I never said that. I agreed that it's a line that shouldn't be crossed. But I'm still surprised that people are surprised.

Please define "message".

It may refer to an item in your facebook stream. In which case, nothing in the messages has been altered.

Or "message" may refer to the the facebook stream as a whole, made up of the smaller individual message items by your friends and/or advertisers.

In that case, facebook is the sender of the message and the "message" always has been subject to facebook picking news items. We basically had more than one algorithm (or parameter sets for the same alogrithm) that picked those messages. And as picking messages (or message items in this definition) out of all those potential messages sources (friends/groups/pages, whatever you're following) has always been the core of what facebook made to create its message (the stream you're seeing) there is not much new here either.

i agree that context is essential for "messages". But when you're posting something on facebook to your friends, you never had control when, where and even if it will appear in other users stream. So the context in which your post may or may not appear is not under the senders control and therefor not part of the message.

Could you please give an example how facebook could have changed a message (and not the delivery context, which has always been under facebook control) without changing the content?

I never said it was acceptable. I said it was widespread. And I put that line where you're manipulating someones emotions for commercial gain without their consent. (When I'm watching a comedy, I WANT my emotional state to be manipulated)

Agreed.

But intresting enough, according to one of those news articles I read about that issue today, one of the potential harm that was supposed to be subject of the experiment was feeling left out by too many positive news about their friends.(*)

May be BS, but may indeed be a valid and intresting theory, too.

(*) That statement should have at least 6 pairs of "quotes" around certain "words". I left them out for readability.

Point taken.

I'll reduce that claim to "commercial web design". But that's still the majority of pages out there. They want to SELL. And if it takes those dancing bears, there is no way they won't use dancing bears.

Quick: what toilet paper brand has dancing bears as mascots?
And aren't they cute and funny and loveable.... See, it works.

So you don't want to create websites that people enjoy using?

That may explain the design of the average Linux user group website, but wold also explains why websites like facebook or even lolcats, that target emotions, have more commercial success.

Yes. And I agree with you.

I never said it was or should be accepted, I said it was widespread. And that in marketing, emotional manipulation is even out of the experimental stage.

But according to /., not what happend here.

According to this article here, no messages were changed:

(emphasis mine).

I agree with you that changing the actual messages would not be acceptable by any standard.

And again I agree with you that you're stepping over a line when you're consciously manipulating people's feelings for economic reasons. But this line is crossed thousandfold already. The type of environment is secondary. A/B-tests take place in controlled environments, too.

Creating an emotional response is part of marketing and therefore webdesign.

Of course you're not directly monitoring emotions as a data point during A/B-Tests. You measure e.g. the clicks, pages read or the time spent on the website. But every marketing guy worth its money could tell you that you can increase all of that by "making the user feel at home".

I understand why this should be considered wrong and fully understand users who don't want to have someone (less some company!) playing with their feelings.

But on the other hand, considering that creating an emotional response has been a standard marketing tool for the last 20 years, how is this different from regular A/B-Testing? 50% of your website users will see a slightly altered version of your website, and you compare response rates to the users receiving the "old" or "original" website.

Advertisers are manipulating our feelings for decades.News outlets have been doing it to an extent it became part of the news format itself (I guess anyone who was watching tv news last night saw that light-hearted, cozy, human-intrest or slightly oddball or cute item concluding the broadcast, right?) While creating negative feelings toward someone else has always been used in political campaigns.

It even becomes less spectacular if you consider, that on facebook, there always has been a selection algorithm in place, that tried to select those items from all your facebook-sources, that might keep your intrest focused onto facebook. Without selection, your facebook would scroll past like the Star Wars end titles. Only the parameters of the selection have been fine tuned, as they probably are at each facebook server update. It would be some new quality if that selection had been "objective" before, but being "personal" and emotional instead, is what kept us at facebook already.

So this is old news. But it should be a wake-up call: WAKE UP, THIS IS OLD NEWS! PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO MANIPULATE YOUR FEELINGS FOR AGES!

Just in case you haven't noticed. I'm surprised about the number of people who are surprised.

That there is /. in it should have been a giveaway that your imagination was flawed from the begining...

It doesn't seem far fetched at all that we don't fully understand the physics behind the Higgs boson. I'd rather say it's OBVIOUS that we don't understand the physics behind it.

A non-crushed universe should be proof enough that our current theories are missing something.

I think it takes more than three words scribbled on a piece of paper to circumvent the first sales doctrine.

But I agree with you that tickets are a special case.

That's why the OP and me explicitly talked about actual physical goods and not physical tokens for entertainment services. But then again, 10 years ago, no one would have expected concert tickets to be handled differently from other physical goods. After all, as you said, tickets have been invented to have a convinient way to buy sell that right like you would buy and sell a gallon of milk.

And yes, of course contracts have to be fulfilled legaly. But that doesn't change my point that a contract, after its fulfilment is fulfilled and done with and a fulfilled contract can't be broken (read: NOT be fulfilled) as it has been already fulfilled.

I thought of your remark as an intresting and valid(!) point. Intresting because they are usually NOT privately but public owned, as communism would require.

I call BS. Or rather First Sales doctrine.

You can't break a contract that has already been fulfilled. Money has changed hands, a physical good has changed hands. The contract is fulfilled.