Facebook lets over a million companies get their products in front of people who are inclined to purchase them.

When those Facebook users do in fact click and make purchases it is often (not always) a profitable exchange for the companies advertising. Those companies take the revenue from the sales and use it to pay people to do other work for them. Wherever it is you work, they probably advertise on Facebook.

Creating a profitable revenue engine for a million companies is absurdly useful.

If not with Facebook and Alphabet, there would still be most of those companies selling their products, with other means or site. There's not much that Facebook adds other than number of people it has using their site during their off times. If people needed to buy things, they could have easily looked it up on other sites or real places. There are many companies that do much more important things, produces more useful goods/productivity/services.

If you are producing a useful good or service would you honestly prefer to market it pre-Facebook? The volume, price and ability to focus narrowly on only the people most likely to care... It's worth a lot to a lot of makers.

If it's worth so much to so many people, why can't people simply accept that there are also people who find all of it useless and highly unimpressive?

Yeah, I would like to market pre-Facebook. In exactly the same way I wouldn't want to advertise with Stalin, no matter how effective his apparatus. I bet you there were people who couldn't understand that either.

My life is a painting. I already have brushes and paint, and while I could of course use more and better brushes and paint, there are also those offers to shit all over my painting for a truckload of generic, lame colours, and thousands of stamps with all sorts of shapes designed by "professionals", because making those with your own brush is just too hard. I say no to that, that is a net negative value for me. I don't live to earn money, I earn money to live. FB is right out. As the song goes: you might win some but you just lost one. Nothing more, but also never anything less.

I don't doubt facebook's usefulness to many companies and online only businesses.

Ah yes, no need for internet at all. We could already send messages via other means before it.

I don't follow

very dangerous and unpopular thought way out of the HN comfort zone - but you're not alone!