago

I’ve made sure to delete or render inactive all social media accounts. Yes, even GitHub. And you know what? Life continues.

benmarks 5y ago
Are forums like HN not also a social medium?
- VLM 5y ago
  At some point drift in language will change the definition of "social media" from the former definition of trying to profit off users self-generated content, to the modern "in practice" definition of a for-profit heavily politically censored propaganda channel. So, no, under the old def HN was never about becoming trillionaires by selling our accts to google or whatever. And under the new definition HN has intense political leanings but is still primarily technical in nature and doesn't censor as much as Reddit or other fundamentalist or inquisition like as sites.
- kibwen 5y ago
  We should not pretend that message boards are not subject to many of the same pitfalls as more conventional social media. At the same time, we should not be so overbroad as to lump message boards and social media into the same category. On a message board, 1) I don't have a profile that's rich with personal information, 2) I don't have a dedicated wall for my musings, 3) I don't have an individually-curated timeline, and 4) I don't have first-class social connections embedded in the platform. Point 1 means that there is much less ability to identify me for the purposes of advertising, which avoids much of the perverse incentive that comes with monetizing social media users. Point 2 means that I have much less personal attachment to this place as an outlet for creative self-expression, which helps to defuse both a sense of toxic entitlement that I might feel on behalf of the platform providers, as well as the sunk-cost fallacy that might keep me active here even if I no longer experienced pleasure from being here. Point 3 keeps filter bubbles from fractally proliferating; there is still one bubble, but it's the bubble that everyone else on the platform inhabits. Point 4 provides a mixture of all of the above benefits. Again, this isn't to say that message boards are perfect or that social media must be inherently bad, but IMO the differences are important.

sys_64738 5y ago

Being FB free, forever, is to be celebrated.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

robg 5y ago

Maybe my age (finished grad school in 2004) but I never created a Facebook account. Seemed like a waste of time and energy. And now? I’d gladly buy an Occulus but nope, need a Facebook account. Seems like a horrid company and where the cigarettes analogy seems apt and I used to smoke Marlboros as a kid. A lot of kids are now addicted to a product that actively harms them, Instaspam especially. Frankly love that FB makes it so hard to read stuff posted. Every time I’m linked to something there and it requires an account, I nope right out. I’ve banned Facebook from my life. Highly recommend not what you’ve lost, but what you’ll find instead.

skylanh 5y ago
This is a similar issue I have with Twitter. Direct link to the material--I can see it, if I'm trying to find additional material, nope. The negative patterns are too bold.
- dreen 5y ago
  Tbf its hard to find specific things/tweets you're looking for on Twitter even if you do have an account. At least that's how it was until I stopped logging in about a year ago. But I can still access linked content. On mobile, I just have to paste the url into the browser address bar and it works.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > But I can still access linked content. Yeah but it feels like navigating around gets weird if you're not logged, because any link from the direct-linked content (original tweet for RTs, comments, etc...) will navigate then immediately hide the information behind a big popup, and if you close that popup... it sends you back where you came from.
    - kittywav 5y ago
      It's a recent anti-pattern they added. Possible solution: replace the "twitter.com" portion of the URL by "nitter.net" and you won't be nagged by things like that.

Yaa101 5y ago

Wear it like a badge of honor...

TrevorFSmith 5y ago

If this headline bothers you then go help the open immersive web become the actual metaverse.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
The aptly named Matrix might end up being the perfect OSS Metaverse. It will require people to actually bother to build it though. Identity is going to be key and we should accept no substitute for the federated variety. So, matrix has that and the brand. And conveniently, Facebook has nothing else than a vague idea of what they think they might need to build, which is basically Whatsapp and Instagram but with AR goggles, in their narrow minded heads. Which, is they same as saying that they have no clue whatsoever. That's good news! Whatever, it's going to be, it's not going to be theirs to own in perpetuity. Matrix is for now one of the few actually federated things (in addition to email) that still has a chance of not failing. As such it's a good basis for people to build a Metaverse on top of. Of course it is going to require people actually showing up and doing that. Email completely destroyed it's competitors by virtue of "you can email everyone instead of just the morons that bought the exact same shit that you bought". Thirty years on, nothing has changed. Whatever it's going to be, Zuck's ffing walled garden ain't it. Neal Stephenson has been repeatedly answering the question what he thinks about the whole Meta thing as part of his recent book tour for Termination Shock. He'd be the person that coined the whole notion of the Metaverse in Snowcrash in the early 90's. He does not seem very impressed with this effort by Facebook and nor did Facebook bother to even talk to him about their plans. I think that is probably a tactical mistake by Facebook and it kind of outlines how desperate they are.
- ztjio 5y ago
  Speaking of Matrix and the implied association, Keanu's not too impressed by Facebook's hijacking of Neal Stephenson's term/concept either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZyu0_vYhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZyu0_vYhs

albybisy 5y ago

I'm banned from Instagram and i can't create new accounts because they banned my phone number. So if i want an instagram account i have to buy another number. No way. I can still live without instagram, but this is the way Facebook inc/Meta do business. For me Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatApp have to die!

