[ganeshkrishnan]

50 million is chump change for Facebook. In a fair world, we would have competition against facebook and there would be choices for consumers. In this real world we are stuck with the bottom feeders like facebook which just works with impunity.

Not only did facebook lose all the data, it disabled customer support chat in Australia for all services including advertising.

Our company fb account (for travelers) was disabled due to "Suspicious activity" and then permanently deleted. But they conveniently left the ad account on which we can neither login nor disable. If we do a charge back, Facebook will instaban the instagram account as well and in process we could lose our 16 year account.

There is a huge group of such people here https://www.reddit.com/r/facebookdisabledme/

Both reddit and facebook belong to trash of history (for different reasons)

[ipaddr]

In fairness facebook has many competitors and it's possible to create a clone for a small sum. That doesn't include the scaling components which are world class. But a profile some photos and videos has been done successfully by vk for example.

How to you get everyone to signup? This is how facebook did it. Start in top universities and only allow people from there to sign up. Repeat at other universities. Open it up to all .edus. Get press coverage about this site many are talking about but only college kids can use. Open it up to everyone but setup cities regions where content is shared. Introduce a tool that reads your hotmail and emails everyone to join. Add games. Groups. Kill games. Promote flame bait. Replace content with ads.

The facebook rollout was magical and hard to replicate. Having people within the same colleges on a public/private network created communities. Places where parents/relatives/past school mates wouldn't see that content. Lost some magic with cities but it still created communities. Killing games started the decline. Everyone you know from your grandparents to your little sister joining killed the original feel. Politics killed conversations.

Facebook had many paths to choose and they ended up here. If you started a similiar journey you could make different choices and end up somewhere else.

[grugagag]

Not in your case as a business but for majority of people being banned on facebook and other social media could be a blessing in disguise.

[strogonoff]

The “you are the product” cliché might be the most underrated phrase of the last decade or two.

What Facebook did was not about some genius move where they got university students to sign up; it was about making it seem as if your customers are not who they actually are, and by exploiting the market contrary to how it’s supposed to work. Facebook is not the only one who did it, but they are perhaps the first ones who did it for social media and at such scale.

The bright idea of the free market—customers pay for things they get value from, which helps more of these things to exist—is turned on its head and inside out when the product customers pay for is people paying for things while those people are misled into thinking they are being provided a “free product”.

Any value the end user gets from the system is purely incidental. If it is harmful to the end user long-term, that is orthogonal to the bottom line. The company is not incentivized to provide the end user any value, the company is not interested in helping the end user succeed and prosper—rather, the company is incentivized to not let the end user leave in bulk (that would hurt the actual paying customers, that is the advertisers, and the bottom line) and to keep their eyes on the non-product for as long as possible (if riling them up by algorithmically chosen triggering posts works for that purpose, great).

This fosters monopolies, infects capitalism, and when it becomes the default engine of human interaction it infects society.

[protocolture]

I have an account like that that simply exists but can never interact. Support requests (even when I figured out how to make them) do nothing. They just say "It will be fixed within the week"