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Facebook Pages: Why I don’t like Nest thermostat or anything else anymore

318 points by Shpigford 14y ago

sumone4life 14y ago
I hardly go on Facebook anymore mostly because of all the advertisements that get interleaved into the news stream. It's definitely a case of, if you don't like it then don't use it. There is no one forcing you to use Facebook and if they have a user base that is willing to put up with an Ad supported experience then so be it. AdBlock helps a lot in keeping at least the right hand ads to a minimum. It's funny going on a friends computer who doesn't have AdBlock and being surprised at the amount of advertising on Facebook. As an aside, I love my Nest thermostat.
wmeredith 14y ago
>> This has to stop. There has to be a setting to turn this shit off. You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. It is the nuclear option, but it's one that more and more of my friends (tech geeks - so who cares, right?) are doing. I think the real problem here is headlines like this. OP's blog post title says "I don't like NEST" this is a problem for their brand and all the other companies that support Facebook's business model. If they start leaving because Facebook's UX opacity hurts their brand more than it helps, then it's lights out.
- warpspeed 14y ago
  As much as it's good to "fight the good fight" against FaceBook, it's fast becoming an expected means of communicating. Believe me, I deleted mine years ago and finally had to come back because I realized I was actually hindered in real ways by not having an account. I personally think FaceBook will reach an inflection point where public interest will wane and people will use it less and less... but still have accounts. Then something better will come along and there might be a mass migration. For now though, the reality is it's somewhat essential.
  - wmeredith 14y ago
    That's definitely a concern, since I don't like FB much as a company. Thankfully, this hasn't happened in my social circles yet and it doesn't appear that it ever will at this point.
  - mshron 14y ago
    In what way were you hindered? I deleted mine years ago and the only downside is that I occasionally can't see a photo album someone sends me. It's not like photos only exist on Facebook. I can't speak for other people, but the effort it took to maintain a Facebook presence (deidentify unflattering photos, take a few minutes every day to get caught up on people's minutiae) was far greater than the benefit it brought me. People who want to talk to me know my email address and phone number. (edit: clarification, first paragraph)
    - warpspeed 14y ago
      Well, that's exactly it. Everyone else seemed to "be in the loop" compared to me. People don't always think to mass-email a silly picture of their baby or their latest comment on world news, but those are things I definitely appreciate being able to see. Sure, I might not care what they had for breakfast that day, but it sure is nice to know how my friend's trip to Costa Rica was. Basically FaceBook is its own layer in my social network, and not having an account was ostracizing me. To me, it's analogous to the argument against text messaging. Yes, people who want to talk to me can simply call, but there's a bottom threshold of importance that must be met to deem a phone call necessary. Meanwhile I can text a one sentence message to a friend I haven't seen in months and not spend half an hour on the phone.
    - pavel_lishin 14y ago
      I'm keeping my account because it's the tool 90% of my friends - including my wife - use to plan social activities. I can see which events I'm invited to, and who's coming over to our house next saturday for dinner. We could use Google calendar for this, or any number of other tools, but that would put a burden on our other friends to learn a new system. The end result would be that some people would flat out not attend the event, and some others would attend but not RSVP, throwing off guest counts, etc.
- nate 14y ago
  Yeah, I'd like to nuke it, but there's so many things on there that family and friends post that I'd never get anywhere else. The photos of my 2 year old niece. The articles my friends only post there. Years ago I created http://tgethr.com http://tgethr.com so I could hopefully get my family just posting/emailing these things around privately. It turned out super useful, but a private network like that just doesn't stick too long. And most of the photos/links/articles just end up on FB.
- purephase 14y ago
  I'm more than a little concerned that this is not the default answer to this question. While Nest certainly shared blame in choosing FB as their partner in advertising, I think the real problem is the FB only cares about advertising. I'm amazed at the number of people that I hear complain about this stuff and yet keep using FB as if it is essential. For instance, add your cell # to your account to confirm developer status and then turn off notices. You will still receive texts from FB because they don't give a damn. For the life of me, why people willingly give so much of their information to a company who clearly does not care about privacy is beyond me.
  - prostoalex 14y ago
    Why wouldn't Nest advertise to friends of people who like (and possibly own) Nest? If you were installed as their chief marketing officer, where would you advertise the thermostat?
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  tech geeks - so who cares, right? If I said you could mitigate the issue by selling your computer and getting a feature phone, I would be right. But you would probably protest that there are many useful things you need a computer for -- and some of them might not be strictly necessary to your life, or strictly require a computer to do, but the convenience and satisfaction it would bring make it worth having one. In other words, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? Same thing applies for most people and their Facebook account. So your only argument here is to convince people that they don't draw as much satisfaction from Facebook as they think they do, or that they don't need an account for the reasons they think they do. Which might be true, but quite simply, people want not merely to survive but to thrive. Edit: and also, you are in the unenviable position of arguing with people about what they feel, which means you are wrong.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. How is this any different than deleting all of your email accounts and acting like that IS the solution to spam?
  - AlexandrB 14y ago
    Facebook is a product. Email is a protocol. Are you saying that boycotting Facebook is not a solution to Facebook stepping all over privacy? What are we supposed to do? Use harsh language?
    - darkarmani 14y ago
      Not that it matters what it is, but I said email accounts. I might use multiple protocols to send and receive my email messages, but it doesn't really distinguish it from the stack of protocols that Facebook is based on either. > Are you saying that boycotting Facebook is not a solution to Facebook stepping all over privacy? A boycott wasn't actually the suggested course of action by the OP. They made a different point: opt-out of the system to protect your own privacy. You are suggesting collective action to promote change which is quite different. As an individual, quitting facebook isn't really equivalent to a boycott.
      - AlexandrB 14y ago
        "E-mail" doesn't send spam. Individuals or organizations spam you via "e-mail". With Facebook, violating your privacy or shoving ads into your news feed is up to Facebook itself. Maybe boycott is the wrong term, but it's what I think of when people say "vote with your dollars". Quitting Facebook is essentially denying them an audience and additional personal information. It may not be collective action, but it's still expressing an opinion on Facebook's service and policies.
