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Comment by Skroob | Hacker News Reader

When you're building on someone else's platform, you're subject to their whims, whether you like it or not. Facebook can delete your app for no reason, so can Apple and Google and Microsoft. If you're building a Netflix or Twitter app and they change their API (or terms of service) to disable your app, you don't really have any legal recourse. Yeah it sucks, but it's a pitfall of doing business on someone else's platform, and one that developers should be keenly aware of before they start.

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In a sense, whatever we build is always built upon someone else's platform. The Internet itself is someone else's platform. The legal framework in our respective countries is someone else's platform. These two platforms are harder to control than an online service like Facebook, but they can likewise be controlled in ways that are stifling and unfair.

Given that every useful platform is owned by someone else, I despise arguments of the form "Such-and-such a platform is not yours, so don't complain if its owners behave like jerks". I agree that complaining is generally fruitless and we must be cautious about binding ourselves to platforms where we are essentially disenfranchised. However, I think we all have the right to call out thuggish actions wherever we see them and to insist that platform owners treat their users and dependents respectfully. I will cheer for people who stand up to jerks before I criticize them for having exposed themselves up to harm from a platform's owners.

I don't disagree with you. Complain if you want. Sometimes it helps. But don't make the mistake of thinking you're entitled to anything.

Two important differences:

- The Internet is not controlled by a single entity.

- The Internet is documented by standards.

Facebook is a social network monopoly and one of the main avenues of business on the web of which there is essentially no replacement (in terms of doing business on a popular general purpose social network.) The fact that they can ban an app unfairly on a whim is not just some minor side issue, and if they abuse their privilege like this its a serious issue for all. In this case what they did is clearly anti-competitive.

A little gratitude to developers from the Twitters and Facebooks of the world would not be amiss. Whether they are able to take such actions is not the question; it's whether it is respectable or even a good business decision to treat developers so poorly.

Many companies like this who were encouraging developers to use their public API two years ago have now decided we are only useful to the extent you can take advantage of us, while it's convenient. A few prominent VCs and CEOs have made it clear they think the time for any sort of idea of a partnership between open API service providers and developers is behind us.

True. But when you're developing a platform, you want it to be known as a place where developers are treated fairly. Just as with their trigger-happy deletion of apps a while ago, Facebook seems to be sending a message of "screw you, we'll do what we want". Presumably I'm not the only developers considering whether or not to invest resources in the Facebook platform who notices stuff like this.

A lot of that thing a few weeks ago was a mishap, not anyone trying to say "screw you, we'll do what we want." Sorry it felt that way :-/. Hopefully if you were incorrectly affected, things got resolved?

Check out https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/521/ for some info on how we're trying to improve the experience when we find apps to be too spammy / in violation of policy. I think the team working on that has already made quite a bit of progress (all while still keeping spam numbers down, which is pretty impressive).

Disclaimer: I work at FB, but not on the platform team.

Thanks for the response, mkjones. I certainly don't think anybody at Facebook is _trying_ to say "screw you, we'll do what we want", and I think the new approach is a very positive step. But the impression it leaves as an app developer is that you made a change that disabled a bunch of apps without thinking about the implications, and then rolled it back when people made enough noise. As somebody else says, Facebook's got a pattern of doing this; so you don't have a reservoir of goodwill.

I don't disagree with this, but it's still a shame. What if Microsoft updated their TOS and decided to delete Adobe products? You think Adobe would have a case against them? I think so...

Although someone from Facebook has rebutted these claims, if this story was 100% true, I would think the company that had their app deleted would have easy success in an anti-trust lawsuit.

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