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> you really should never ever use a company like Facebook as a vital component of your business. Like Facebook - by which you mean Facebook, Google and Twitte

> you really should never ever use a company like Facebook as a vital component of your business. Like Facebook - by which you mean Facebook, Google and Twitter, I suppose? So what are you supposed to do, exactly? Hand out fliers door to door? Create your own social network? These large corporations have inserted themselves into every single part of our lives as a gatekeeper. They believe that they have no responsibility to actually treat their clients with fairness, and they have made sure of that by having no way to actually reach anyone who can change anything. And yet for a small business, they have no choice. The system was designed entirely by these big companies to make sure that these big companies could do exactly as they pleased, giving us no recourse except legal action. What you are doing is called blaming the victim and it isn't very nice. Morally, ethically, _and legally_, this system is wrong. Facebook is the villain here, not this man who used Facebook in exactly the way they advertise to us to do so.

jonathanstrange 4y ago
I'm not blaming anyone, I'm advising people not to introduce single points of failure into their business. You need to either ensure that any dependencies can be replaced easily (which is hard) or diversify these dependencies in a way that failure of one of them is not catastrophic. For example, if you rely on advertising you need to diversify to Facebook, Google, Bing, Amazon, and other online advertisers instead of relying on only one of them. As I've said, it's common sense, so my apologies for stating the obvious.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  It's common sense and obvious, yet whenever it gets mentioned, the messenger gets dunked on for victim blaming or whatever. Nobody's saying "don't use Facebook for your business". Rather, it's "Don't utterly rely on Facebook for your business to function (or on any other free service where you don't have a formal business arrangement with)." Somehow, this is a controversial opinion on HN.
  - jcforbes 4y ago
    Please educate me on how to get the potential clients to switch platforms that they use to view pictures?
- jcforbes 4y ago
  Advertising only works if you advertise where the potential clients are. In my industry that means Instagram. I also do use Google ads and youtube, but the return there is a drop in the bucket compared to instagram, literally a rounding error.

jonathanstrange 4y ago

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm advising people not to introduce single points of failure into their business. You need to either ensure that any dependencies can be replaced easily (which is hard) or diversify these dependencies in a way that failure of one of them is not catastrophic. For example, if you rely on advertising you need to diversify to Facebook, Google, Bing, Amazon, and other online advertisers instead of relying on only one of them. As I've said, it's common sense, so my apologies for stating the obvious.

ryandrake 4y ago
It's common sense and obvious, yet whenever it gets mentioned, the messenger gets dunked on for victim blaming or whatever. Nobody's saying "don't use Facebook for your business". Rather, it's "Don't utterly rely on Facebook for your business to function (or on any other free service where you don't have a formal business arrangement with)." Somehow, this is a controversial opinion on HN.
- jcforbes 4y ago
  Please educate me on how to get the potential clients to switch platforms that they use to view pictures?
jcforbes 4y ago
Advertising only works if you advertise where the potential clients are. In my industry that means Instagram. I also do use Google ads and youtube, but the return there is a drop in the bucket compared to instagram, literally a rounding error.