NoPiece 14y ago
Good post, as someone who occasionally uses promoted posts, it made me realize it is a little weird to target friends of fans, which I believe is the FB default.
leeoniya 14y ago
this is why i only "like" something by consciously posting about it in my status via a link to product or article. i always found those "like" buttons to be completely moronic and entirely out of my control.
HyprMusic 14y ago
"I was actually experimenting with how these “like gates”, as they’re called, work because for my own company we were also playing with creating tools to encourage people to like someone’s Facebook page." Sounds a little hypocritically for criticising facebook about these dirty tricks and then building a business around them. That feeling you get when you see these adverts with your name on? That's the same feeling I get when I'm forced to unnaturally 'like' something on facebook in order to see something else.
- nate 14y ago
  Sorry if I made the timing not clear. It definitely would be hypocritical if I was building this business after I wrote this post. I had no idea these sponsored posts ended up in people's timelines in such a way no one could tell what's real and what's bullshit. I stopped development on any "like-gating" tech over a year ago for a bunch of reasons. The tech is still up on a website in demo mode, but I don't sell it anymore or intend to revisit selling it again. I wouldn't want to work on encouraging likes again if this sponsored post thing continues to be used like I describe in this post.
webwanderings 14y ago
How long before Twitter goes the same route? You are asking for people to follow you "safely" on Twitter. Don't hold your breath, you have not seen the future, nobody has. These are the reasons I don't click on Like anywhere, certainly not on brands. Facebook has been a mess since they have introduced the promoting stories. They have even added an additional Page Feed, which in my case, has been sitting idle gathering unread counts. Update: IMHO, the best is to use Facebook publicly in a read-only mode. If you must follow the updates from someone, follow their RSS from their website or their email newsletter, they must have one or the other, or else they are not worth it. It is also better to keep yourself logged out of Facebook when you don't need to use it. Twitter is not that bad right now but it still shoots spam messages with bad links without you knowing about it. So your actions or inaction on any social media can directly or indirectly affect your relationship with your friends/contact.
tthomas48 14y ago
The solution in this post doesn't work. It just changes your settings for the ads on the right. Not the ones in your feed.
- zach 14y ago
  Exactly right. Here's a Facebook help page of interest: "Can I opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories?" http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/ http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/
codva 14y ago
I don't ever "like" major brands. But I do click like on small local businesses, or things my real-life friends are involved with. For a small business, every little bit of free promotion helps.
cletus 14y ago
This is pretty simple: just don't "Like" anything. Seriously. It didn't take an oracle to figure out that "Likes" were always going to be a gateway to direct advertising. And for things you "need" to "Like" (eg to enter a contest or get access to something) then just use a dummy account like many do for playing Facebook games, for much the same reason: (almost) no one wants to spam their friends with "I milked a cow!" messages. This is Facebook's (and Twitter's for that matter) biggest problem: their apparent monetization paths are at direct odds with the user experience.
- bluetidepro 14y ago
  > "just don't "Like" anything. Seriously." I completely disagree with the idea of never "Liking" anything. There is plenty of benefits of "Liking" a Facebook page. I, personally, enjoy seeing update posts from bands, products, etc. about new content, products, promos, etc. I think music artists is a great example to use here. I love tons of bands. A lot of those bands do not have websites other than using Facebook. I'm not going to check their Facebook pages multiple times a day, going through the 100's of artists that I "Like", just to see if they post an update of some sort. I understand that this not a universal example, and some pages are not worth "Liking" (pages that are a joke meme and not a product, company, artist, etc.), but I think it's ridiculous to say never "Like" anything.
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    You can subscribe to their posts without liking.
    - saurik 14y ago
      You can also like a Page without getting messages from it: click the Liked button and uncheck "Show in News Feed".
      - bluetidepro 14y ago
        That defeats the purpose of what I'm saying, though. I'm saying to get any sort of updates from a page, you have to "Like" it. There is no way around it, currently. There is plenty of brands I do want updates from, so I have to "Like" their page to get those updates.
fidotron 14y ago
Until people start being willing to pay for services like Facebook or Twitter these kind of antics are inevitable. Unless you're paying you're the product.
- mzuvella 14y ago
  Thank you. Been saying that for years.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Are we the product of HN, then? Or if HN is "not the same", how are Identi.ca users its product? It's a nice soundbite, but it's oversimplified. There are many business models, and some don't involve neither direct payments nor ads/tracking, and others have ads even when you pay (e.g. Cable TV). It's just not that simple.
  - krickle 14y ago
    You know we are a highly technical audience and YC companies can advertise jobs, etc. here, right? I think that post is right, and things like cable TV or Hulu are just squeezing some money out of their product before they pass it on.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      OK, how are we Wikipedia products? Advertising (users as products) and charging are just two characteristics that may appear in a business model together, or just one of them, or none, depending on its design. There's simply no rule that makes ¬paying ⇒ product an inevitability.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
- jfoster 14y ago
  Isn't it my attention that's the product?
danvoell 14y ago
I agree. They are going way to far. I don't care if they want to mislead people, but please don't do it on my behalf. When I logged in to cancel "Ads shown by third parties" which you linked to, I had a new notification (normally reserved for my friends information) which was a Groupon of the Day. WTF? Seems like two sinking ships.
miop 14y ago
Facebook should offer an ad-free membership level for a monthly or yearly fee, or give people the option to ignore/hide "Likes" from showing up in their newsfeed.
- ZanderEarth32 14y ago
  I think they've figured out that you as a user is worth X amount more to advertisers than you're probably willing to pay a year. Would most people be willing to pay $100 a year if that is what you are worth to Facebook's advertisers?
  - preinheimer 14y ago
    People who have $100/year to drop on facebook are also people with enough disposable income to be worth advertising to.
ericdykstra 14y ago
