7 ms·
My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site
- shaftoe 11y agoSummary: Facebook has an overly rigid process governing names and this guy has an edge-case problem. Is this not a solved issue? How do women who change their name upon marriage use Facebook? Does Facebook recognize legal name changes? Is that not in effect here?
- shaftoe 11y agoIt says something that my comment is getting downvoted, though I'm not sure what. Is it sensitivity to saying scenarios that are statistical anomalies "edge-cases"?
- lukev 11y agoHow sad is it that the "protest" they come up with is to deactivate their accounts for a day?. Facebook is terrible. Ditch it entirely. Or do like I do and leave up a bare bones page with a bit of contact information for old friends and never visit.
- kristopolous 11y agoI'd really like for everyone to construct elaborate arbitrary but consistent identities. It would make Facebook enormously fun as opposed to a large interconnected network of corporate brands and homogenized identities. A communal reflection of the minds eye. The current perpetual thanksgiving dinner is fun but I'd rather talk about dreams. Exploration over documentation.
- logicallee 11y ago>Facebook is terrible. Ditch it entirely And then...? What? Try to get people to invite you to events on Google Hangouts or whatever Google has?
- x3n0ph3n3 11y agoOr you could, say, call, text, and e-mail people you want to be in contact with. The idea that someone can be completely cut off from all their contacts just because they lose their Facebook account is absurd and reckless on the part of the user.
- logicallee 11y agoI didn't say anything about being completely cut off from all your contacts. I said, how will people remember to invite you to events, other than by your 5 closest friends who would jump through the hoops of - sending you an email? Or text message. I don't mean as some theoretical exercise, I mean practically speaking. In fact, a lot of totally public events are only listed on Facebook anyway. The easiest thing to do is to invite people via FB. The bar is raised dramatically by making people send an unsolicited text message or email, if they even have your email address. I just coordinated a meetup via email. Unbelievably awkward and high-friction.
- Qualman 11y agoIt may be absurd, but it's not at all uncommon. Sending group invites via SMS is an incredibly kludgy experience, and following the path of least resistance, is so unrealistic when you have Facebook events at your fingertips. All of your friends are already there, and you merely need to change the details, and Facebook handles all the communication.
- meddlepal 11y agoI just stopped caring about being invited to "events". If the event is so impersonal that it needs to be broadcast rather than two or three people organizing and then blasting a simple text message like "Hey beers at 5PM at <Insert Restaurant or Bar Here>. Come if you can!" I just don't care.
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- jdavis703 11y agoCould Facebook implement a PageRank type algorithm that gets people with already verified real names (perhaps they paid for something by credit card on FB, or are registered with a .edu email that matches their initials), to then say whether their friends name was real? Surely there's a way of proving someone's real name without making them use their legal name.
- jschwartzi 11y agoI wonder if they simply want the legal name. If part of the purpose of Facebook is to sell networks of people to marketers, then being able to tie your network identity to your home loan, car loan, and credit score is going to be very appealing.
- runn1ng 11y agoHow illegal is to provide a fake ID documents to Facebook? ("fake" in the sense of "editing it in Photoshop")
- eevee 11y agoWhy would it be illegal at all? Facebook isn't a government authority.
- protomyth 11y agoWell, faking documents for a bank is a crime, so just because they aren't government doesn't provide protection.
- KnightHawk3 11y agoAs someone who has done this previously, I don't particularly care.
- mschuster91 11y agoI guess this is the work of a bunch of trans-haters abusing the report feature. Assigning the right amount of power for an automatic filter is a science itself, though. Heuristic AV scanners and spam filters suffer from the same issues. For example even big telco providers (Ay Yildiz Germany) get caught up for now MONTHS in Gmails spam filter with no way to change this. Their emails are discarded already at SMTP delivery...
- protomyth 11y agoI have my doubts about that since they also seem to go on spurts of banning Native American using their real names.
- mschuster91 11y agoI don't know Native American names, but I guess the filter classifies their names as having too much entropy when compared to the other 1.1bn FB users. 1.1bn gives a pretty exhaustive list of common names for a given country region.
- protomyth 11y agoWell, its a known problem and their continued foolishness is a pain to people including those who do not work for Facebook but have to deal with ticked people because they are the local computer person. > 1.1bn gives a pretty exhaustive list of common names for a given country region. If the last name is a person with a Wikipedia entry then their pretty exhaustive list is not very exhaustive.
- cgtyoder 11y agoSo, "Zip" used to work there and she hasn't used her connections to get this resolved? While it's unfortunate that this happened, that's pretty standard in this situation. Make a call - it sounds like she knows the right people.
- imron 11y agoAnd what about all the people who don't have contacts at Facebook?
