This is pretty simple: just don't "Like" anything. Seriously. It didn't take an oracle to figure out that "Likes" were always going to be a gateway to direct advertising.<p>And for things you "need" to "Like" (eg to enter a contest or get access to something) then just use a dummy account like many do for playing Facebook games, for much the same reason: (almost) no one wants to spam their friends with "I milked a cow!" messages.<p>This is Facebook's (and Twitter's for that matter) biggest problem: their apparent monetization paths are at direct odds with the user experience.
>> This has to stop. There has to be a setting to turn this shit off.<p>You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. It is the nuclear option, but it's one that more and more of my friends (tech geeks - so who cares, right?) are doing.<p>I think the real problem here is headlines like this. OP's blog post title says "I don't like NEST" this is a problem for their brand and all the other companies that support Facebook's business model. If they start leaving because Facebook's UX opacity hurts their brand more than it helps, then it's lights out.
This is a really really valid point. This is a HUGE problem, believe me.
In fact, here's what happened to me - I got notified in my feed that a friend of mine kept liking her ex-boyfriend's music page, and I got this continuously, consistently for several weeks in my feed. After a while, I got pissed off, sent her a long E-mail , advising her to forget the past and move on. At that time, I didn't know Facebook was the culprit. She naturally was shocked+agitated and defended herself after which I thought she was lying and deleted her from my list. Today, we both are no longer friends. All thanks to Facebook. So, atleast in my case, it did more harm than good.
I started to see this slippery slope about a year ago, saw my name (and face!) appearing in advertisements on friends feeds, saw messages from me appearing in my friends feeds without me being (totally) aware I was about to spam them, saw timelines of my entire life with pictures that other people had taken and I was only vaguely aware I had noted I was in them.<p>I just deleted my facebook account.<p>With the exception of technical friends who have children, and are trying to find an easy way to share pictures with the grand-parents/inlaws/family, the majority of my colleagues in the valley have just stopped using, and in many cases, have deleted their facebook account.<p>End of problem. No more intrusions of this kind.<p>Not the solution for everyone, but it's a pretty straightforward mechanism to eliminate this problem, and, in my case, really cost me nothing.<p>Now, if I had to delete my Amazon account to avoid those tracking ads, that would be a whole new level of pain. I don't know if I'm ready to do that, yet.
How long before Twitter goes the same route? You are asking for people to follow you "safely" on Twitter. Don't hold your breath, you have not seen the future, nobody has.<p>These are the reasons I don't click on Like anywhere, certainly not on brands.<p>Facebook has been a mess since they have introduced the promoting stories. They have even added an additional Page Feed, which in my case, has been sitting idle gathering unread counts.<p>Update: IMHO, the best is to use Facebook publicly in a read-only mode. If you must follow the updates from someone, follow their RSS from their website or their email newsletter, they must have one or the other, or else they are not worth it. It is also better to keep yourself logged out of Facebook when you don't need to use it. Twitter is not that bad right now but it still shoots spam messages with bad links without you knowing about it. So your actions or inaction on any social media can directly or indirectly affect your relationship with your friends/contact.
Wow, I thought when I opted out of having my names next to ads that I wouldn't show up in the sponsored stories of people, either, but apparently that's completely different, and I can't turn it off. (see: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/</a>)<p>Is there an easy way to "un-like" everything? Facebook automatically made me "like" everything that I had on my interests a long time back, and now that's turning me into an advertising icon for those brands to my friends? No thanks. So do I have to go through each one individually, or is there some way I can get rid of all these "likes" at once?
"I was actually experimenting with how these “like gates”, as they’re called, work because for my own company we were also playing with creating tools to encourage people to like someone’s Facebook page."<p>Sounds a little hypocritically for criticising facebook about these dirty tricks and then building a business around them. That feeling you get when you see these adverts with your name on? That's the same feeling I get when I'm forced to unnaturally 'like' something on facebook in order to see something else.
As soon as they insisted that one's likes be(come) public, I decided that that was the end of that (for me, at least).<p>Remember: Likes (or whatever they used to be called back then, e.g. items listed on your profile) used to be content you could restrict to your friends. Pointers for them to stuff you found cool and interesting. Then FB assigned them to the "forced to be public" part of your profile. Now, eventually, they've become primarily a vehicle for 1) Gaming people to participate (self-serving contests), in order to 2) Spam their graph.<p>Likes no longer represent user-generated content.
When it comes down to making money, FaceBook is acting exactly like every other big media & communications company: they are doing everything in their power to extract economic rents, to the extent permitted by law, so long as it doesn't annoy or push away too many customers. This isn't really news.
This! My fb news feed is heavily spammed by products a few of my friends 'liked'.<p>Making the situation worse:<p>- Some ads, one example for me is TD Bank, are shown repeatedly and redundantly months after months. You'd think they would know I am not interested by now.<p>- On 4.7" screen phone, these are almost full screen ads.<p>- I'm pretty sure the people who 'liked' these companies aren't aware they are continuously spamming me.<p>I usually don't mind a few ads if it will pay for a free service and when they are well targeted I might even click on them. Just the other day, a fb ad reminded me to go to a delicious local burger place I don't enjoy nearly often enough. However the current level of ad aggressivity is way past the limit of what is acceptable.
Amazing to me how many people bitch and whine about a free service. If you paid for Facebook access then it would be completely understandable, but you don't. So change the settings or go to Google+ (if that's still around).
I hardly go on Facebook anymore mostly because of all the advertisements that get interleaved into the news stream. It's definitely a case of, if you don't like it then don't use it. There is no one forcing you to use Facebook and if they have a user base that is willing to put up with an Ad supported experience then so be it. AdBlock helps a lot in keeping at least the right hand ads to a minimum. It's funny going on a friends computer who doesn't have AdBlock and being surprised at the amount of advertising on Facebook. As an aside, I love my Nest thermostat.
