So I feel the GP's pain, I've taken to marking them as spam as well because I know that my settings aren't guaranteed to stay where they are. It's not even in Facebook's best interest to try and keep my notification settings where they are.
At some point or another they decided to expand this to include re-engagement garbage like "{{Some person you haven't interacted with in 10 years}} {{ commented on their status || uploaded a photo || added a video}}!", so now I've turned off everything but security alerts.
My current frustration is how they won't let you get notifications about new messages by email. I don't want the app, I don't want to 'delete' my account since we know it doesn't really remove anything and I'd rather retain a semblance of control, but I also don't want to leave the occasional person hanging who tries to contact me via Facebook Messenger, since people can still message you even if you mark yourself 'offline'.
I know this is completely intentional and designed to get me to install the Messenger app and look at their ads, but damn if it doesn't grind my gears. If I could go back to 2005 I never would have made a Facebook account to begin with.
Microsoft/Gates also had trouble with this. What is "business hardball" in a startup, can be illegal conduct in an almost-monopoly.
In a kitten, pouncing aggression is cute... in a liger, not so much. For the same behavior, you'd put it down.
Individuals can similarly fail to recognize transitions. "You can't do X." "But I've been doing X for years!" "Yes, but here you have relationship Y, so X is no longer ethical/legal."
It's weird to expect that deleting your account will result in the account being deleted and notifications for the account you no longer have to go away?
It's nice to know there's a workaround for when account deletion isn't respected, but you could skip the incredulity, you shouldn't have to go through your settings, and your settings shouldn't affect your notifications, if you delete your account.
But the person above just stopped using their account, didn't delete it (or disable it, which is what facebook sends you on the path towards), so that is why the notifications continued. They still had an active account, just hadn't logged in for some time.
Why should @bmelton expect Facebook to respect the notification settings after he has evidence they didn't respect the account deletion request multiple times?
It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications. That's what pretty much all other web sites and services currently do. They may ping you several times, but eventually they will stop. I know because I run a service that does this, and I pay attention to what other services are doing, and I care about what is socially acceptable. Facebook, unlike other services, ramps up their notification schedule when you get quiet, rather than assuming that no contact and no response after multiple attempts means you don't want to use their service.
What Facebook is doing is what's weird here.
Elsewhere in this thread, @wpietri makes a compelling argument that were Facebook a person in your life, the increasing notifications would be considered very annoying and needy. This is the reason it's weird for a company to do the same thing.
No, it's not. This would be like if my post office stopped delivering my mail because I didn't call them up and tell them to keep delivering my mail.
What is the correct functionality for Facebook given this user's settings?
I do not agree that it should stop sending notifications. Let's say I _want_ to keep getting notifications via email without having to open Facebook every so often. I would have my settings match theirs and I would be quite annoyed if it just stopped working because I didn't log in.
You might be lumping all notifications into the same bucket. There's a difference between a Facebook message that notifies you of someone else IMing or commenting on your photo, and a Facebook message that reminds you to use Facebook or upsell you on services.
That difference has standard terminology in the web business sphere: transactional email vs marketing email. Generally speaking these things have a hard line between them, and are easy to define & separate. Marketing is sales, and transactional is private notifications about your account activity & private notifications from social contacts. Marketing is what other sites stop sending after too much inaction, and marketing is what Facebook is increasing in response to inaction. Transactional notifications don't stop, and they shouldn't stop. I suspect you're misunderstanding me and assuming I'm talking about all email, and not just marketing.
I agree that I misunderstood part of what you were saying. It also sounds like we both agree that the notifications ("transactional email", from the sounds of it) should be going through. I was only ever trying to make a statement about those types of emails. I agree that upping the marketing emails is pretty bad.
I think this line in particular is where I misunderstood:
> It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications.
In this case, I interpret "notifications" as "transactional emails".
> when the users wish/intent is clear
How is it clear? Their whole post is stating that all they did was not use the site for a bit.
Given that they have an active account and notification are set to notify, why would they ever assume you no longer want notifications? They could very well want all of those notifications (since they have them turned off), so not sending them would actually be the exact opposite of what it should do.
This would be like if my post office stopped delivering my mail because I didn't call them up and tell them to keep delivering my mail.
However, if that isn't the basis of their expectation, I don't really understand the rest of their post. Especially "knowing full well that I didn't see them" (how?) and proceeding to mark the emails as spam... instead of turning off the notifications...
The latter is why I believe they expected the notifications to stop.
Edit: as far as the notifications getting more frequent, that actually is pretty interesting, but not really relevant to the other points made.
