Hacker News Reader

Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Disappointing.

Facebook's decision to use people in their ads, and also automatically subscribe people to spam from Facebook Pages, has already made clicking the Like button a 'heavy' action—meaning I have to think about it before doing it, and most likely won't click nowadays.

Google Plus is the same now. I used to consider handing out a quick +1 to any post I liked, or a cool site/service. But now, I have to think about whether I would be okay with my profile being associated with whatever that article/site/service is doing, and whatever they may do in the future.

I've already opted out, but I've now lost my trust that clicking +1 is a lightweight/safe action.

The only social button/action that seems safe anymore is the 'Tweet this' button... Hopefully Twitter doesn't screw that up.

View on HN

It is worth noting here that endorsements are only shared to the circles that can see the original review.

For an endorsement to appear to a user in search, that user has to have access to your review in the first place. Data that was once private is not being leaked publicly.

>>made clicking the Like button a 'heavy' action—meaning I have to think about it before doing it.

I may be in the minority here, but I think that is a feature, not a bug. "Liking" something should be a heavy action that you think about. I remember when I started getting page-spam from weird pages I'd liked in the early days of Facebook and went back and cleaned up my likes, there were some things in there I didn't remember liking or ever want to like. Now, I really have to think about it, and it leads to my ads and page updates being much more relevant and interesting to me. Also, the Graph Search capabilities should also be encouraging people to think before they like.

As an online marketer, I like it too, because it means my audience is marginally more likely to truly be interested in the targeting I choose.

At least on Facebook, there's no way to (for instance) list which bands and TV shows you like on your profile anymore without Liking their pages and all the potentially undesirable consequences that come with it. Facebook have systematically and intentionally replaced lighter-weight mechanisms with Likes.

Not to alarm you, but actually I think a company would be entitled to use your tweet in their ads (with or without involvement by twitter).

A tweet is meant for public consumption (if it's public), you mention their product...as long as they don't make it look like you're saying something you're not, saying that you said that seems to be just stating a fact (which is well covered by the first amendment), and as long as they've only taken a sentence or a fragment of a sentence, they should be well covered by fair use as far as copyright is concerned.

I'm having trouble finding case law on this, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Twitter has made it known they do not want people using Tweets in ads without following their brand guidelines.

Do you have a link? It's hard to search for this stuff without just getting links about advertising on twitter.

Its quite trivial to follow their brand guidelines.

You just have to worry about other people with Twitter: http://mashable.com/2013/10/11/new-york-comic-con-promotiona...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com