Wow, I thought when I opted out of having my names next to ads that I wouldn't show up in the sponsored stories of people, either, but apparently that's completely different, and I can't turn it off. (see: http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/ http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/) Is there an easy way to "un-like" everything? Facebook automatically made me "like" everything that I had on my interests a long time back, and now that's turning me into an advertising icon for those brands to my friends? No thanks. So do I have to go through each one individually, or is there some way I can get rid of all these "likes" at once?
- halefx 14y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/browse/other_connections_of/ https://www.facebook.com/browse/other_connections_of/
ghshephard 14y ago
I started to see this slippery slope about a year ago, saw my name (and face!) appearing in advertisements on friends feeds, saw messages from me appearing in my friends feeds without me being (totally) aware I was about to spam them, saw timelines of my entire life with pictures that other people had taken and I was only vaguely aware I had noted I was in them. I just deleted my facebook account. With the exception of technical friends who have children, and are trying to find an easy way to share pictures with the grand-parents/inlaws/family, the majority of my colleagues in the valley have just stopped using, and in many cases, have deleted their facebook account. End of problem. No more intrusions of this kind. Not the solution for everyone, but it's a pretty straightforward mechanism to eliminate this problem, and, in my case, really cost me nothing. Now, if I had to delete my Amazon account to avoid those tracking ads, that would be a whole new level of pain. I don't know if I'm ready to do that, yet.
- alphang 14y ago
  Agreed. The social ads, creepy frictionless sharing, the history of privacy issues, the "hidden options" UX, the lack of anonymity, and the lack of support for multiple facets to our identities -- these issues all combined together made me deactivate my account. I'm still trying it out to see if I can live without it for a year. But I'm hoping to delete it altogether.
  - breckenedge 14y ago
    I made it about 10 months before I caved in and recreated an account. It's so ingrained with my family and friends. But, just don't log in and cancel all the email notifications, works pretty well. I've had friends say "oh we forgot to invite you to the party because you weren't on Facebook." I'm glad of the friends that use evite.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      I'd seriously find some new friends.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
neya 14y ago
This is a really really valid point. This is a HUGE problem, believe me. In fact, here's what happened to me - I got notified in my feed that a friend of mine kept liking her ex-boyfriend's music page, and I got this continuously, consistently for several weeks in my feed. After a while, I got pissed off, sent her a long E-mail , advising her to forget the past and move on. At that time, I didn't know Facebook was the culprit. She naturally was shocked+agitated and defended herself after which I thought she was lying and deleted her from my list. Today, we both are no longer friends. All thanks to Facebook. So, atleast in my case, it did more harm than good.
- woodchuck64 14y ago
  Too late to 'pologize?
  - neya 14y ago
    Actually, I just sent her this link and patched up :D
    - woodchuck64 14y ago
      That warms my heart!
- MattRix 14y ago
  When you believe Facebook is more trustworthy than your own friend, it's really "all thanks to you".
  - neya 14y ago
    We live in a data-driven age. When I had data that testified against her, I couldn't really do much. But, your point is valid.
    - AlexandrB 14y ago
      You're allowing an advertising firm to mediate your interactions with a real human being.
throwaway1979 14y ago
Did Facebook change something related to the use of Likes recently? They just managed to tick me off this morning. My nephew's like of a product showed up as an advert for me - and I'm sure he didn't know this was happening. Between this and their social plugin (I've tried disabling this many times), I am a hair away from disabling my account.
icesoldier 14y ago
I was under the impression that these were the user-facing side of Promoted Posts that go to friends of friends. So I see that one of my friends liked the GRE several times. But I also see "Sponsored Story" under that line, so I ignore it and blame the page itself. On the iOS app at least, it tells me when the Like occurred, which felt a little comical when a friend's Like from 2008 gave me a Sponsored Story a couple weeks ago.
mzuvella 14y ago
Amazing to me how many people bitch and whine about a free service. If you paid for Facebook access then it would be completely understandable, but you don't. So change the settings or go to Google+ (if that's still around).
rcavezza 14y ago
I learned recently that legally, "liking" something on Facebook is considered an endorsement of that product or service. I'm sure the law still needs to catch up to technology, but this news stopped all my "liking" activities.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  What does it mean to "legally" endorse a product or service? What are the legal consequences of this? I've never heard of this concept.
RandallBrown 14y ago
Facebook likes have been showing up on advertisements for years. The fact that they're in the news feed now is all that's new. I've mistaken a few of these ads for new posts from friends as well, but it became immediately apparent after my friend like Samsung USA for the 2nd time that it was simply an advertisement.
pasbesoin 14y ago
As soon as they insisted that one's likes be(come) public, I decided that that was the end of that (for me, at least). Remember: Likes (or whatever they used to be called back then, e.g. items listed on your profile) used to be content you could restrict to your friends. Pointers for them to stuff you found cool and interesting. Then FB assigned them to the "forced to be public" part of your profile. Now, eventually, they've become primarily a vehicle for 1) Gaming people to participate (self-serving contests), in order to 2) Spam their graph. Likes no longer represent user-generated content.
BenoitEssiambre 14y ago
This! My fb news feed is heavily spammed by products a few of my friends 'liked'. Making the situation worse: - Some ads, one example for me is TD Bank, are shown repeatedly and redundantly months after months. You'd think they would know I am not interested by now. - On 4.7" screen phone, these are almost full screen ads. - I'm pretty sure the people who 'liked' these companies aren't aware they are continuously spamming me. I usually don't mind a few ads if it will pay for a free service and when they are well targeted I might even click on them. Just the other day, a fb ad reminded me to go to a delicious local burger place I don't enjoy nearly often enough. However the current level of ad aggressivity is way past the limit of what is acceptable.
bsg75 14y ago
Why do people (professionals who are not in marketing) use Facebook? As a user of HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet, I honestly don't see the attraction. Seems like it is fraught with annoyances.
- conradfr 14y ago
  Because life ?
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  Sounds like you're happy where you are. Plenty of people's social presence is only Facebook, so the only way to keep abreast is through it.
- liotier 14y ago
