Your thoughts about the new FB restriction

[Filip]

Recently Facebook started enforcing Animal protection policies that forbid any sale or trade of livestock via FB pages .
How do you all feel about this recent restriction and how do you think it will affect our hobby in general and discus trade in particular ,in a possitive or a negative way ?

I feel that quallity will prevail quantity and reputable sellers and LFSs will be affected in a positive way.
The number of "non seasoned " and new hobbists may be in decline because they won't be able to find low quallity , dirt cheap , half inch discus on FB any more though .

[Second Hand Pat]

Recently Facebook started enforcing Animal protection policies that forbid any sale or trade of livestock via FB pages .
How do you all feel about this recent restriction and how do you think it will affect our hobby in general and discus trade in particular ,in a possitive or a negative way ?

I feel that quallity will prevail quantity and reputable sellers and LFSs will be affected in a positive way.
The number of "non seasoned " and new hobbists may be in decline because they won't be able to find low quallity , dirt cheap , half inch discus on FB any more though .

Hi Filip, do you have a link you can share regarding this? I can not find anything on this and have not heard of it.
Pat

[Second Hand Pat]

I did find this after a bit of searching https://www.facebook.com/policies/commerce/prohibited_content/animals. Note the last item "Any part, pelt or skin from an animal, including fur". So this affects articles of clothing, shoes, saddles etc.
Pat

[brewmaster15]

Recently Facebook started enforcing Animal protection policies that forbid any sale or trade of livestock via FB pages .
How do you all feel about this recent restriction and how do you think it will affect our hobby in general and discus trade in particular ,in a possitive or a negative way ?

I feel that quallity will prevail quantity and reputable sellers and LFSs will be affected in a positive way.
The number of "non seasoned " and new hobbists may be in decline because they won't be able to find low quallity , dirt cheap , half inch discus on FB any more though .

I don't follow facebook, refuse to drink the cool-aid there.:) so I don't know the details on this policy, but if facebook is not allowing Fish sales anymore and actually enforces that, its going to seriously affect alot of sellers and buyers . Many sellers rely on facebook as their main outlet.

Call me selfish here, but I think its a given that for forums with livestock classifieds this move would be a potential life-line and a huge boon. It could reset the clock to when sellers relied on forum communities and not the facebook machine. That in turn could bring new members to the forums. I'm not holding my breath, but hey, one can hope.

I will say though that its a bit omninous, If facebook has gone this route, other social media like you-tube and twitter could as well. That would definitely hurt many in the hobby at least in the short run.


Its a trend we are seeing, I wrote last year about how paypal working capital would not give loans anymore to dealers of livestock.

Al

[brewmaster15]

I'm not seeing much in internet searches.. I see this goes back to 2016/2017 but appears to be currently being enforced in some circles....

http://arachnoboards.com/threads/no-more-sale-of-animals-on-facebook.319099/

al

[jeep]

FB has not only been deleting livestock posts, they've been deleting entire groups without notice. I'm not a fan of FB either, but I would hate to lose our presence there. We've clearly stated that commercial sales are limited to forum sponsors, but individual sales have been left alone, even though our members have been thoughtful enough to ask permission before posting. I don't know if they're only deleting posts with prices or deleting posts with links as well. There are several petitions out there with very good points about the beneficial aspects of reducing poaching and helping to reduce capturing/exporting endangered species.

[Filip]

Its been discussed all over the FB fish groups in this past week and it still took me a half an hour to find a link from a discussion on that darn FB app :) .
Here it is , one of many discusions :

https://www.facebook.com/groups/FishTankEnablers/permalink/638361713243910/


I went thorough and read all the people comments in the post and came to realise that this was an 3 year old policy that FB suddenly decided enforcing .
It has already shut down many fish trade oriented groups and pages and has enabled "report " and "flag" feature for any post that contains fish sell so that FB users can police each other and help enforcing the rule .
Almost all fish groups have already announced that live stock selling is not allowed in their board .

[Filip]

FB has not only been deleting livestock posts, they've been deleting entire groups without notice. I'm not a fan of FB either, but I would hate to lose our presence there. We've clearly stated that commercial sales are limited to forum sponsors, but individual sales have been left alone, even though our members have been thoughtful enough to ask permission before posting. I don't know if they're only deleting posts with prices or deleting posts with links as well. There are several petitions out there with very good points about the beneficial aspects of reducing poaching and helping to reduce capturing/exporting endangered species.

Jeep , I think you should officially announce on our FB page too , that live stock sales are not allowed any more .
We got to find a way to prevent sales and pricing in our group because as you already mentoned ,FB can shut down our group without any warning .

As far I know from people discussion so far , you can put links to web selling site or advertise fish in a form of discussion but soon as you put price on the post ,it becomes a problem for FB .

I hope there is some FB users service that can shed some light on how do we react as a FB group to avoid problems.

[jeep]

I've actually been wanting to deal with this for the past few days. Thanks, you just answered some of my questions. We have invited our sponsors to post on our page and I was curious if posting links was also in violation, since many people have speculated that FB's only interest was in generating revenue.

I will write up an amendment and present for approval ;)

[Filip]

Here is another link :

https://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/news/fishkeeping-news/articles/2019/4/24/cant-find-your-favourite-facebook-fish-selling-page-facebook-may-have-deleted-it


Some user reviews said that one should go back to history posts and delete all selling post in the group , which sounds impossible :) .

[jeep]

I think this is the answer... "He added that he could show the fish and a link to his website, or that it was available in store, however."

Out of commitment to our sponsors, we've been keeping sales posts very limited, so going back a bit shouldn't be too hard...

[gunnerschh2]

Big Brother Cometh!!!!!!!!!!!

[Phil4Discus]

Hopefully it'll work in the forum's favor and help support the sponsors by bringing interested buyers here where they can join the discussions as well as make purchases from reputable sellers/breeders.

[Filip]

Hopefully it'll work in the forum's favor and help support the sponsors by bringing interested buyers here where they can join the discussions as well as make purchases from reputable sellers/breeders.

And that alone would even out all the negative aspects of this restriction :) .
As Al already said " we all may be a little selfish here but..... " :)

[pitdogg2]

Do not care what FB does. I will never have nor use anything Facebook.

[Phil4Discus]

And that alone would even out all the negative aspects of this restriction :) .
As Al already said " we all may be a little selfish here but..... " :)

I am a huge Duke basketball fan and have been a member of a Duke forum for over 10 years now and I've seen the affects of Facebook on there as well. So it seems like Facebook just ruins every hobby or interest when it comes to forum based information outlets.