varelse 5y ago

And that's why you probably should have had a separate account for running your business. I don't use Facebook for anything except some of the groups that remain there and which are relevant to my hobbies. Strong opinions get you suspended because there will always be someone offended by what you say.

pcthrowaway 5y ago
I think business accounts have to be linked with personal accounts, and Facebook requires users to use their legal name. They also do phone verification for signups now so it's not trivial to get around their requirements
- lofties 5y ago
  You're 100% right. A few years back you could sign up for business accounts which were seperate from your personal identity, but 2 or 3 years back this practice was cancelled and you had to start linking your business account to your personal account. Also having two facebook accounts is not allowed by their TOS. That's the first thing our partner manager asked me: "do you have multiple accounts by any chance? That often gets people banned".
  - lupire 5y ago
    You need to hire a burner person in your legal corporation, to be the owner of your FB accoubt. Bonus: economic opportunity for lower class.

rvz 5y ago

Sorry for your banishment. Now you're a lifetime member of the lost and banned.

lil_dispaches 5y ago

Calling facebook "meta" is the ultimate in marketing people their own conceptual understanding of things back to them. Truly FB is trying to ZUCK the internet. This meme takeover is the worst part, speaking as a mostly non-user of FACEBOOK products. I dreamed of a OS filter that lets you turn "meta" back to "facebook" where appropriate. We can't bring AI to the OS fast enough.

Overtonwindow 5y ago

I don’t understand Facebook bans. A lot of people I know have multiple Facebook accounts. Why don’t you just create another account?

lofties 5y ago
I've done and created a second account, which was reduced to a limited account the minute I linked my secondary phone number. Probably used that number on my old account already, so they were quick to strike it down. I could not link a phone, but I need to link my phone number if I want to get access to more advanced functionality such as running ads, pages, et cetera. Surely there are a thousand other ways I could sign up again -- but to be honest I don't want to jump through those hoops. I just want my account back. And since that isn't happening, I hope my tale serves as a warning for people never to rely on Facebook as they can take your access away if their bots think you're suspicious.
- Overtonwindow 5y ago
  You give Facebook your phone number? Why? Is this a new requirement for an account?
  - frabcus 5y ago
    In my experience, yes. Also a few weeks into using an account I made for testing a product that uses their signin system, it asked me to scan in and upload my passport. Luckily it wasn’t a core part of my job so I just gave up having any kind of Facebook account. They really care that you have exactly one account in your real name.
    - chris_wot 5y ago
      If you screw up your personal details, you won’t be able to get back in. No matter how you try. It’s one of the best things that can happen to you, to be honest. Facebook is a cancer on society.
- 5y ago

29athrowaway 5y ago

Using a different e-mail or phone number should be enough to evade the ban.

b0rsuk 5y ago

nickdothutton 5y ago

In the early 90s I ran a BBS and was a USENET user and administrator (ISP) for years. The SnR of major social media platforms is so poor now. I find it hard to even explain to the young how much better such forums can be.

numpad0 5y ago

One thing I don’t get about Facebook’s Metaverse push is that Metaverse is just an alternative name for VR, and V stands for virtual. If you’re going to disallow disconnection between meatspace and VR, there’s nothing virtual left in it.

aidog 5y ago

Nevermind FB. We miss you on twitter man.

CommieBobDole 5y ago

It amazes me that on the one hand, people keep getting banned from Facebook for odd inscrutable reasons, while on the other hand, none of the spammers or scammers I've reported ever get banned, no matter how obvious. Literally yesterday, I was looking through my ignored friend requests and found some random profile that had thousands of 'friends', and all the posts in his timeline were ads for dodgy weight loss and/or boner pills, with hundreds of people tagged in the photos. Dozens of posts a day, every post title full of punctuation-as-text to avoid triggering spam filters. Reported it as a spam account, got a response a few hours later that they had checked the profile, determined it didn't violate their community standards and that it would not be removed. I guess it's just fascinating that with all that money and power, they've managed to build a moderation system with such a high rate of both false-positives and false-negatives. You'd think they could at least constrain it to being terrible in one direction.