  Facebook is where the clueless people are. Unfortunately, I love quite a few of those clueless people - so I join them where they are. When all your friends decide to meet at that fake corporate fac-simile of a cliché pub, you go there too because you like your friends and might meet some nice girl there too. You may suggest a place with beer that does not taste like llama piss, but you drink that beer with a smile anyway because in the end it is all about people, even with stupid UI, satanic EULA and sprawling ads.
  - alphang 14y ago
    I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I wouldn't call them "clueless" - maybe unaware, or unconcerned.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- alphang 14y ago
  "HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet" Many of these examples tend to be online communities that share the same interest as you. Sure, you can probably configure your own Google Group (i guess?) but who's going to do that? Facebook is mostly used by people to keep in touch with their offline community - their real-life friends.
lukejduncan 14y ago
There is no word for this except spam. I am so tired of seeing that a very weak connection has liked Samsung Mobile... every... single... freaking.... day... As a result, I've contacted friends in the exact same manner: "Hey, can you unlike this product, I'm tired of seeing it every day for the last few months."
- mrknmc 14y ago
  Why don't you use AdBlock?
  - lukejduncan 14y ago
    It's livable on the web. On mobile however they are effectively full page ads, and there's no way to block it.
  - lukejduncan 14y ago
    And, to be honest: I don't think I'd mind as much if it wasn't the exact same ad multiple times a day, every day, for over a month
ColinDabritz 14y ago
I've never been a fan of Facebooks behavior and attitude toward users. I signed up for an account a while back mainly to make it harder for anyone else to 'be' me. I watched as the privacy continually eroded. ( an excellent 2010 chart here: http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Erosion-Strategy.html http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Er... ) I've been forced to sort out privacy snafus several times over the years, as they added new on-by-default options that I don't want. I think it's time to leave.
jere 14y ago
I've always seen those like ads and wondered... why?!? I can understand liking a struggling business or artist, but in what situation does it make sense to like Visa or Walmart or Sprint or whatever? It doesn't. It should be pretty obvious that everything you do on Facebook these days will be monetized. And Facebook hits the jackpot when you explicitly state a preference for a particular corporation. When Facebook took my comma delimited list of "interests" and turned them all into ads, I figured out Facebook had sold out. Call me melodramatic, but this was years before Zuckerberg claimed "we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services."
cs702 14y ago
When it comes down to making money, FaceBook is acting exactly like every other big media & communications company: they are doing everything in their power to extract economic rents, to the extent permitted by law, so long as it doesn't annoy or push away too many customers. This isn't really news.
- moultano 14y ago
  Blanket cynicism doesn't add anything to the discussion.
  - cs702 14y ago
    moultano: my comment was not meant to be cynical; I'm sorry if it came across that way. In hindsight, I could and probably should have worded it differently. My main point: this is not an isolated incident of FaceBook pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable by users to make money; there have been other such incidents in the past. Given the history, should we really be surprised?
    - coldpie 14y ago
      If they're toeing the line of acceptability, they're bound to cross over it at some point. This is a discussion about how one user thinks they've crossed that line, what effects that might have on their business and their users and customers, and what can be done to bring it back into line. Must every article and discussion be about something "surprising"? Meta-discussions like this are dull; if you're uninterested in an article, ignore it.
savories 14y ago
Massive overreaction. It's very obvious that these news feed posts are sponsored. It clearly says so. 99% of users won't even notice this or care.
moultano 14y ago
Wow. You can't opt out. That's pretty disgusting. http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/ http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/
marknutter 14y ago
This is an unfortunate title. It should read: "Facebook Pages: Why I don't like things anymore". There are going to be more than a few people who might have been on the fence about buying a Nest thermostat and will make a snap judgement based on this title.
- JeffL 14y ago
  Maybe they should stop advertising with Facebook?
languagehacker 14y ago
This kind of crap is why I unliked everything I possibly could, and then created LikeBuster. I don't want people getting the wrong idea about me because of an ad I didn't actually promote. I honestly think Facebook makes everyone they use for their ad platform look foolish, and I'd prefer not to see my friends insulted like that. There are Chrome and Firefox add-ons for LikeBuster linked at https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster.
brown9-2 14y ago
Related to liked pages, I've noticed a few times in the past month or two that friend's months-old status updates that have links to products on Amazon.com now re-appear in my current news feed as "sponsored posts". So it seems like advertisers can also sponsor posts containing links to their domains to re-appear in your feed.
- alphang 14y ago
  Ugh. So even if you don't Like anything, your shared links can become promotional stories. Terrible.
justinph 14y ago
With gmail you have a marketplace. Gmail might be nice, but email is a protocol and you can take your business elsewhere. Not so with facebook. They've built what's essentially treated as a protocol, but it's completely under their control. Clearly, this makes it rife for what we might perceive as abuse.
jameswyse 14y ago
I've removed all my likes to try and clean up my news feed, though my facebook profile still says I still have 110 'likes' , I'm guessing those are websites without a facebook page and I've no idea how to remove those.
bgruber 14y ago
businesses have recently been complaining about facebook forcing them to pay to reach their 'likers', but this is the flip side. I'm seeing more and more sponsored stories about things my friends like, and not seeing the updates from the pages i really do want to see. even in 'most recent' view, facebook fails to show me updates from the pages i have explicitly told it to put in my news feed. which means i'm going to get those updates by other means. which means i'm going to use facebook less.
jusben1369 14y ago
An interesting wrinkle on this was the recent Presidential election in the US. Some of my contacts "Liked" Romney's or Paul Ryan's page (or both) Every 3rd or 5th day they were there when I looked at my feed "Romney is great" and your 3 friends liked this etc. My first reaction was "Wow, my friends are pretty hard core Romney fans if they're liking every new post he puts up on his page" So from endorsing him once they sent the message indirectly to their friends about 8 - 12 over a two month period that they're a supporter. That's probably a lot more in your friends' face with your political belief than most realize. It's like the guy at a BBQ who casually says "I think I'm voting for Obama" vs the friend whom every time you see them in the build up to the election wants to talk about their candidate and you're voting for him right?
daem0n 14y ago
Great description of what really happens in these situations. Scary.

