[dkarl]

I'm guessing you long ago hid messages from Farmville and similar games and forgot about it. There's no way you know 340 people who don't play Facebook games.

Yet I can use Facebook today to find out about meat specials at my butcher, or someone selling artisanal pickles, or a new theater company, or someone making custom knives as their hobby hoping to try to make a living doing it. And because of the stupid blue "like" button this article rails against, these hopeful businesses can do that without paying for pointless terribly-performing ads in major newspapers or on radio stations, and can have actual conversations with their customers.

I used to "like" local businesses. But... every day I get ads in my news stream reminding me that my friends "like" Wal-Mart. And Amazon.com. Mostly Amazon.com, actually. Sometimes I think that if I just clicked "like" I'd get fewer ads from Amazon than I currently get for Amazon. Because on Facebook, even the ads have ads.

Now I hesitate to "like" anything because I feel complicit in helping Facebook spam my friends. I think it's cool when a single item goes into my friends' feeds saying that I "like" a local restaurant, but I DON'T want them to see recurring ads in their news feed with my name attached. I have one friend who posts very infrequently, and she is apparently one of the only Facebook friends I have who has "liked" Wal-Mart, so most of her appearances in my feed are promotions for Wal-Mart. If I only knew her from my feed, I'd know her as that girl who shills for Wal-Mart.

I admit it's irrational to avoid the "like" button when it comes to local businesses, because I've never seen Facebook promote a cool local business to me; it's too busy telling me about this awesome new thing called Wal-Mart that I might not have heard of. When I "like" the coffee shop down the street, I suppose Facebook applies powerful machine-learning algorithms to that information to determine that they should lace my friends' news feeds with slightly more ads for Amazon.com and slightly fewer ads for Wal-Mart. No real harm done, then, since my name won't be used, but it isn't something I'm thrilled to be part of.

[tptacek]

How does it harm small businesses when people "like" Walmart on Facebook? You can't buy artisanal marshmallows at Walmart, and it's no cheaper for Walmart to collect "likes" on Facebook than it is for Hipster Marshmallow Factory.

I just don't see the controversy here.

[dkarl]

I didn't have an issue with "liking" businesses until Facebook decided to let the highest bidder influence how users' likes are presented to their friends.

One issue I have with it is that promoted content makes no attempt at being valuable to users at all. I get endless reminders that so-and-so "likes" Wal-Mart or Amazon, but nothing about businesses I've never heard of. It's the opposite of being friendly to the tenuous, fledgling businesses for whom Facebook can be so helpful. People do their best to be interesting and to promote businesses they love that their friends might want to learn about. They don't endlessly shill brands that all of their friends already know about. Promoted content is a way for big boring brands to muscle their way in, through sheer advertising dollars, into a medium that naturally favors novelty and underdogs. Also, since companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon use their Facebook pages to direct advertising to users, promoted content is advertising advertising. Ads for ads. I don't know if I can articulate a reason why advertising for advertising makes me feel like a line of absurdity has been crossed (or a shark has been jumped) but it doesn't feel right.

Another thing that bothers me is that they use my friends' names. My friend may truly like Wal-Mart, but is she okay with her name being used to suggest a page to me over and over again in the hopes that the fifth or tenth or twentieth time I see it, I might relent and click "like?" I'm not cool with Facebook using my name that way. If Facebook wants to suggest one of my likes to a friend of mine, because Facebook believes that friend is likely to be interested, that's great. That makes me actually feel kind of good about Facebook having so much data about us. If Facebook wants to nag my friend to check out a page because that advertiser is paying Facebook to nag him, well, maybe that's the price of using Facebook, but please don't use my name. I'm sure the TOS says they can, but common courtesy should apply. Perhaps it is public information that you support a particular candidate in the presidential election, but it would be out of line for me to send hundreds of emails to HN users saying, "THOMAS H. PTACEK THINKS YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR MITT HUSSEIN JOHNSON." The opinion might be yours, but the obnoxious style wouldn't be, so it wouldn't be fair to invoke your name.

[sjg007]

it ruins your hipster cred.

[nealabq]

Not if you "like" ironically.