Friday morning, I got this email from Facebook. I had no idea what they were was on about:
Unregistration noticeI knew that I do not have, nor have I ever had, a “developer account”, and didn’t even know what that is. I’ve never in my life done anything even remotely related to developing apps. I can’t even imagine that ever changing.
Hi, This is to inform you that your developer account does not have any roles on any apps (such as an admin). As such, to keep your developer account registration, we ask that you create an app or receive a role on an existing app within the next 30 days. If this developer account is not associated with an app by this date, this developer account will become unregistered. Please note that this will be the only reminder you receive in this time period and if no action is taken, this account will become unregistered in 30 days.
My first reaction was about how their systems can send out irrelevant mails, but they just can’t seem to find a way to identify or deter actual, real-live extremists on their platform, even when content that goes against their “community guidelines” is pointed out to them. Totally checks out.
Later, I checked, and it turned out that I DO have a Developer Account for some mysterious reason. Their "Meta for Developers" site has absolutely no support options whatsoever—of course!!!—except for being able to ask questions in a community forum. When I checked on Thursday, he most recent topic was about this very topic, and 18 others had also posted to it that they'd received the same cryptic email—18 people who'd also bothered to dig around the Meta for Developers thingee to try and find support. Two people mentioned that they had a separate Page, as I do (for my AmeriNZ Blog and Podcast), but that's part of Meta for Business, not the Developer stuff. Maybe one of their few remaining coders accidentally messed up the code and ended up creating Developer Accounts for people with Pages?
No one from Meta posted an explanation to the forum (of course) and the question remained marked "Unresolved"—because it was. The most common thing people were worried about was that in 30 days Meta/Facebook will close ALL a person's FB accounts/Pages, not just the Developer Account. It'd be, ya know, kinda nice if Meta had an actual human who monitored forums and could post an explanation—since there's absolutely NO other way to get an answer—but so that seemed too hard for the company.
The next day, I saw that the Facebook Developers blog had an update to a post about this (I found the post about ten hours after it was updated). They’d added: "Unregistration [of Developer Accounts] will only apply to developer accounts; this change doesn’t impact personal Facebook accounts." So, that's that: I don't have to do anything, and my normal account will be fine.
Two things: Given that the company doesn't believe in having actual human beings available to answer users' questions, why couldn't they have been clear in the email and avoided all the confusion? After all, it was clearly important enough for them to update their blog post a day or so after the emails had gone out. Second, why don't they have anyone monitoring their "community" forums to answer the question like this? The answers, of course, are found in one simple fact: We don't pay anything for FB.
There's a common saying about social media companies: "If you're not the customer, you're the product". I'd say "inventory", rather than "product" because selling access to us is how these companies make their money. This is why the blue checkmark Facebook offers by subscription specifically offers access to customer service PEOPLE as a benefit: By paying for services, people with the checkmark become customers and get things we inventory folks don't.
For me, frustrated as I get with Facebook, right now it's not bad enough to make me quit. Yeah, I'm inventory, but FB is still good for hanging out and interacting with my fellow "inventorians". For now, anyway.
But I could do without so much weirdness.
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