318 points by Shpigford 14y ago

I hardly go on Facebook anymore mostly because of all the advertisements that get interleaved into the news stream. It's definitely a case of, if you don't like it then don't use it. There is no one forcing you to use Facebook and if they have a user base that is willing to put up with an Ad supported experience then so be it. AdBlock helps a lot in keeping at least the right hand ads to a minimum. It's funny going on a friends computer who doesn't have AdBlock and being surprised at the amount of advertising on Facebook. As an aside, I love my Nest thermostat.

wmeredith 14y ago

>> This has to stop. There has to be a setting to turn this shit off. You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. It is the nuclear option, but it's one that more and more of my friends (tech geeks - so who cares, right?) are doing. I think the real problem here is headlines like this. OP's blog post title says "I don't like NEST" this is a problem for their brand and all the other companies that support Facebook's business model. If they start leaving because Facebook's UX opacity hurts their brand more than it helps, then it's lights out.

warpspeed 14y ago
As much as it's good to "fight the good fight" against FaceBook, it's fast becoming an expected means of communicating. Believe me, I deleted mine years ago and finally had to come back because I realized I was actually hindered in real ways by not having an account. I personally think FaceBook will reach an inflection point where public interest will wane and people will use it less and less... but still have accounts. Then something better will come along and there might be a mass migration. For now though, the reality is it's somewhat essential.
- wmeredith 14y ago
  That's definitely a concern, since I don't like FB much as a company. Thankfully, this hasn't happened in my social circles yet and it doesn't appear that it ever will at this point.
- mshron 14y ago
  In what way were you hindered? I deleted mine years ago and the only downside is that I occasionally can't see a photo album someone sends me. It's not like photos only exist on Facebook. I can't speak for other people, but the effort it took to maintain a Facebook presence (deidentify unflattering photos, take a few minutes every day to get caught up on people's minutiae) was far greater than the benefit it brought me. People who want to talk to me know my email address and phone number. (edit: clarification, first paragraph)
  - warpspeed 14y ago
    Well, that's exactly it. Everyone else seemed to "be in the loop" compared to me. People don't always think to mass-email a silly picture of their baby or their latest comment on world news, but those are things I definitely appreciate being able to see. Sure, I might not care what they had for breakfast that day, but it sure is nice to know how my friend's trip to Costa Rica was. Basically FaceBook is its own layer in my social network, and not having an account was ostracizing me. To me, it's analogous to the argument against text messaging. Yes, people who want to talk to me can simply call, but there's a bottom threshold of importance that must be met to deem a phone call necessary. Meanwhile I can text a one sentence message to a friend I haven't seen in months and not spend half an hour on the phone.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    I'm keeping my account because it's the tool 90% of my friends - including my wife - use to plan social activities. I can see which events I'm invited to, and who's coming over to our house next saturday for dinner. We could use Google calendar for this, or any number of other tools, but that would put a burden on our other friends to learn a new system. The end result would be that some people would flat out not attend the event, and some others would attend but not RSVP, throwing off guest counts, etc.
nate 14y ago
Yeah, I'd like to nuke it, but there's so many things on there that family and friends post that I'd never get anywhere else. The photos of my 2 year old niece. The articles my friends only post there. Years ago I created http://tgethr.com http://tgethr.com so I could hopefully get my family just posting/emailing these things around privately. It turned out super useful, but a private network like that just doesn't stick too long. And most of the photos/links/articles just end up on FB.
purephase 14y ago
I'm more than a little concerned that this is not the default answer to this question. While Nest certainly shared blame in choosing FB as their partner in advertising, I think the real problem is the FB only cares about advertising. I'm amazed at the number of people that I hear complain about this stuff and yet keep using FB as if it is essential. For instance, add your cell # to your account to confirm developer status and then turn off notices. You will still receive texts from FB because they don't give a damn. For the life of me, why people willingly give so much of their information to a company who clearly does not care about privacy is beyond me.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  Why wouldn't Nest advertise to friends of people who like (and possibly own) Nest? If you were installed as their chief marketing officer, where would you advertise the thermostat?
jessedhillon 14y ago
tech geeks - so who cares, right? If I said you could mitigate the issue by selling your computer and getting a feature phone, I would be right. But you would probably protest that there are many useful things you need a computer for -- and some of them might not be strictly necessary to your life, or strictly require a computer to do, but the convenience and satisfaction it would bring make it worth having one. In other words, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? Same thing applies for most people and their Facebook account. So your only argument here is to convince people that they don't draw as much satisfaction from Facebook as they think they do, or that they don't need an account for the reasons they think they do. Which might be true, but quite simply, people want not merely to survive but to thrive. Edit: and also, you are in the unenviable position of arguing with people about what they feel, which means you are wrong.
darkarmani 14y ago
> You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. How is this any different than deleting all of your email accounts and acting like that IS the solution to spam?
- AlexandrB 14y ago
  Facebook is a product. Email is a protocol. Are you saying that boycotting Facebook is not a solution to Facebook stepping all over privacy? What are we supposed to do? Use harsh language?
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    Not that it matters what it is, but I said email accounts. I might use multiple protocols to send and receive my email messages, but it doesn't really distinguish it from the stack of protocols that Facebook is based on either. > Are you saying that boycotting Facebook is not a solution to Facebook stepping all over privacy? A boycott wasn't actually the suggested course of action by the OP. They made a different point: opt-out of the system to protect your own privacy. You are suggesting collective action to promote change which is quite different. As an individual, quitting facebook isn't really equivalent to a boycott.
    - AlexandrB 14y ago
      "E-mail" doesn't send spam. Individuals or organizations spam you via "e-mail". With Facebook, violating your privacy or shoving ads into your news feed is up to Facebook itself. Maybe boycott is the wrong term, but it's what I think of when people say "vote with your dollars". Quitting Facebook is essentially denying them an audience and additional personal information. It may not be collective action, but it's still expressing an opinion on Facebook's service and policies.

