First, you just can’t tell me that 3 seconds of an auto-played video should count as a view. No one can argue that. ComScore’s insistence that you can count a view after three seconds isn’t logical, but at least it assumes that someone clicked on something to initiate the view. You’ve seen your retention graphs…the way Facebook is counting views exists solely to inflate numbers and everyone who’s paying attention knows that.

But more importantly, the theft problem is systemic. Facebook video works so well largely because of the simplicity and ubiquity of freebooting. Freebooting is responsible for a lot of Facebook’s video growth (as is miscounting views). If you took this seriously, you would not be bragging about growth based largely on theft, you would be being up front with press and investors that you have a really tough nut to crack here.

I am very interested in the strategies and systems you’re planning to use to crack that nut, so keep me posted. But I have a lot of anxiety that the systems and culture that creator communities have built over the last ten years are going to be torn apart because Facebook’s bull decided to wander into our rather lovely china shop without any thought to what interesting things might actually be happening there.