Facebook has gotten nothing but grief since going public last month and now a user poll is adding to the misery with more evidence that their ads don't work and user engagement is going down. After its 100 Bn. Dollar which saw Mark Zuckerberg become the 23rd richest person in the world and immediately afterwards trousered 1.3 Bn. Dollars in cash and married his long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan and headed off to Rome to experience La Dolce Vita. For myself I don’t think too much of FB’s ill-gotten gains have gone into customer service for shortly after Mark took his eye off the ball I was forced to write to him after experiencing a Zuckeroid attack.
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| Priscilla and Mark - It's not complicated |
Ciao Marco,
Sorry to have to write to you when you are busy getting busy but almost as soon as you went on honeymoon my problems began.
Out of the blue without any warning I have received a notice that my friend requests are blocked for "14 Days due to multiple feedback" that I have sent friend requests to "people" I don't know. Your highly directive and patronising process software (don't take my word for how this stuff winds up users - ask them and they'll tell you at the same time why FB is such a distrusted brand) then "invites" me to cancel my pending friend requests. As I haven't accepted this "invitation" no doubt your "intelligent" software which makes Homer Simpson seem like a genius will discover tomorrow it should extend this to 21 days and the day after to 28 days.
Some facts;
1. Have the Zuckeroids considered the possibility of malicious feedback - particularly from friend trawlers whose FB requests I have refused because their pages don't seem real or they have few friends. Or indeed people from the Indian sub-continent and Africa whose friends have friended you but who then ask for money or help with illegal immigration or jobs in the UK and who as a consequence I have de-friended?
2. I have only sent FB requests to "people" suggested by FB and where I have at least 50 friends in common - A lot of these "people" are not people but Political, Trade Union (that's Labor in American) or activist accounts - I also run Aylesbury Labour Party's Facebook account - please tell me how I should know these personally to comply with your Community standards - I'll be happy to put your considered reply on my Blog as I know your answer (rather than waffly "Community Standards") would be of interest to a lot of FB users.
I am a responsible FB user but like many such people I am totally tired of your inconsistent and unrealistic policies - not that I or anybody else could keep up with them as they seem to vary in practice from day to day, week to week depending on what brain wave Zuckeroid programmers come up with without really considering the impact of what they are doing outside their own narrow attention span. Last week you were preventing putting Blog links (on the grounds that "it looks spammy or inappropriate) on MyBlogworld Forum a group set up by fellow Bloggers for sharing blog links!
Finally - calling us a "Community" is a delusional fiction of your invention - a community is based on respect and engagement and that is not the way users feel about FB - a large company which abuses its users information and continually changes the rules to maximise its own mean advantage.
In summary I do not care in the slightest what stupid and illogical "Blocks" you impose - if you keep losing users trust it will be entirely irrelevant and you will join the long line of "impregnable" enterprises who wrongly thought they were more important than their customers.
Stop alienating your users with stupid actions - as long as you do we will not trust you, without trust you won't achieve your commercial objectives and the bottom line is we are more important to you than you are to us - your non-community.
Infine, while in Rome try an authentic restaurant, Abruzzi on the Via Vaccara at angelo Piazza Santi Apostoli, just off the southern end of Il Corso. It’s good food and an old established restaurant which won’t break the bank.
Arrivederci,
DaithaiC
Footnote; such is FB’s dedication to customer service that you can no longer write to them about your problem or issues. No sirreee, that approach is soooo yesterday! What you need to do is “post” your (non) communication on a help forum and then other FB users can respond to you. For, dear members of the “Community” if you are having problems it is because YOU don’t understand and it is simply not cost effective for a 100 Bn. Dollar company to deal with your silly concerns because YOU are always wrong. Now that is the type of “customer service” Frank Kafka could relate to!!
P.S. Three days after posting my letter in the Limbo land of user forums my block was quietly lifted.
