I completely disagree with the idea of never "Liking" anything. There is plenty of benefits of "Liking" a Facebook page. I, personally, enjoy seeing update posts from bands, products, etc. about new content, products, promos, etc.
I think music artists is a great example to use here. I love tons of bands. A lot of those bands do not have websites other than using Facebook. I'm not going to check their Facebook pages multiple times a day, going through the 100's of artists that I "Like", just to see if they post an update of some sort. I understand that this not a universal example, and some pages are not worth "Liking" (pages that are a joke meme and not a product, company, artist, etc.), but I think it's ridiculous to say never "Like" anything.
That is not true. I think subscribing only works for people accounts, not pages. Or at least, you are in a special A/B test that has that ability. Currently, I have no way of subscribing to a page to get updates. I can only "Like" the page.
I have no problem subscribing to Pages without Liking them. (Little drop down to the right of Like and Message buttons on a page; click on Add to Interest Lists...)
As per the grandparent post of this thread, I don't "Like" anything on twitter, and follow things in interested with Interest Lists.
That defeats the purpose of what I'm saying, though. I'm saying to get any sort of updates from a page, you have to "Like" it. There is no way around it, currently. There is plenty of brands I do want updates from, so I have to "Like" their page to get those updates.
I was actually not responding to you: I was expanding on what aw3c2 said to mention that the opposite was also explicitly true (and to show how to set it), as this information also helps the person you responded to (who specifically was bothered that they were getting spammed).
That said, unlike with the direction I was indicating, it does seem like what aw3c2 is only of limited applicability: while Facebook supports subscriptions to Pages, it seems like it might be something that Pages have to activate (not 100% certain about what causes it to appear).
It is not a property of every Page, however. If you do a search, though, on Google, for 'subscribe to a page without liking it' you will get numerous hits talking about such users, with screenshots of the buttons on some Pages, and discussing the rollout and announcement of the new feature.
It's highly possible. But even if they didn't I just hate this concept where FB/Zynga try to trick users into doing something they expect will yield X when in fact they have changed it to do Y.
For instance, I once used my PayPal account to authorize a in-game payment in FB (Zynga game) for my wife. Go figure why she likes to play that stupid game but she does. In my mind I was thinking "I am authorizing THIS payment NOW" but what they did in fact? Paypal added FB as an authorized company allowed to charge me anything.
So then when my wife clicked something curious in the game thinking she would just see something, the game actually charge my account for that. I never agreed to it charging my account once again and a third time. But that's what it did.
I know, it's probably all very well explained in the those small grey letters but I didn't bother to read. My wife won't read them. My grandma won't either. Nobody will... and they know it.
PayPal was a whole experience in itself. I had to dig down into 4-5 levels of options until I found the list of authorized companies and FB was there.
I know this can all be explained with "users are dumb and deserve it" but really? Do they have to resort to such tactics? Well, they probably have otherwise their stock will keep falling more and more... sad situation.
A few weeks ago I deleted my FB account because it was fed up with all the things mentioned here and it was a great distraction. It's impressive how little impact it had, except I have more mental space for other (let's hope so) more useful things.
I completely disagree with the idea of never "Liking" anything. There is plenty of benefits of "Liking" a Facebook page. I, personally, enjoy seeing update posts from bands, products, etc. about new content, products, promos, etc.
I think music artists is a great example to use here. I love tons of bands. A lot of those bands do not have websites other than using Facebook. I'm not going to check their Facebook pages multiple times a day, going through the 100's of artists that I "Like", just to see if they post an update of some sort. I understand that this not a universal example, and some pages are not worth "Liking" (pages that are a joke meme and not a product, company, artist, etc.), but I think it's ridiculous to say never "Like" anything.