tjpnz 5y ago
Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  They probably have to have a higher threshold to ban people on a thing like marketplace. It's very hard to sell anything without someone complaining sometimes. Sometimes the complainers are scammers. And maybe they make money from it, so they don't want to kill the goose. I would also guess that heavy FB users are a terrific concentration of suckers.
- coryrc 5y ago
  My friend keeps getting his posts banned for selling firearms. Like the Apple Mac tower and a generator... very dangerous weapons.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Don't forget about Facebook Marketplace. It's absolutely rife with scammers and other assorted criminals. That's why burglars and shoplifters call it Fencebook.

champagnois 5y ago

My family will never own Oculus products or anything connected to Facebook. Block and filter anything related to their platforms.

amelius 5y ago
Never buy anything that is tethered by the vendor. From Nespresso cups to Apple IDs. There should be a "no-tether" law.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  What about vendors that add tethering after the fact? That’s far worse behavior, but even that has not been enough to change the status quo. My GoPro camera once worked fine without signing into their service. Then one day they forced me to create an account and log in, just to continue to use the app to control my hardware. This pissed me off so much that the camera was “accidentally” destroyed not long after, but not before thinking hard about tying it to a brick and returning it via their corporate office window. Now, I tell everyone that will listen to avoid buying their products. Shame on them and any company that does such despicable things to their own customers.

helsinki 5y ago

This reads a bit like a plea to Facebook for account restoration.

chris_wot 5y ago
Well, he is pretty open about this, despite his ambivalence to Facebook he even says he realises that it has more a hold of him than he thought it would. Hang in there. De-Zucking your life is a net positive.
lofties 5y ago
I want my account back, I even said so at the end. But I also want to let people know that, despite having access to some high level people inside of FB, I most likely won't get my account back. So it's two-fold: I want people to know they can get banned, at any time, for life, without much of a warning. And two: you might depend on Facebook more than you'd like to, so plan accordingly. I really hate that I can't talk to James anymore. I didn't even bother to swap email addresses.

account-5 5y ago

This is one of the reasons I don't have any FB (or FB owned) account. You're at their mercy, with all your eggs in their basket you have to hope they don't decide you're not allowed your eggs. It's not the only reason. Not even at the top on my list for reasons. But if there is going to be a metaverse, Facebook cannot be the gatekeeper, or any other US tech company that randomly and for no given reason permabans you cough Google.

superkuh 5y ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. This person chose to get into a business run entirely on someone else's property and now they're paying the price for that bad decision. They lampshade this in the first couple paragraphs but that doesn't change the relevance.

joeman1000 5y ago

I was unfairly (and unprofessionally) pressured into using fb for a group project chat at uni this year. I tried to create an account about 5 times but was completely unable. Each time I logged in or created an account, I was shown to have ‘violated community standards’ and promptly kicked off. This was on brand-spanking-new accounts. I must have really pissed someone off at fb over the years.

InGoodFaith 5y ago
By any chance did you have an initial picture without your face? Over recent years Facebook has been clamping down with those same sort of messages (sometimes it will appear after a few days or weeks for people I know) and for better or worse the main fix was having a picture with a face on a brand new account. Older accounts don't have this problem though. It's a similar tactic to how in recent years twitter lets you sign up without a mobile number but after some time you will suspiciously get your account locked until you "verify" with a mobile number.

comeonseriously 5y ago

How can I get banned? This sounds great!

slightwinder 5y ago

Let's see whether this will remain legal. It seems EU has some laws impacting these cases, according to rumors. There recently was a case of someone who went to court and successfully revoked his lifetime-ban on a certain platform. This was for a business-account and nothing is really public yet regarding the case and laws involved. So I'm not entirely sure whether it was settled outside of court at the end or whether a law forced the judgment. But this case gives me some hope that we do move in the direction where we limit the power of platforms in favor of the customers.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago

I found out recently that I'm "pre-banned" from Facebook. I don't know why, nor do I care. I stayed off of Facebook for a long time, because I figured it was a stupid idea. In a moment of drunk weakness I decided to sign up because I was bored and curious (~2019?). Nope, not allowed to sign up. No idea why, no reason given. The email address and my real life identity is never used in any offensive way (or really in any way at all). I don't have some weird name that sounds offensive either. They didn't offer any way to remedy, no way to contact, no way to do anything about it. I just said screw it, I probably shouldn't be on there anyway. Yet what I know about it and what I've seen of it, people I've known are perfectly acceptable posting hate speech, violent threats, spreading misinformation about people for lulz deliberately, etc. Why is this company not considered the same as 8chan? I don't really care if it exists, just why culturally is it considered some sort of bastion of existence and 8chan is demonized when I see them as equals?

