5 ms·

Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

92 points by veb 14y ago

pritam2020 14y ago
There should be some way to distinguish between a fan page, and an official page. So, that people who want to follow either have a choice.
- pritam2020 14y ago
  Also, no need to delete anything just to have one official page.
- veb 14y ago
  Yeah, you're supposed to put in the official page (so people know), but there is no official page.
- saurik 14y ago
  There is: it is called a "community page". This person flagrantly violated this mechanism, against Facebook's terms of service, in order to capitalize on the fame of a television show he did not create and was not involved in.
  - veb 14y ago
    This feature wasn't exactly around when the page was made.
goodside 14y ago
The moral of the story here is that you shouldn't invest your time and emotional energy into things that actually belong to other people. You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database owned by a multi-billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed. You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now on.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  I actually came to write that the big takeaway for me was to care about things that actually exist. Pouring your life into a fan site that can one day disappear seems incredibly depressing. In that time others have built companies, relationships and a happy life and you have built: a collection of fan art for an obscure tv show. Isn't there something better one could be doing?
  - jquery 14y ago
    A more Zenlike takeaway would be to realize that everything has an end and to accept that. There is nothing that can't be taken away from you.
    - pilgrim689 14y ago
      Precisely, I thought the "Feel free to enjoy nothingness for a minute:" quite apt. :x
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - a3_nm 14y ago
      Accepting that everything has an end and nothing can't be taken away from you is fine, but this doesn't mean you should not focus more on things that can't be taken away from you easily (i.e. until you die).
    - GoodIntentions 14y ago
      I read that as "there is nothing that can be taken away from you" Same frame of mind I think, slightly different way of expressing it. :P
      - danabramov 14y ago
        “Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy
  - 14y ago
hanapbuhay 14y ago
I think Fans of Sherlock just jacked ModernSherlock, the vanity url.
- veb 14y ago
  It's actually my page!! I'm so confused. 750 likes?! but at least the content is back: http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png
  - hanapbuhay 14y ago
    Yes, at least you have the page back. Grats. What I'm noticing is that my same 3 Facebook friends like both your fan page and the TV show's page. But that's possibly a strange coincidence. This might be the work of FB running some categorization cleanup. Your fan page is now sub-categorized as a Community Page for the Sherlock TV show. FB doesn't seem to have all popular fan pages sub-categorized. For example, fb.me/fansofapple, isn't shown connected to Apple at all.
artursapek 14y ago
Cache. Not sure what's up. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://spottedsun.com/someone-stole-sherlocks-300000-likes/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
mocko 14y ago
Most likely your page and its fans have been appropriated by the content owner. This is a feature YouTube & others now offer content owners as a way to steal a ready-constructed online fan base from real fans who invested their own time building a community around the brand. There's a moral to this story: industrial production of culture is not beneficial to its consumers.
- simonbrown 14y ago
  He ruled that out (though not intirely) by the fact that a previous page was appropriated and Facebook notified him. Also, if that were the case it would have probably been redirected/converted to an official page. I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that companies shouldn't produce TV shows (I assume that's what you mean by industrial production of culture). Edit: They have now emailed him, but I doubt it was the same kind of email he was sent before, since it doesn't mention a company.
silentscope 14y ago
"yes I know, first world problems." yep. nice post.
simonsarris 14y ago
Well that's nicer than what they used to do. I remember in the very early days of Facebook Pages, as soon as they came out I created "Honda" and "Subaru", both with a substantial number of Likes (they were called fans back then, I think?) I kept my posts on those pages strictly factual, and really just parroted emails from the two companies and occasionally asked for the audience's opinion. After about a year both of them were shut down by the respective real car companies, and I tried to email their PR about how if they can be reactivated I could just hand them over, since the fanbase was relatively large at the time, but neither ever responded to me. Oh well.
nkwiatek 14y ago
Not to make light of your situation with this tangent, but I must say that that is a cool 404 page.
- simonbrown 14y ago
  I can't reproduce it (perhaps because I don't have a Facebook account).
