In practice that's not really a meaningful distinction. For a business that survives by selling ads, pissing off your users is just as bad as pissing off your advertisers; you need both to survive, not just one or the other.

Maybe, but like anything else there will be a calculation performed to determine how much it pisses people off as opposed to how much they might make by having people be suckered into^W^Wrejoin the fold.

It's like Ford in the 70's with the Pinto, trading off the cost of law suits vs. the cost of a recall.

So, yes. I agree with you in spirit, but not all users are as skilled, or upset, by this as others. And some may actually be lured back in.

That has nothing to do with whether you're a paying customer or not though. (As illustrated by your example with Ford, where the people being harmed were clearly "the customer", not "the product".)

I don't understand why this was down-voted, it's a very insightful quote and not the first time I've seen it.

People severely overestimate their own free-will and downplay the role of luck and external forces in their lives. If free-will was absolute and unlimited, then Facebook wouldn't be able to make any money from advertising. If you look at Facebook's income statement, you can actually quantify how much free-will Facebook took away from humanity.

Facebook's mission is basically to take free-will out of people and turn it into dollars for corporations.

Don't frustrate returning products then.

So long as the trade-off doesn't upset too many, they may still end up ahead.

I pay for Facebook (ads, as well as boosting posts). That makes me a customer, I guess.

You may fulfill both roles, customer and product, but I think that would make you a bit of a rarity. They can upset you as a product and support you as a customer at the same time.

> I pay for Facebook. That makes me a customer.

How does one pay for Facebook? Is there a premium service I'm not aware of?

Hey, sorry. I edited my comment to clarify shortly after posting it, but I imagine you probably loaded the page in the meantime and responded later.

I run ads on Facebook for several Facebook pages and additionally promote their posts (using the per-post boosting) fairly regularly.

Okay that makes sense. I thought it was from the perspective of a John Q. User who has a Facebook account.

In your example though the Ads are the product you're paying for. Not the Facebook account that is purchasing them, though I see how they're inherently linked.

When you own pages you can use Facebook advertising system to #feature# your page on it.

Same way Google do with adword on their search page.