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Comment by bermanoid | Hacker News Reader

I know there are plenty of Facebook people reading HN, so I can't help but wonder why complaints about FB are never addressed here when they come up, especially when they're of this nature (this particular problem seems like a glitch in code, not something that would require a massive business effort to fix). The instant someone makes a complaint about some aspect of Google's search algorithm, Matt Cutts appears out of the wild and addresses the situation; I've seen many other Googlers comment on various issues, too, letting us know that they've escalated issues as appropriate, or even just that they're aware of problems but can't do anything about it.

What's up with the silence from the FBers in the crowd? Not allowed to say anything? Don't know who to forward the issue to? Just don't care?

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How come no witches ever show up to our witchhunt?

The vast majority of fb employees wouldn't know anything about this. They couldn't say anything except something w/o any knowledge and cause more problems.

That's a very fair point - HN is vastly more hostile to Facebook than it is to Google, so it makes more sense that Googlers would pop in to calm things down.

I'm sure the hostility has nothing to do with the lack of response, the screw-ups, or the handling of the situation in general ...

But, I probably shouldn't even be in this thread, because I think that building a huge user base that relies on someone else's closed & fickle platform is a hilarious thing to do.

I truly believe its down to a deep misstrust of facebook and Zuckerberg which started from day 0 of facebook.

I'm stunned that a site full of developers might be hostile to a site that has facebook's track record with developers. Stunned.

Moreover, the vast majority of Facebook employees aren't going to be /empowered/ to say anything about this. I sure as hell am never going to make any statements on behalf of any company I work for.

I'm a Facebooker, just not on the API team. If you think that silence is bad, you should hear about the ordeal I had with my HR recruiter. Talk about silence....whew!

So... mind sharing? Sounds interesting and I'm sure people could learn something from it. Anonymous blog post if you must.

Pretty much the same as the Google nightmares you hear about. I've come to the conclusion that the average tech HR rep is just not competent. It's a level of ineptitude far below what an average programmer (for example) would be at. Then again, I guess nobody ever dreams of being an HR rep as a kid...

I work at Facebook, but am not part of the platform (or platform integrity) team. In general, since we have so few engineers (in the hundreds), we have to resort to technological means of solving problems like spam and bad apps. I can't speak for these specific cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a nonzero false-positive rate for spam/platform abuse detection, but it's the tradeoff that they are willing to make in order to catch most of the bad cases out there.

You think it's hard to contact Google if your Adsense account got shut down, or Ebay if your Paypal account got disabled. And that's even with thousands of people in Adsense; imagine what Facebook's sub-100 platform engineers can do with millions of platform developers.

I'm just speaking out of my ass, but while I think it's unfortunate that there are false-positives, it's a necessary tradeoff for a small company like Facebook with very few engineers.

I always try to avoid publicly discuss any company I have worked for, not just Facebook. Mainly because my opinions are my own, and even with disclaimers I feel they reflect on my employer.

A few months ago, Facebook banned adsense from apps, on the premise that it's not "safe enough" (while at the same time allowing ad networks with viruses). No matter how many attempts have been made to get facebook's response, not a sound:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336

It's safe to say that facebook is actively trying to push developers away. They have a special relationship with zynga, and that's their cash cow.

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