NoPiece 14y ago

Good post, as someone who occasionally uses promoted posts, it made me realize it is a little weird to target friends of fans, which I believe is the FB default.

leeoniya 14y ago

this is why i only "like" something by consciously posting about it in my status via a link to product or article. i always found those "like" buttons to be completely moronic and entirely out of my control.

HyprMusic 14y ago

"I was actually experimenting with how these “like gates”, as they’re called, work because for my own company we were also playing with creating tools to encourage people to like someone’s Facebook page." Sounds a little hypocritically for criticising facebook about these dirty tricks and then building a business around them. That feeling you get when you see these adverts with your name on? That's the same feeling I get when I'm forced to unnaturally 'like' something on facebook in order to see something else.

nate 14y ago
Sorry if I made the timing not clear. It definitely would be hypocritical if I was building this business after I wrote this post. I had no idea these sponsored posts ended up in people's timelines in such a way no one could tell what's real and what's bullshit. I stopped development on any "like-gating" tech over a year ago for a bunch of reasons. The tech is still up on a website in demo mode, but I don't sell it anymore or intend to revisit selling it again. I wouldn't want to work on encouraging likes again if this sponsored post thing continues to be used like I describe in this post.

webwanderings 14y ago

How long before Twitter goes the same route? You are asking for people to follow you "safely" on Twitter. Don't hold your breath, you have not seen the future, nobody has. These are the reasons I don't click on Like anywhere, certainly not on brands. Facebook has been a mess since they have introduced the promoting stories. They have even added an additional Page Feed, which in my case, has been sitting idle gathering unread counts. Update: IMHO, the best is to use Facebook publicly in a read-only mode. If you must follow the updates from someone, follow their RSS from their website or their email newsletter, they must have one or the other, or else they are not worth it. It is also better to keep yourself logged out of Facebook when you don't need to use it. Twitter is not that bad right now but it still shoots spam messages with bad links without you knowing about it. So your actions or inaction on any social media can directly or indirectly affect your relationship with your friends/contact.

tthomas48 14y ago

The solution in this post doesn't work. It just changes your settings for the ads on the right. Not the ones in your feed.

zach 14y ago
Exactly right. Here's a Facebook help page of interest: "Can I opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories?" http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/ http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/

codva 14y ago

I don't ever "like" major brands. But I do click like on small local businesses, or things my real-life friends are involved with. For a small business, every little bit of free promotion helps.

cletus 14y ago

This is pretty simple: just don't "Like" anything. Seriously. It didn't take an oracle to figure out that "Likes" were always going to be a gateway to direct advertising. And for things you "need" to "Like" (eg to enter a contest or get access to something) then just use a dummy account like many do for playing Facebook games, for much the same reason: (almost) no one wants to spam their friends with "I milked a cow!" messages. This is Facebook's (and Twitter's for that matter) biggest problem: their apparent monetization paths are at direct odds with the user experience.

bluetidepro 14y ago
> "just don't "Like" anything. Seriously." I completely disagree with the idea of never "Liking" anything. There is plenty of benefits of "Liking" a Facebook page. I, personally, enjoy seeing update posts from bands, products, etc. about new content, products, promos, etc. I think music artists is a great example to use here. I love tons of bands. A lot of those bands do not have websites other than using Facebook. I'm not going to check their Facebook pages multiple times a day, going through the 100's of artists that I "Like", just to see if they post an update of some sort. I understand that this not a universal example, and some pages are not worth "Liking" (pages that are a joke meme and not a product, company, artist, etc.), but I think it's ridiculous to say never "Like" anything.
- aw3c2 14y ago
  You can subscribe to their posts without liking.
  - saurik 14y ago
    You can also like a Page without getting messages from it: click the Liked button and uncheck "Show in News Feed".
    - bluetidepro 14y ago
      That defeats the purpose of what I'm saying, though. I'm saying to get any sort of updates from a page, you have to "Like" it. There is no way around it, currently. There is plenty of brands I do want updates from, so I have to "Like" their page to get those updates.

fidotron 14y ago

Until people start being willing to pay for services like Facebook or Twitter these kind of antics are inevitable. Unless you're paying you're the product.

mzuvella 14y ago
Thank you. Been saying that for years.
icebraining 14y ago
Are we the product of HN, then? Or if HN is "not the same", how are Identi.ca users its product? It's a nice soundbite, but it's oversimplified. There are many business models, and some don't involve neither direct payments nor ads/tracking, and others have ads even when you pay (e.g. Cable TV). It's just not that simple.
- krickle 14y ago
  You know we are a highly technical audience and YC companies can advertise jobs, etc. here, right? I think that post is right, and things like cable TV or Hulu are just squeezing some money out of their product before they pass it on.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    OK, how are we Wikipedia products? Advertising (users as products) and charging are just two characteristics that may appear in a business model together, or just one of them, or none, depending on its design. There's simply no rule that makes ¬paying ⇒ product an inevitability.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
jfoster 14y ago
Isn't it my attention that's the product?

danvoell 14y ago

I agree. They are going way to far. I don't care if they want to mislead people, but please don't do it on my behalf. When I logged in to cancel "Ads shown by third parties" which you linked to, I had a new notification (normally reserved for my friends information) which was a Groupon of the Day. WTF? Seems like two sinking ships.

miop 14y ago

Facebook should offer an ad-free membership level for a monthly or yearly fee, or give people the option to ignore/hide "Likes" from showing up in their newsfeed.