- coldcode 11y agoFacebook needs to be replaced by something that is people oriented instead of marketing oriented. Fat chance, but one can dream.
- chx 11y agoNot trans but I identify with the letters "chx" much more strongly than my real name. There are thousands, perhaps ten of thousands of people out there who know me by this nick and nothing else. My own brother often calls me that. British Columbia doesn't allow me to take a single word as a legal name but once I get citizenship I am very seriously considering changing my legal name to a name where the abbreviation makes it a sort of retronym. (Charles Harry Xavier?)
- jackvalentine 11y agoHow is it pronounced? "chix"? or spelled out C.H.X?
- chx 11y agoI heard both :) not to mention the Hungarian pronunciation of c-h-x where I originally come from -- I am using this nick for more than twenty years and 1993-2005 I heard it only in Hungarian as my contact with the Western world was mostly virtual. Then everything changed at the first DrupalCon in Antwerp but I am getting off topic here.
- jackvalentine 11y agoThat is a more fantastic answer than I thought i'd get! Even the pronunciation doesn't adhere to traditional name conventions :-) I love it, good luck.
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- ethagknight 11y agoIs the use of WASP in this case wholly inappropriate and clearly intended to be derogatory? Why is it tolerated and not considered a form of hate speech?
- natrius 11y ago"Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex." Nope. Not inappropriate. Not derogatory. Not hate speech. Different cultures treat names different ways. Here, "WASP" is a reference to the dominant American culture. I didn't bat an eye when I read it.
- jzelinskie 11y agoThey could have said that without using the term "WASP". I've personally never seen this term used in a non-derogatory way before.
- pcl 11y agoTo me, "WASP" has a pretty narrow definition, with strong East Coast and British affinities. I'm largely Irish by heritage, and so of course there's some Catholic in there too. So, while I'm white, I'm (mostly) not Anglo-Saxon or Protestant. In fact, ironically, one of the characteristically WASPy things that comes to mind immediately is the prevalence of unusual names -- "Leslie" as a man's name; "Van" as a legit first name; people with three or four middle names; whole lines of firstborn men with the same formal name leading to ubiquitous uses of nicknames, etc.
- ethagknight 11y agoMy point is, the term WASP is used here not as an enpowerment, but as a target of blame for the subject matter. If WASP is a reference to dominant American culture, why not just say dominant American culture? White Anglo Saxon Protestants are in no way responsible for Facebook's naming schemes. Maybe it isn't offensive to you, but it is unquestionably slang, and I would add yes, offensive, because it's a) not true, b) out of context, and most significantly c) in direct contrast with the article's call for understanding of other cultural identities.
- teaneedz 11y agoPersonally, I disagree with this one point. > Cynics will tell you that using your “real name” is so they can sell your details to advertisers. That’s not the case. Facebook is selling access to their profile of a person for targeted ads and tracking across the web - which includes a real name. No, I haven't worked at FB, but I get the business side from a Product Management perspective. Yes, ad impressions can factor into it, but one could argue that there would be more engagement using a name that a person is currently using or known by, resulting in increased time on the newsfeed, not less. It's all about a story to sell advertisers though. Facebook is an advertising platform. We use "real names" is just a marketing bullet FB can hold up to advertisers in glossy material and sales pitches. Real name policies are indeed a made up solution mistakenly used by some to address trolling issues as well. The thing is, that argument has been proven false, time and time again. Ello, that underdog social community, is proving right now that pseudonymity can work. I guess the real question is, "Are we willing to walk the talk and support the companies that are standing up for users on this issue as well as privacy?" Of course we might have to sacrifice some features we are used to, but ultimately it's the only way to send a message that will be heard. Google, afterall didn't change it's stand on real names just out of some epiphany or random act of kindness. That story is a little more complex for sure, yet our eyes and where they spend time is the ultimate metric in today's ad model. My eyes choose Ello these days.
- informatimago 11y ago”I guess the real question is, "Are we willing to walk the talk and support the companies that are standing up for users on this issue as well as privacy?"“ An interesting question. So on one hand we see that we have some kinds of companies that can provide useful global services (facebook, google, wikipedia, sourceforge (before ads), mozilla, github, etc), but it is impractical, unsavory or counter productive to make "users" pay (because we're not only passive "users", but active contributors to the services facilitated by those companies. The "solution" found by those companies is to extract the needed money from other companies in exchange for advertisement. On the other hand, we can print money to give to banksters only to satisfies their shareholders, and with no benefit whatsoever to the general population, on the contrary. What if, instead, we printed money to give to those internet companies and associations providing useful services? They wouldn't then have to use advertisements, and therefore could better protect the privacy of the users/contributors.