"We explicitly violated the terms of service for a website and you'll never guess what happened next."
I understand the feeling, but these weren’t random people that had nothing to do with a company action. These were all individuals who took part in the act.
I agree it’s petty, and yes this is what many free market proponents want (unless free market is just a convenient guise to get what they want).
The pettiness isn't the problem, the extra-legal power that consolidation of capital and media enables is. Competition in the market ceases to be about the best product at the best price, and becomes a game of strategic alliances and power abuse instead.
Edit: To clarify once more: Facebook may have a legitimate interest in keeping this company off Instagram. What it does not have is a moral right to use unrelated properties for retaliation. This is what I meant by "extra-legal" - it's using its market power to punish a company, instead of the courts. If Instagram was independent, it could not engage in this sort of business-warfare.
What? “extra-legal”? Don’t mix this with other behaviors Meta/Facebook/Instagram engage in, I hate them for all the bullsht they get away with too. However, this isn’t that, this is someone trying to build a platform on top of someone else’s platform explicitly against their terms of service and without reimbursing them.
I don't consider it to be stealing any resources or services. It's little different than an ad and tracker blocker on a browser. Any client-side user agent should have the right to act on behalf of the user. If it's not illegal to build this kind of program yourself to protect yourself, it shouldn't be illegal for another company to build it and profit from it. A company like Facebook shouldn't have the right to strategically stifle innovation and improvement, in a way that makes the market better for the consumer. That undermines the entire point of capitalism, which is to benefit maximally for the consumer by forcing companies to out-do each other. It reads more like anti-competitive behavior to me, and Facebook refusing to try to properly adapt to somebody making their product better than they can do themselves.
If Ford produced an on-board tracking device that tracked your use of the car to sell to advertisers, and another company sold a device that disabled the tracker permanently, there would be no good reason for Ford to be able to forcefully ban the company from buying their cars. Even if the car was sold at a loss because the ad revenue subsidized the remainder and then some.
People are hungry for privacy and a better experience. Facebook needs to learn to adapt for the good of the consumer, or die by letting other companies eat their lunch. This is good capitalism. It sucks for Facebook, but it's good for the public.
Not attempting to stop that act would be, for a public company, a violation of their duties to shareholders.
I believe in what’s best for the commons, but not at the expense of stealing what’s not mine. Sure, take possession of what’s yours, your information, your privacy, your property. But don’t give it all away to receive some benefit, then insist on seizing it all back and keeping the benefit.
The transaction you make with Meta is that you’ll give them a piece of your property, in exchange you get to use their machines. If you don’t want them to occupy your property, stop using their machines.
I choose not to use Facebook/Instagram because I’m not so self important as to share my daily life with “friends” I only talk to out of convenience and lack of something better to do. I don’t feel like the benefit Facebook offers is worth the toll they exact. I don’t want my land to be part of their machine, and similarly I don’t feel entitled to it.
When someone sends me a Facebook or Instagram link and I’m asked to login, I just let them know I can’t view that link. If I’m blocked from Instagram content, or increasingly Twitter content, because of my adblocker, then I just accept that the content isn’t available to me.
I host content I want to share with friends and family on services that I either host or pay for so that I don’t have to subject them to that. So they don’t have to sign away their privacy to view my kids having fun at the park.
https://twitter.com/theogapp_/status/1574811388823732233
https://twitter.com/theogapp_/status/1574816036645314561
And they are a venture backed startup. Does none of this alarm you?
Are you claiming that building and/or using adblocking software is theft?
Years ago there was an effort to allow users to pay a monthly fee to avoid ads. The idea was that this specific ad network would distribute those funds to the sites you visited in place of ad revenue, and the users would instead see a placeholder of their choice (like a grey block, cat pictures, etc).
I signed up for it, unfortunately they could never achieve market penetration compared to google Adsense, eventually the product died.
Unfortunately there is more money in collecting your behaviors, habits, and using that for targeted advertising than most people are willing to pay for content in aggregate.
YouTube and other platforms have seem some success in ad free options, but only on those targeted platforms where the value-add is clearer to the consumer.
I’d like to see an internet that didn’t need ads or ad blockers. Give me a better way to help you monetize your content.
I could imagine certain protests being demonized and their attendants removed from meta for violating terms of service.
The real question is do they virtually round up the avatars for public deletions, or do they just disappear them?
I think a lot of people would enjoy virtual public executions, if anyone from meta is listening.
Also, while I enjoy your alliteration, it’s also an extremely steep “slippery slope” argument. It’s certainly not an argument I was trying to entertain.
If a comedian tells vile racist jokes, I believe the writer of the joke, the talent manager who knew the comedians content, the person who booked the comedian knowing the content, and the venue who knowingly provided the platform for the content should all be similarly shunned.