Comment by IsaacL

When I see things like, I try to actually answer the question "why don't they fix this"? Often it's not because the company in question is dumb, but because they're operating within certain design constraints.

Think of the design space here:

Given: 1. Facebook has close to a billion profiles linked to people's real names. 2. By default, these profiles are publicly searchable.

You want to design messaging so that: 3. People can message people they're not friends with. 4. But you don't want to encourage spammers in any way.

3 & 4 are hard to reconcile. If you have what is essentially a global telephone directory, letting people message anyone is going to lead to horrendous spam. By the sounds of the article, they do some clever filtering to let you know if your message gets through, but it seems they still have to learn towards too-strict filtering. (It's not just viagra and penis enlargement pills - probably most FB spam would be "LIKE our page for the BEST student events in Reno" or "hey girl u look fine u got bf?")

Maybe the pay-a-dollar-and-get-refunded-if-they-reply feature could work, I don't know.