Maxime pfp
Maxime
@maxb
In 2019, my team and I launched a scraper tool with cool features for FB Ads Library, which got 5.000+ sign ups in less than a week. We felt on top of the world, we knew the product would keep getting more attention and that we could scale it easily, until…
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Maxime pfp
Maxime
@maxb
A week later, I was on my way to sleep when I heard an email notification. I checked my phone, saw the notification and my blood started pumping. It was a Cease and Desist letter from Facebook’s lawyers…
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Maxime pfp
Maxime
@maxb
In short, the letter said we were violating Facebook’s terms because we obtained and stored ads and related information from Facebook without authorization. Which was true, we stupidly scraped the FAL lmao But the bad part is…
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Maxime
@maxb
During that night, Facebook blocked: ➡️ All of our products’ FB pages ➡️ Our products domain on FB ➡️ Our ads manager Which is kinda fair tbh, they didn’t want us using their data for our personal gain.
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Maxime
@maxb
But they also banned all our personal accounts on FB and Insta. Keep in mind this is early 2018, by then everyone had an FB account, even my grandma…
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Maxime pfp
Maxime
@maxb
This means we lost of our connections with friends and family members… But also a lot of our unsaved memories, a bunch of family pictures, or the pictures of friday nights with old friends, and even some of my deceased dog… All of it gone…
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Maxime
@maxb
The worst thing is that they didn’t have the legal rights to ban our private accounts. In France, professional and personal accounts are 2 different entities… Of course they didn’t care, we had to play by their rules so we couldn’t do anything except let our lawyers fight.
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Maxime
@maxb
And 8 months later… I almost could have had a kid during this time… We finally got our accounts back after signing an agreement letter to basically promise we didn’t profit from the scraping and that we’ll never do it again. But it didn’t leave me unmoved…
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Maxime
@maxb
Big brands have the monopoly of the Social Graph, so they can do whatever they want like sell any data they get, delete accounts with no warning and never release innovative updates And their user base won't budge because it's too inconvenient to move to another platform.
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Maxime
@maxb
But now these times are starting to end… Web3 is coming back stronger each year, and we’re seeing creative ideas that will profit the end users instead of the corporates in suits.
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Maxime pfp
Maxime
@maxb
End users won’t serve as data for the big guys to sell in bulk anymore. The blockchain is making everything transparent, where only innovations useful to users will prosper, not data mining apps. We still have a long way to go, but we're aiming in the right direction.
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Maxime pfp
Maxime
@maxb
That's why I’m excited to take part in a brand new Web3 journey, to learn and share insights with friends and to build for a better future for our children and their children after them. And most importantly to play by the rules with the most consensus, not those decided by a single entity.
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