AgentConundrum 14y ago
> Why does the other page have the original likes? Because Facebook doesn't know how to deal with changes to pages. Seriously. Facebook has unilaterally changed my affiliations on me at least twice. There are probably others that have changed, like things I've 'liked', but two really stand out for me. First, they decided I didn't actually go to the Canadian college that I'm quite sure I attended. They decided instead that I had gone to a similarly-named university in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the old page/affiliation, but Facebook couldn't handle it. Recently, I discovered that one of my former employers had been acquired and changed/lost their Facebook page. Now, Facebook is trying to convince me that I actually worked for a band with a similar name to the former name of the company I had worked for. In neither case was I informed of the change. Several of my friends are still considered to have gone to the American university. I assume some former co-workers are similarly affiliated with the band, but I haven't gone to the trouble to check.
- DannyPage 14y ago
  Similarly, I was apart of a fraternity that was local to my school. But then a female sorority with a few more people came on Facebook, took/stole/transferred the likes, and now I have a pink flower where a black and white crest once was, and no way to reclaim all the old posts or pictures. It's very weird.
stephensprinkle 14y ago
Exactly why I don't build or put marked amounts of time into platforms I have no control over.
meric 14y ago
It looks like he got his likes back? http://www.Facebook.com/ModernSherlock http://www.Facebook.com/ModernSherlock
- veb 14y ago
  Yep! Very pleased that's happened. Seems like a lot of people missed the page. Still wondering about the other page though... ModernSherlock page no longer shows up in search though.
Ashoke 14y ago
Hey Mike, your page was incorrectly flagged and removed. Facebook has restored it now and changed the name of the page to more accurately reflect what your page is about. Sorry for the inconvenience. https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202753086436852 https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202753086436852
GoodIntentions 14y ago
Having a hard time understanding why anyone would put unfettered effort into building up content on a platform where they have absolutely no right of access save at the pleasure of the platform owner. Take that love of the show and build a fansite or better yet something where you don't have to worry about the copyright holder shutting you down.
fredwolens 14y ago
My name is Fred Wolens, and I work for Facebook’s Policy Communications Team. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused by the migration of the Page’s content and Likes. We have already restored the Page, and there shouldn’t be any remaining issues. Unfortunately, the Sherlock Page was not the official BBC fan Page for the show; this caused the Page to be flagged as a violation of our terms and we mistakenly removed instead of migrated the Page. After we found out about the problem, we renamed the Sherlock Page to Fans of Sherlock to comply with our policies and migrated the fans + content. We’re sorry for the trouble caused and we’re constantly iterating on our processes to improve the accuracy of our reporting system.
- veb 14y ago
  Hi Fred. Thank you for posting this explanation -- I do have a question though, the current "Sherlock" page -- is that an official page? How long will it take for these changes to appear in Facebook search?
  - Meist 14y ago
    Yes. The current Sherlock Page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherlock https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherlock) is official. Search should populate in the next couple days, the re-crawl shouldn't take more than a week or so.
pud 14y ago
Looks like it's back now, with 300,000+ likes. Thanks on behalf of the internet, whoever works at Facebook and saw this. :-) https://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock https://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock
- veb 14y ago
  Definitely. Thank you Internet, and thank you to the people at Facebook who looked into this.
brownbat 14y ago
I remember the 90s, when we all just built fan pages directly on the Internet itself. Well, ok, that's not fair. We also made fan pages on AOL and Geocities, but we got rid of those after a while since gated Internet couldn't compete in the long run with regular Internet. I guess now we have Facebook, though, and it's different... though I forget how. Remind me, why did we make yet another gated mirror of the Internet?
nothacker 14y ago
Don't stop with this post. I think the girl with blog of the school lunches in Scotland showed a modern method to solve any similar customer service issue. Start a blog and continually update it with whatever your issue is in a factual non-opinionated way. Wait for them to try to shut you down, then go to the media and social avenues so that it becomes hot topic, and they'll fix it. Then they may screw you again and you'll have to go to the media again and then they'll fix it again. Perfect solution.