Are you not aware that Facebook is attempting to track emails and links for everyone? The mechanisms are numerous and varied, but putting "tracking pixels" in HTML emails is standard practice. If you ever ran a Mailchimp list, you'd know you get reports on who received your email, who opened and looked at them, who clicked any link in them, etc.
Facebook also track visits to any site on the web with Facebook integration, via cookies, which is a large number of popular sites. They know when you've seen their emails, if you're like "most people" and you use hotmail or gmail and not pine. You have to be pretty privacy & security adept to have a Facebook account and avoid getting tracked. 99% of people who use Facebook are not adept enough (or just don't care enough to fight it), and their emails & visits to Facebook and elsewhere are tracked.
Me, I think it's weird to think: "It's perfectly reasonable that if you once give somebody your email they will bother you until the end of time unless you jump through any arbitrary hoops they set up."
I've done this before, just let myself keep getting emails and hoped they stopped. Then I just clicked all of the unsubscribe links they are legally required to put in every email, and I never got an email again.
You don't have to hope for what you want, you can act upon it.
My point is that it's not how it normally works with humans. If a person did this, it would be creepy and controlling. But when a group of people does it because it might make them money, it's ok to blame the person they're bothering.
I get your perspective and agree that it is, for the moment, the dominant one. I just disagree that it's weird to think otherwise.
I don't think it's any more ideal to have to opt out of communications, I'm merely saying that expecting not to have to opt out is a misjudgement.
I'd rather more closely understand reality than hope it gives me exactly what I want. Facebook does not owe me anything.
Although when bringing up paper mail, we should note there are many different standards. Are we talking the standards of 1792, when the USPS was created? Perhaps we use the 1879 mail classification act? The 1920s, when the Direct Mail Advertising Association was formed? How about around the time of the junk mail controversy of 1953? Or perhaps 1970, when Chief Justice Warren Berger wrote, "Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive."
1) Clicking "unsubscribe" confirmed that you received the spam mail, so spammers would activate your email address on their other lists, thereby increasing the amount of spam you received. Otoh, acting like /dev/null increased the chance that spammers culled your address to increase their apparent delivery ratio.
2) Following those links gives the spammer access to your web browser, along with tracking cookies, and chances to exploit any plugin vulnerabilities.
3) Your chances of getting phished are way higher if you follow mail that looks like it's from ICQ than if you just go directly to icq.com and find their unsubscribe settings. (I didn't say I got that advice recently....)
[1] In Germany, there is a specific section of the public code governing ToS ("AGB-Gesetz", part of the BGB). Among other things, it forbids "unexpected" terms, acknowledging that people usually cannot read all the ToS that they have to agree to in practice. Quite a few ToS have been nullified by courts because of that rule.
On Facebook, the unsubscribe link is very fine-grained, and is specific to the exact type of notification the link appeared on. I don't think you can fault anyone for giving up on them if you use one but still get Facebook spam.
In fact, those unsubscribe links are the only fine-grained way to control notifications. You can't only preemptively subscribe to the specific notifications you want. The options you get are all, nothing, or dick around with dozens of unsubscribe links for weeks.
Facebook is all dark UI patterns. It's so bad to the point where I don't think any user can be faulted for not knowing how get it to do what they want.
I just don't buy this. I don't get emails. I didn't have to contact customer support. I didn't have to ask for help. I just clicked the link in the email and turned everything off.
That's false; Facebook demonstrably does not work that way at present. If you're getting Facebook emails, the unsubscribe link is scoped only to the particular type of email notification it appeared on. You'll continue to get all the others until you click unsubscribe on each individually, or go into the settings and disable email notifications totally.
Again, they use dark and overly complicated UX patterns to make difficult for people to unsubscribe totally, and this is almost certainly intentional (but deniable). I think it's totally reasonable for someone just assume Facebook's whole unsubscribe system doesn't work, as it's not really reasonable to expect people to invest the time to learn Facebook's deliberately bad unsubscribe system.
I never asked FB to send me any texts other than for 2fa and this is pushy and unwelcome.
"Facebook activated my dormant account and it won’t let me deactivate it"
That doesn't strike me as particularly unreasonable, rather projection of ill will onto Facebook. They have no way of knowing which person is actually the account owner, actual ID would definitively settle the matter.
I stopped using Facebook 6 years ago and haven't gotten a single email / sms from them since then, because I used the settings properly.
Yeah, if you just ghost them and never click "update your email settings" at the bottom of every email they send, they'll keep sending them.