Oculus / Facebook Cautionary Tale

Soldato
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All's it will take is one drunken post.....

You think? And how drunk have you got to be? Or is it a case of in vino veritas for some?

I reckon an active account with one bad post will be flagged, warned etc. But probably not instabanned.

Online companies don't like getting rid of good customers. Even malware advertisers can get back on advertising networks again and again, because they pay good money. If a partner, or someone else important, complains, then they'll get the heave-ho maybe, but otherwise, what makes money stays. Facebook aren't going to instaban a decent active account.

A duplicate account, a long dormant and newly logged in account, a brand new account that then doesn't do anything? Sure, they probably aren't missing out on much by being a bit more aggressive. But one with decent activity is less likely to go I reckon.
 
Soldato
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Another issue at the moment is even temporary locks where they ask for verification are turning into indefinite bans as Facebook say they may never get around to reviewing cases.
 
Soldato
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Online companies don't like getting rid of good customers. Even malware advertisers can get back on advertising networks again and again, because they pay good money. If a partner, or someone else important, complains, then they'll get the heave-ho maybe, but otherwise, what makes money stays. Facebook aren't going to instaban a decent active account.
You're making a mistake comparing Facebook with a commercial organisation, you are not a customer of Facebook you are a service user it is a totally different relationship. Facebook have a totally captive audience, they can and do make up their own rules because you as a service user have no choice as to whether to accept them or not especially if you are tied to them via a Oculus headset as you can't just say you'll stop using their service without losing access to your hardware. The real frustration for me is that unlike any other online organisation I have dealt with there is no channel open to me that I can use to attempt to resolve the issue that I have. Any commercial organisation would legally have to have an accessible dispute resolution channel but with Facebook they have made it impossible to communicate outside of their predefined forms which they have purposefully made to be as obtuse as possible so they can be automated and dealt with by their software.
 
Associate
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Interest point. You bought your quest2 from oculus, which is a separate entity from facebook, but facebook can possibly prohibit your use of a piece of hardware that they werw not directly involved in selling to you.

It sounds like a very dubious legal setup. That's like Argos selling you an Argos tablet, but you need an active login from tiktok to get it going, and if they don't want to give it to you, or want to disable it for whatever reason, the tablet is dead. And there is no business relationship between you and tiktok. Sounds like Argos is responsible. Even if tiktok owns Argos, it's still Argos's issue.

I am not at all familiar with the business model between Facebook and Oculus, I'm guessing Oculus is operating as a separate business entity.
 
Soldato
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I am not at all familiar with the business model between Facebook and Oculus, I'm guessing Oculus is operating as a separate business entity.

As far as I know, Oculus is a wholly owned subsidary of Facebook now, not a separate entity.

However Oculus products have been taken off sale in Germany precisely because being forced to use a separate product to use another product isn't allowed - it's called coupling. It can be argued, that at least for Rift, Rift S and Quest that didn't originally use Facebook accounts, that forcing them to use a separate product to continue to use their devices is against consumer law as you are changing the basis on which they were purchased in the first place.

The situation with Quest 2 is somewhat more difficult as it says 'Requires a Facebook account' on the box. Though authorities may take a dim view of a company forcing users to use a social media account for a gaming device.

Generally where Germany leads, the EU will follow, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes. This is on top of Facebook threatening to leave Europe altogether, as Ireland is taking legal action against Facebook to try to prevent them sharing user data with Facebook's US servers.

Though that does have massive implications, because a lot of services, including gaming services share info with US servers - Steam for example.
 
Soldato
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It's not just Facebook who have pathetic customer service, Google are just as bad.

The Mrs lost access to YouTube and YouTube music because our kids uploaded a video by mistake which had the radio playing in the background. Fair enough, mistakes happen, but the problem is like Facebook, everything is driven by bots meaning there is no way to speak to a human to regain access. The people you can talk to, don't know anything about YouTube.

Ai isn't advanced enough yet, so it's confusing why they are hiding behind it.
 
Soldato
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There have been a few more instances of Reddit users creating Facebook accounts and having them instantly banned. Sometimes it's due to previous deleted accounts, but even people who haven't had Facebook before have had their accounts banned for 'breaking community standards' when they've made no posts, and have used their real info to sign up.

I hope Facebook/Oculus are working on sorting this out before Quest 2 launches, as it's not going to be pretty otherwise.
 
Soldato
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It's not just Facebook who have pathetic customer service, Google are just as bad.

The Mrs lost access to YouTube and YouTube music because our kids uploaded a video by mistake which had the radio playing in the background. Fair enough, mistakes happen, but the problem is like Facebook, everything is driven by bots meaning there is no way to speak to a human to regain access. The people you can talk to, don't know anything about YouTube.

Ai isn't advanced enough yet, so it's confusing why they are hiding behind it.

I had a youtube video with around a half million views, it got wrongly copyright struck by about 5 different companies all claiming I was using their music (I wasn't) and demonitized... All claims were relinquished after being challenged but for some reason it would never allow me to monetize the video again, the option was permanently greyed out for that one video. I found out then that it is simply impossible to communicate with Google/Youtube unless you are a very high tier creator and you have to have a pretty high level of watched hours in a previous time period to even be able to speak to anyone.
 
Associate
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It is shame they have to act like this, be glad when facebook goes the way of myspace, i know a lot of younger people have moved onto other platforms and their is quite a few other promising platforms in the works.

Wonder if someone could come up with some different firmware for these headsets and make it opensource like they do with phones, its a shame really as the whole idea behind oculus was a community led project which started on MTBS forum, i watched how the community helped palmer and donated him things like the LEEP lenses, VR headsets etc and helped him work out how to do things, then as he had plenty of money he could afford to try the things that the community always wanted to do but could not afford, believe me he was no genius it was the years of knowledge and work of the community that got him to the point where he could do the kickstarter, everyone was so hyped for a open source headset everyone could use. Then he completely sold out and threw everyone under the bus.
The only good thing that came out of it was getting people interested in VR, i think though with all the VR tech improving i am sure their will be some other great headsets coming out in the next few years i just hope people don't lose interest in it all before that as i love VR stuff.
 
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