92 points by veb 14y ago

pritam2020 14y ago

There should be some way to distinguish between a fan page, and an official page. So, that people who want to follow either have a choice.

pritam2020 14y ago
Also, no need to delete anything just to have one official page.
veb 14y ago
Yeah, you're supposed to put in the official page (so people know), but there is no official page.
saurik 14y ago
There is: it is called a "community page". This person flagrantly violated this mechanism, against Facebook's terms of service, in order to capitalize on the fame of a television show he did not create and was not involved in.
- veb 14y ago
  This feature wasn't exactly around when the page was made.

goodside 14y ago

The moral of the story here is that you shouldn't invest your time and emotional energy into things that actually belong to other people. You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database owned by a multi-billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed. You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now on.

ryguytilidie 14y ago
I actually came to write that the big takeaway for me was to care about things that actually exist. Pouring your life into a fan site that can one day disappear seems incredibly depressing. In that time others have built companies, relationships and a happy life and you have built: a collection of fan art for an obscure tv show. Isn't there something better one could be doing?
- jquery 14y ago
  A more Zenlike takeaway would be to realize that everything has an end and to accept that. There is nothing that can't be taken away from you.
  - pilgrim689 14y ago
    Precisely, I thought the "Feel free to enjoy nothingness for a minute:" quite apt. :x
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - a3_nm 14y ago
    Accepting that everything has an end and nothing can't be taken away from you is fine, but this doesn't mean you should not focus more on things that can't be taken away from you easily (i.e. until you die).
  - GoodIntentions 14y ago
    I read that as "there is nothing that can be taken away from you" Same frame of mind I think, slightly different way of expressing it. :P
    - danabramov 14y ago
      “Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy
- 14y ago

hanapbuhay 14y ago

I think Fans of Sherlock just jacked ModernSherlock, the vanity url.

veb 14y ago
It's actually my page!! I'm so confused. 750 likes?! but at least the content is back: http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png http://i.imgur.com/jil2q.png
- hanapbuhay 14y ago
  Yes, at least you have the page back. Grats. What I'm noticing is that my same 3 Facebook friends like both your fan page and the TV show's page. But that's possibly a strange coincidence. This might be the work of FB running some categorization cleanup. Your fan page is now sub-categorized as a Community Page for the Sherlock TV show. FB doesn't seem to have all popular fan pages sub-categorized. For example, fb.me/fansofapple, isn't shown connected to Apple at all.

artursapek 14y ago

Cache. Not sure what's up. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://spottedsun.com/someone-stole-sherlocks-300000-likes/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

mocko 14y ago

Most likely your page and its fans have been appropriated by the content owner. This is a feature YouTube & others now offer content owners as a way to steal a ready-constructed online fan base from real fans who invested their own time building a community around the brand. There's a moral to this story: industrial production of culture is not beneficial to its consumers.

simonbrown 14y ago
He ruled that out (though not intirely) by the fact that a previous page was appropriated and Facebook notified him. Also, if that were the case it would have probably been redirected/converted to an official page. I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that companies shouldn't produce TV shows (I assume that's what you mean by industrial production of culture). Edit: They have now emailed him, but I doubt it was the same kind of email he was sent before, since it doesn't mention a company.

silentscope 14y ago

"yes I know, first world problems." yep. nice post.

simonsarris 14y ago

Well that's nicer than what they used to do. I remember in the very early days of Facebook Pages, as soon as they came out I created "Honda" and "Subaru", both with a substantial number of Likes (they were called fans back then, I think?) I kept my posts on those pages strictly factual, and really just parroted emails from the two companies and occasionally asked for the audience's opinion. After about a year both of them were shut down by the respective real car companies, and I tried to email their PR about how if they can be reactivated I could just hand them over, since the fanbase was relatively large at the time, but neither ever responded to me. Oh well.

nkwiatek 14y ago

Not to make light of your situation with this tangent, but I must say that that is a cool 404 page.

simonbrown 14y ago
I can't reproduce it (perhaps because I don't have a Facebook account).