ZanderEarth32 14y ago
I think they've figured out that you as a user is worth X amount more to advertisers than you're probably willing to pay a year. Would most people be willing to pay $100 a year if that is what you are worth to Facebook's advertisers?
- preinheimer 14y ago
  People who have $100/year to drop on facebook are also people with enough disposable income to be worth advertising to.

ericdykstra 14y ago

Wow, I thought when I opted out of having my names next to ads that I wouldn't show up in the sponsored stories of people, either, but apparently that's completely different, and I can't turn it off. (see: http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/ http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/) Is there an easy way to "un-like" everything? Facebook automatically made me "like" everything that I had on my interests a long time back, and now that's turning me into an advertising icon for those brands to my friends? No thanks. So do I have to go through each one individually, or is there some way I can get rid of all these "likes" at once?

halefx 14y ago
https://www.facebook.com/browse/other_connections_of/ https://www.facebook.com/browse/other_connections_of/

ghshephard 14y ago

I started to see this slippery slope about a year ago, saw my name (and face!) appearing in advertisements on friends feeds, saw messages from me appearing in my friends feeds without me being (totally) aware I was about to spam them, saw timelines of my entire life with pictures that other people had taken and I was only vaguely aware I had noted I was in them. I just deleted my facebook account. With the exception of technical friends who have children, and are trying to find an easy way to share pictures with the grand-parents/inlaws/family, the majority of my colleagues in the valley have just stopped using, and in many cases, have deleted their facebook account. End of problem. No more intrusions of this kind. Not the solution for everyone, but it's a pretty straightforward mechanism to eliminate this problem, and, in my case, really cost me nothing. Now, if I had to delete my Amazon account to avoid those tracking ads, that would be a whole new level of pain. I don't know if I'm ready to do that, yet.

alphang 14y ago
Agreed. The social ads, creepy frictionless sharing, the history of privacy issues, the "hidden options" UX, the lack of anonymity, and the lack of support for multiple facets to our identities -- these issues all combined together made me deactivate my account. I'm still trying it out to see if I can live without it for a year. But I'm hoping to delete it altogether.
- breckenedge 14y ago
  I made it about 10 months before I caved in and recreated an account. It's so ingrained with my family and friends. But, just don't log in and cancel all the email notifications, works pretty well. I've had friends say "oh we forgot to invite you to the party because you weren't on Facebook." I'm glad of the friends that use evite.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    I'd seriously find some new friends.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

neya 14y ago

This is a really really valid point. This is a HUGE problem, believe me. In fact, here's what happened to me - I got notified in my feed that a friend of mine kept liking her ex-boyfriend's music page, and I got this continuously, consistently for several weeks in my feed. After a while, I got pissed off, sent her a long E-mail , advising her to forget the past and move on. At that time, I didn't know Facebook was the culprit. She naturally was shocked+agitated and defended herself after which I thought she was lying and deleted her from my list. Today, we both are no longer friends. All thanks to Facebook. So, atleast in my case, it did more harm than good.

woodchuck64 14y ago
Too late to 'pologize?
- neya 14y ago
  Actually, I just sent her this link and patched up :D
  - woodchuck64 14y ago
    That warms my heart!
MattRix 14y ago
When you believe Facebook is more trustworthy than your own friend, it's really "all thanks to you".
- neya 14y ago
  We live in a data-driven age. When I had data that testified against her, I couldn't really do much. But, your point is valid.
  - AlexandrB 14y ago
    You're allowing an advertising firm to mediate your interactions with a real human being.

throwaway1979 14y ago

Did Facebook change something related to the use of Likes recently? They just managed to tick me off this morning. My nephew's like of a product showed up as an advert for me - and I'm sure he didn't know this was happening. Between this and their social plugin (I've tried disabling this many times), I am a hair away from disabling my account.

icesoldier 14y ago

I was under the impression that these were the user-facing side of Promoted Posts that go to friends of friends. So I see that one of my friends liked the GRE several times. But I also see "Sponsored Story" under that line, so I ignore it and blame the page itself. On the iOS app at least, it tells me when the Like occurred, which felt a little comical when a friend's Like from 2008 gave me a Sponsored Story a couple weeks ago.

mzuvella 14y ago

Amazing to me how many people bitch and whine about a free service. If you paid for Facebook access then it would be completely understandable, but you don't. So change the settings or go to Google+ (if that's still around).

rcavezza 14y ago

I learned recently that legally, "liking" something on Facebook is considered an endorsement of that product or service. I'm sure the law still needs to catch up to technology, but this news stopped all my "liking" activities.

snowwrestler 14y ago
What does it mean to "legally" endorse a product or service? What are the legal consequences of this? I've never heard of this concept.

RandallBrown 14y ago

Facebook likes have been showing up on advertisements for years. The fact that they're in the news feed now is all that's new. I've mistaken a few of these ads for new posts from friends as well, but it became immediately apparent after my friend like Samsung USA for the 2nd time that it was simply an advertisement.

pasbesoin 14y ago

As soon as they insisted that one's likes be(come) public, I decided that that was the end of that (for me, at least). Remember: Likes (or whatever they used to be called back then, e.g. items listed on your profile) used to be content you could restrict to your friends. Pointers for them to stuff you found cool and interesting. Then FB assigned them to the "forced to be public" part of your profile. Now, eventually, they've become primarily a vehicle for 1) Gaming people to participate (self-serving contests), in order to 2) Spam their graph. Likes no longer represent user-generated content.

BenoitEssiambre 14y ago

This! My fb news feed is heavily spammed by products a few of my friends 'liked'. Making the situation worse: - Some ads, one example for me is TD Bank, are shown repeatedly and redundantly months after months. You'd think they would know I am not interested by now. - On 4.7" screen phone, these are almost full screen ads. - I'm pretty sure the people who 'liked' these companies aren't aware they are continuously spamming me. I usually don't mind a few ads if it will pay for a free service and when they are well targeted I might even click on them. Just the other day, a fb ad reminded me to go to a delicious local burger place I don't enjoy nearly often enough. However the current level of ad aggressivity is way past the limit of what is acceptable.

bsg75 14y ago

Why do people (professionals who are not in marketing) use Facebook? As a user of HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet, I honestly don't see the attraction. Seems like it is fraught with annoyances.

