Facebook seems to be running scared of a new social network that is slowly emerging and is resorting to methods that will ensure that noone or very few get to know of this new entity.
The new social network that has made Facebook terrified and angry is called Tsu. It's a social network that promises to pay its users for posting content to its site, Wired reports.
However, you might not have heard of Tsu or, if you have indeed heard of it, be unable to share the good glad news about Tsu because nay mention of the social network immediately draws the attention of Facebook bots and crawlers and all mentions of 'Tsu.co' get immediately blocked or erased, Wired noted.
'Tsu.co' is the new social network company's address. It's a beautiful site, take a visit and see and you might even get to like it better than Facebook in a while.
Facebook's reaction to Tsu lurking around the corner with a model that might be revolutionary is reminiscent of the jitters it got when Ello turned up in 2014. Facebook did not like Ello's founder Paul Budnitz assert bluntly that "We see Facebook as an advertising platform not a social network. Users are products at Facebook. They want to know as much as possible to advertise to you."
When Ello was launched, it's manifesto stated that Ello would have no ads, no data-mining, no algorithms that make decisions you ought to have made.
According to Wired, Facebook is even more discomfited by Tsu whose CEO Sebastian Sobczak claims Facebook went "so far as to retroactively remove any mention of the site from its archives". Sites like Boing Boing and Tech News Today filed stories about the Facebook 'ban' on Tsu. What's interesting is that Facebook reportedly ensures that those stories cannot circulate on its platform.
Accoding to Wired, "Tsu promises to pay users a percentage of its advertising revenue." It also offers you a cut of revenue generated by content posted by people you refer to Tsu, it adds. Wired cited CEO Sebastian Sobczak as saying that users are rewarded for building the network.
Those testing Facebook's reactions to posting about Tsu say some posts get past the platform's guardian algorithms. Facebook, on its part, claims that Tsu violates its platform policy which does not allow users to 'incentivise' content sharing. Facebooks sees such action as spamming. The problem lies in that posts made on Tsu are automatically shared on Facebook, a form of spam in the eyes of Facebook.
Ello has survived Facebook and is slowly becoming a robust social network with its own flavour and user spectrum. It remains to be seen how far the Tsu experiment in taking on a giant like Facebook and finding a niche for itself will succeed.
