What do you do when you have to email a billion people something they’re not going to like, but you don’t really want to hear all the bellyaching that’s bound to come your way?
If you’re Facebook, you bury the bad news in the middle of the longest paragraph on the page, directly under (not in, under) a bullet list of all the mildly cool sounding but mostly inconsequential stuff you’re also doing. Then, you wait for the night before the biggest, longest American holiday of the year to send the email and wait to hit the send button until late at night. That way, by the time people get the email, it’ll be buried under a lot of other emails and a whole lot of those people won’t see the news until the mandatory seven-day comment period is almost over.
Oh, and you don’t include a link to the page of your own site that has more details about the changes. Instead, you include a link to another page and tell people where to click on that page, and then you include another link at the bottom of that page for people to follow if they really, really want to comment.
And — AND– you lead off the bad news with “We deeply value the feedback we receive from you…”
On second thought, just don’t pee on my leg, okay?
I don’t even have that much of a problem with the change that Facebook management is proposing. The current rule is that a user vote on policy changes is advisory only unless at least 30 percent of active users vote. Facebook suggests the removal of the voting part, which is functionally meaningless anyway, because 300 million Facebook users (30 percent of active users right now) aren’t liking George Takei’s hilarious pictures, let alone voting on obscure policy changes. People can still voice their opinions, but they won’t have a non-binding, meaningless vote. I hate to break it to people, but it’s not like Facebook really takes into account what we’re are saying, anyway. Facebook management cares about how many ads you click, not what you think about policy changes.
If you’d like to see what it is that Facebook management is proposing and leave feedback for them to promptly ignore, follow this link. You only have until this Wednesday morning to respond, so hurry!
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