conradfr 14y ago
Because life ?
skeletonjelly 14y ago
Sounds like you're happy where you are. Plenty of people's social presence is only Facebook, so the only way to keep abreast is through it.
liotier 14y ago
Facebook is where the clueless people are. Unfortunately, I love quite a few of those clueless people - so I join them where they are. When all your friends decide to meet at that fake corporate fac-simile of a cliché pub, you go there too because you like your friends and might meet some nice girl there too. You may suggest a place with beer that does not taste like llama piss, but you drink that beer with a smile anyway because in the end it is all about people, even with stupid UI, satanic EULA and sprawling ads.
- alphang 14y ago
  I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I wouldn't call them "clueless" - maybe unaware, or unconcerned.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
alphang 14y ago
"HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet" Many of these examples tend to be online communities that share the same interest as you. Sure, you can probably configure your own Google Group (i guess?) but who's going to do that? Facebook is mostly used by people to keep in touch with their offline community - their real-life friends.

lukejduncan 14y ago

There is no word for this except spam. I am so tired of seeing that a very weak connection has liked Samsung Mobile... every... single... freaking.... day... As a result, I've contacted friends in the exact same manner: "Hey, can you unlike this product, I'm tired of seeing it every day for the last few months."

mrknmc 14y ago
Why don't you use AdBlock?
- lukejduncan 14y ago
  It's livable on the web. On mobile however they are effectively full page ads, and there's no way to block it.
- lukejduncan 14y ago
  And, to be honest: I don't think I'd mind as much if it wasn't the exact same ad multiple times a day, every day, for over a month

ColinDabritz 14y ago

I've never been a fan of Facebooks behavior and attitude toward users. I signed up for an account a while back mainly to make it harder for anyone else to 'be' me. I watched as the privacy continually eroded. ( an excellent 2010 chart here: http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Erosion-Strategy.html http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Er... ) I've been forced to sort out privacy snafus several times over the years, as they added new on-by-default options that I don't want. I think it's time to leave.

jere 14y ago

I've always seen those like ads and wondered... why?!? I can understand liking a struggling business or artist, but in what situation does it make sense to like Visa or Walmart or Sprint or whatever? It doesn't. It should be pretty obvious that everything you do on Facebook these days will be monetized. And Facebook hits the jackpot when you explicitly state a preference for a particular corporation. When Facebook took my comma delimited list of "interests" and turned them all into ads, I figured out Facebook had sold out. Call me melodramatic, but this was years before Zuckerberg claimed "we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

cs702 14y ago

When it comes down to making money, FaceBook is acting exactly like every other big media & communications company: they are doing everything in their power to extract economic rents, to the extent permitted by law, so long as it doesn't annoy or push away too many customers. This isn't really news.

moultano 14y ago
Blanket cynicism doesn't add anything to the discussion.
- cs702 14y ago
  moultano: my comment was not meant to be cynical; I'm sorry if it came across that way. In hindsight, I could and probably should have worded it differently. My main point: this is not an isolated incident of FaceBook pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable by users to make money; there have been other such incidents in the past. Given the history, should we really be surprised?
  - coldpie 14y ago
    If they're toeing the line of acceptability, they're bound to cross over it at some point. This is a discussion about how one user thinks they've crossed that line, what effects that might have on their business and their users and customers, and what can be done to bring it back into line. Must every article and discussion be about something "surprising"? Meta-discussions like this are dull; if you're uninterested in an article, ignore it.

savories 14y ago

Massive overreaction. It's very obvious that these news feed posts are sponsored. It clearly says so. 99% of users won't even notice this or care.

moultano 14y ago

Wow. You can't opt out. That's pretty disgusting. http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/ http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/

marknutter 14y ago

This is an unfortunate title. It should read: "Facebook Pages: Why I don't like things anymore". There are going to be more than a few people who might have been on the fence about buying a Nest thermostat and will make a snap judgement based on this title.

JeffL 14y ago
Maybe they should stop advertising with Facebook?

languagehacker 14y ago

This kind of crap is why I unliked everything I possibly could, and then created LikeBuster. I don't want people getting the wrong idea about me because of an ad I didn't actually promote. I honestly think Facebook makes everyone they use for their ad platform look foolish, and I'd prefer not to see my friends insulted like that. There are Chrome and Firefox add-ons for LikeBuster linked at https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster.

brown9-2 14y ago

Related to liked pages, I've noticed a few times in the past month or two that friend's months-old status updates that have links to products on Amazon.com now re-appear in my current news feed as "sponsored posts". So it seems like advertisers can also sponsor posts containing links to their domains to re-appear in your feed.

alphang 14y ago
Ugh. So even if you don't Like anything, your shared links can become promotional stories. Terrible.

justinph 14y ago

With gmail you have a marketplace. Gmail might be nice, but email is a protocol and you can take your business elsewhere. Not so with facebook. They've built what's essentially treated as a protocol, but it's completely under their control. Clearly, this makes it rife for what we might perceive as abuse.

jameswyse 14y ago

I've removed all my likes to try and clean up my news feed, though my facebook profile still says I still have 110 'likes' , I'm guessing those are websites without a facebook page and I've no idea how to remove those.

bgruber 14y ago

businesses have recently been complaining about facebook forcing them to pay to reach their 'likers', but this is the flip side. I'm seeing more and more sponsored stories about things my friends like, and not seeing the updates from the pages i really do want to see. even in 'most recent' view, facebook fails to show me updates from the pages i have explicitly told it to put in my news feed. which means i'm going to get those updates by other means. which means i'm going to use facebook less.

jusben1369 14y ago

An interesting wrinkle on this was the recent Presidential election in the US. Some of my contacts "Liked" Romney's or Paul Ryan's page (or both) Every 3rd or 5th day they were there when I looked at my feed "Romney is great" and your 3 friends liked this etc. My first reaction was "Wow, my friends are pretty hard core Romney fans if they're liking every new post he puts up on his page" So from endorsing him once they sent the message indirectly to their friends about 8 - 12 over a two month period that they're a supporter. That's probably a lot more in your friends' face with your political belief than most realize. It's like the guy at a BBQ who casually says "I think I'm voting for Obama" vs the friend whom every time you see them in the build up to the election wants to talk about their candidate and you're voting for him right?

daem0n 14y ago

Great description of what really happens in these situations. Scary.