incompatible 5y ago
If your email address is banned, presumably you can still create an account with a different address. I can't imagine that they ban real names, given the massive duplication of names in the real world, but even in that case it wouldn't be hard to vary it a bit. I guess you don't care enough to try such experiments, but for somebody who was kicked off and actually wants to be there, is there any special obstacle to creating a new account?

mwattsun 5y ago

I bought an Oculus headset before it required a Facebook login. I haven't used it since that requirement was added. The metaverse I envisioned comes from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, not a sanitized and sexless universe where Code of Conducts written by Home Owners Associations are strictly enforced and LinkedIn type interactions are the norm. Bill Gates recently said all business meetings would be on it in three years. I don't like to criticize people personally, but billionaires have so much power I think it's ok: Bill G is not exactly a tech visionary, famously having to rewrite his book "The Road Ahead" because he missed the internet happening. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg loves it because his personality already seems blank and smoothed over like an avatar. Do I want to live inside a sappy television commercial where Coke teaches the world to sing and everyone smiles and expresses only approved virtuous thoughts? Nope.

mindcrash 5y ago
> I bought an Oculus headset before it required a Facebook login. I haven't used it since that requirement was added. They recently reversed this decision. Facebook is no longer required, and your Oculus account is your primary way to sign in again.
- omginternets 5y ago
  What happened once can happen again, and has a funny way of doing so with Big Tech.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  My rant was more about the Metaverse as proposed and controlled by Meta. Funny, after I wrote this I watched a Eric Meijer video and he talked about the 10th man, a concept new to me. I was being the 10th man for a moment. In a group of 10, one is designated as the 10th man (or person, but I'll go with Erik's term.) When 9 people agree, the 10th man is required to disagree. This throws a monkey wrench into groupthink. 2016 - One Hacker Way Rational alternative of Agile - Erik Meijer (at minute 25:00 in case the time param doesn't work) https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=1499 https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ?t=1499 Edit: He's now Director Of Engineering at Meta so maybe he can be the 10th man at Meta https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikmeijer1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikmeijer1/

smsm42 5y ago

I see a lot of people saying "who cares, it's just a site, so what if you're banned". But I am reading about people losing connections with relatives, friends, business partners, unable to access services and have their lives upended because somebody, somewhere, for some undisclosed reasons, and without any recourse, decided to cancel their account. I suspect it's going beyond "just some site". And we either need a public awareness campaign for people to stop their reliance on such sites so much in their public lives, or find some solution to the immense control that companies like Facebook have on people's life and how abusive this control has become. People that have platforms with millions of listeners should start using their platforms - not just to make their friend unbanned this one time, but to illuminate the dangers of the dystopian situation we're sleepwalking into. People should know that facebook is unreliable, erratic, capricious platform, where you could get randomly excluded for life without any recourse, and friends shouldn't let friends use facebook, at least not for anything remotely important.

kova12 5y ago
Another thing that irks me as blatantly wrong is that those account bans just cut the people off the network cold turkey. Even criminals don't get such treatment. You don't just "disappear" if you are convicted. But with facebook you just vanish. Nobody tells you "your account will be banned in 7 days, please close up the convos". You can't post "hey, I'm getting off facebook, contact me by email at xxx". There's no autoreply. People you were having dialog with don't know what happened, just assume you blew them off. And also facebook (and google for the same matter) is used by many sites as an identity provider, which has an effect of severing your access to sites that may or may not want that, and likely don't even know. What if you are in the middle of financial transaction, which you can not complete now because account is banned? This is such a clusterfuck

specialist 5y ago

How do I get perma banned? I'd pay to be preemptively banned. Huh. Potential future social media conceirge service. I already waste too much personal time on junk mail, spam, robocalls.

airbreather 5y ago

This is stupid because if the overall societal goal was to create better behaviour, then a lifetime ban totally removes any possibility of engagement and education, which could result in improvement and rehabilitation. (I am aware the language here potentially indicates willing participation in some kind of arbitrary totalitarianism, but it's for the point of discussion) So this is an equivelent of a life sentance, what's next, special towns where only people banned by facebook live? Or maybe execution. From Facebooks business model perspective, this probably doesn't hurt them while the numbers stay under some smallish magic threshold, but cross that threshhold range and all of sudden they might find they have banned themselves into irrelevance and be just be another MySpace.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

And nothing of value was lost.

anonimamente 5y ago

Nearly no one in software development, particularly VR, seems to care about the morality of supporting Facebook. Are we too mesmerized by their latest shiny toys, Quest 2, et. al.? Doing a search for anything concerning the ethics of feeding the Meta beast led me to this scant result.