An interesting wrinkle on this was the recent Presidential election in the US. Some of my contacts "Liked" Romney's or Paul Ryan's page (or both) Every 3rd or 5th day they were there when I looked at my feed "Romney is great" and your 3 friends liked this etc. My first reaction was "Wow, my friends are pretty hard core Romney fans if they're liking every new post he puts up on his page" So from endorsing him once they sent the message indirectly to their friends about 8 - 12 over a two month period that they're a supporter. That's probably a lot more in your friends' face with your political belief than most realize. It's like the guy at a BBQ who casually says "I think I'm voting for Obama" vs the friend whom every time you see them in the build up to the election wants to talk about their candidate and you're voting for him right?
Related to liked pages, I've noticed a few times in the past month or two that friend's months-old status updates that have links to products on Amazon.com now re-appear in my current news feed as "sponsored posts".<p>So it seems like advertisers can also sponsor posts containing links to their domains to re-appear in your feed.
There is no word for this except spam.<p>I am so tired of seeing that a very weak connection has liked Samsung Mobile... every... single... freaking.... day...<p>As a result, I've contacted friends in the exact same manner: "Hey, can you unlike this product, I'm tired of seeing it every day for the last few months."
I've always seen those like ads and wondered... why?!? I can understand liking a struggling business or artist, but in what situation does it make sense to like Visa or Walmart or Sprint or whatever? It doesn't. It should be pretty obvious that everything you do on Facebook these days will be monetized. And Facebook hits the jackpot when you explicitly state a preference for a particular corporation.<p>When Facebook took my comma delimited list of "interests" and turned them all into ads, I figured out Facebook had <i>sold out</i>. Call me melodramatic, but this was years before Zuckerberg claimed "we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services."
I've never been a fan of Facebooks behavior and attitude toward users. I signed up for an account a while back mainly to make it harder for anyone else to 'be' me. I watched as the privacy continually eroded. ( an excellent 2010 chart here: <a href="http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Erosion-Strategy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Er...</a> )
I've been forced to sort out privacy snafus several times over the years, as they added new on-by-default options that I don't want.
I think it's time to leave.
I don't ever "like" major brands. But I do click like on small local businesses, or things my real-life friends are involved with. For a small business, every little bit of free promotion helps.
Why do people (professionals who are not in marketing) use Facebook?<p>As a user of HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet, I honestly don't see the attraction. Seems like it is fraught with annoyances.
This kind of crap is why I unliked everything I possibly could, and then created LikeBuster. I don't want people getting the wrong idea about me because of an ad I didn't actually promote. I honestly think Facebook makes everyone they use for their ad platform look foolish, and I'd prefer not to see my friends insulted like that.<p>There are Chrome and Firefox add-ons for LikeBuster linked at <a href="https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster</a>.
Good post, as someone who occasionally uses promoted posts, it made me realize it is a little weird to target friends of fans, which I believe is the FB default.
I was under the impression that these were the user-facing side of Promoted Posts that go to friends of friends. So I see that one of my friends liked the GRE several times. But I also see "Sponsored Story" under that line, so I ignore it and blame the page itself. On the iOS app at least, it tells me when the Like occurred, which felt a little comical when a friend's Like from 2008 gave me a Sponsored Story a couple weeks ago.
Until people start being willing to pay for services like Facebook or Twitter these kind of antics are inevitable.<p>Unless you're paying you're the product.
Did Facebook change something related to the use of Likes recently? They just managed to tick me off this morning. My nephew's like of a product showed up as an advert for me - and I'm sure he didn't know this was happening.<p>Between this and their social plugin (I've tried disabling this many times), I am a hair away from disabling my account.
Facebook likes have been showing up on advertisements for years. The fact that they're in the news feed now is all that's new. I've mistaken a few of these ads for new posts from friends as well, but it became immediately apparent after my friend like Samsung USA for the 2nd time that it was simply an advertisement.
I agree. They are going way to far. I don't care if they want to mislead people, but please don't do it on my behalf.<p>When I logged in to cancel "Ads shown by third parties" which you linked to, I had a new notification (normally reserved for my friends information) which was a Groupon of the Day. WTF? Seems like two sinking ships.
With gmail you have a marketplace. Gmail might be nice, but email is a protocol and you can take your business elsewhere. Not so with facebook. They've built what's essentially treated as a protocol, but it's completely under their control. Clearly, this makes it rife for what we might perceive as abuse.
This is an unfortunate title. It should read: "Facebook Pages: Why I don't like things anymore". There are going to be more than a few people who might have been on the fence about buying a Nest thermostat and will make a snap judgement based on this title.
I learned recently that legally, "liking" something on Facebook is considered an endorsement of that product or service. I'm sure the law still needs to catch up to technology, but this news stopped all my "liking" activities.
I've removed all my likes to try and clean up my news feed, though my facebook profile still says I still have 110 'likes' , I'm guessing those are websites without a facebook page and I've no idea how to remove those.
this is why i only "like" something by consciously posting about it in my status via a link to product or article. i always found those "like" buttons to be completely moronic and entirely out of my control.
businesses have recently been complaining about facebook forcing them to pay to reach their 'likers', but this is the flip side. I'm seeing more and more sponsored stories about things my friends like, and not seeing the updates from the pages i really do want to see. even in 'most recent' view, facebook fails to show me updates from the pages i have explicitly told it to put in my news feed. which means i'm going to get those updates by other means. which means i'm going to use facebook less.
Facebook should offer an ad-free membership level for a monthly or yearly fee, or give people the option to ignore/hide "Likes" from showing up in their newsfeed.