AgentConundrum 14y ago

> Why does the other page have the original likes? Because Facebook doesn't know how to deal with changes to pages. Seriously. Facebook has unilaterally changed my affiliations on me at least twice. There are probably others that have changed, like things I've 'liked', but two really stand out for me. First, they decided I didn't actually go to the Canadian college that I'm quite sure I attended. They decided instead that I had gone to a similarly-named university in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the old page/affiliation, but Facebook couldn't handle it. Recently, I discovered that one of my former employers had been acquired and changed/lost their Facebook page. Now, Facebook is trying to convince me that I actually worked for a band with a similar name to the former name of the company I had worked for. In neither case was I informed of the change. Several of my friends are still considered to have gone to the American university. I assume some former co-workers are similarly affiliated with the band, but I haven't gone to the trouble to check.

DannyPage 14y ago
Similarly, I was apart of a fraternity that was local to my school. But then a female sorority with a few more people came on Facebook, took/stole/transferred the likes, and now I have a pink flower where a black and white crest once was, and no way to reclaim all the old posts or pictures. It's very weird.

stephensprinkle 14y ago

Exactly why I don't build or put marked amounts of time into platforms I have no control over.

meric 14y ago

It looks like he got his likes back? http://www.Facebook.com/ModernSherlock http://www.Facebook.com/ModernSherlock

veb 14y ago
Yep! Very pleased that's happened. Seems like a lot of people missed the page. Still wondering about the other page though... ModernSherlock page no longer shows up in search though.

Ashoke 14y ago

Hey Mike, your page was incorrectly flagged and removed. Facebook has restored it now and changed the name of the page to more accurately reflect what your page is about. Sorry for the inconvenience. https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202753086436852 https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=202753086436852

GoodIntentions 14y ago

Having a hard time understanding why anyone would put unfettered effort into building up content on a platform where they have absolutely no right of access save at the pleasure of the platform owner. Take that love of the show and build a fansite or better yet something where you don't have to worry about the copyright holder shutting you down.

fredwolens 14y ago

My name is Fred Wolens, and I work for Facebook’s Policy Communications Team. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience caused by the migration of the Page’s content and Likes. We have already restored the Page, and there shouldn’t be any remaining issues. Unfortunately, the Sherlock Page was not the official BBC fan Page for the show; this caused the Page to be flagged as a violation of our terms and we mistakenly removed instead of migrated the Page. After we found out about the problem, we renamed the Sherlock Page to Fans of Sherlock to comply with our policies and migrated the fans + content. We’re sorry for the trouble caused and we’re constantly iterating on our processes to improve the accuracy of our reporting system.

veb 14y ago
Hi Fred. Thank you for posting this explanation -- I do have a question though, the current "Sherlock" page -- is that an official page? How long will it take for these changes to appear in Facebook search?
- Meist 14y ago
  Yes. The current Sherlock Page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherlock https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherlock) is official. Search should populate in the next couple days, the re-crawl shouldn't take more than a week or so.

pud 14y ago

Looks like it's back now, with 300,000+ likes. Thanks on behalf of the internet, whoever works at Facebook and saw this. :-) https://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock https://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock

veb 14y ago
Definitely. Thank you Internet, and thank you to the people at Facebook who looked into this.

brownbat 14y ago

I remember the 90s, when we all just built fan pages directly on the Internet itself. Well, ok, that's not fair. We also made fan pages on AOL and Geocities, but we got rid of those after a while since gated Internet couldn't compete in the long run with regular Internet. I guess now we have Facebook, though, and it's different... though I forget how. Remind me, why did we make yet another gated mirror of the Internet?

nothacker 14y ago

Don't stop with this post. I think the girl with blog of the school lunches in Scotland showed a modern method to solve any similar customer service issue. Start a blog and continually update it with whatever your issue is in a factual non-opinionated way. Wait for them to try to shut you down, then go to the media and social avenues so that it becomes hot topic, and they'll fix it. Then they may screw you again and you'll have to go to the media again and then they'll fix it again. Perfect solution.