A "free" ad-driven social networking site that brings in gigantic revenue, but that has to pay thousands of high-priced engineers to implement all of the cruft you just described.
versus ...
A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it can be largely cruft-free.
I know there have been a gazillion attempts at the latter and none has succeeded in any way comparable to the "free" sites. It's too bad, because if any of them were to ever achieve Facebook scale, the subscription price would probably be quite modest.
I can see that if you consider ads to be inherently offensive, you would notice them wherever they appear, and be annoyed.
But that's not where most people are.
I wouldn't say it's as bad as potholes on the road, since ads are more predictable.
Think of it as the difference between a for-profit bank and a credit union. The bank exists to maximize returns for its shareholders. The credit union exists solely for benefit of its members. So the credit union isn't going to try to employ sneaky fine-print fees, because that's not what the members want.
In a similar vein, you might not care about ads and may have trained yourself to ignore them, but you might care about performance, which is sluggish because of all the cruft, or you might care about privacy, or you might care about being marketed to in more subtle ways than display ads.
For subscription to work, you either:
1- undercharge users from wealthier countries
2- price poorer users out of you platform
3- give up on the idea of worldwide adoption (Facebook scale, as you say) entirely
4- attempt to charge different amounts by country of origin, and watch your users cheat the system mercilessly
5- go freemium, and suffer the same fate that news organizations do- find that far too few are willing to pay to go ad-free, stick ads back into the free version, and end up leaking data anyway
I suppose 4 might be the most feasible option, but once it is obvious that some people pay more for the exact same value, they are likely to assume that the product has less value than it actually does, feeling that they are being ripped off.
In short, there is probably a good reason that paid services will never reach Facebook scale.
At ardour.org, we offer 3 tiers of subscriptions ($1, $4 and $10 per month) named to target different economic conditions. We also offer a single fixed payment with a suggested but editable cost based on OECD data about the cost of dining out.
We're not trying to maximise revenue, which is perhaps an important difference between us and, oh, Facebook :)
Small social networks are fine for what they are and, I think, have much more flexible options for getting the bills paid.
I, too, loved App.net. Alas, seems that people won't even pay a couple bucks a month to see what their friends are eating for lunch.
Yet they still spend their time on it. Huh.
Or in other words:
The reason I bring it up is that in changing user norms, it's much less helpful to think about them in stimulus response terms, than in terms of modelling other users behavior - which itself is guided by limitations on our capacity to process information, and heuristics which though adaptive are poorly adjusted to the modern media landscape. So people didn't flock to facebook initially because they were conditioned to prefer it - they used it because (in addition to offering a peek into the lives of others, it was cool). Conditioning is an important part of why people become addicted to the reward loops of social networking sites, but it's an insufficient explanation for their appeal and often misapplied.
MeWe is freemium (paid extra stickers and storage) and is actually nice, at least the parts I've seen, a lot like Google+ - a friendly neighborhood full of photographers, chili enthusiasts etc.
Of course most people are going to go with twitter, but if you'd like something more like Google+ or what Facebook could have been you might want to try MeWe.
Yes. It would be set to the minimum required to dissuade banned users (e.g. spammers) from continuing to create new accounts. This amount would still likely be well above cost.
That's by design, of course - it benefits Facebook greatly that its herd is addicted, and unlike people addicted to alcohol, nicotine or other substances - there's not even another supplier they can turn to: It's either feed your addiction or suffer withdrawal symptoms.
And I think the success rate of quitters (as a percentage of those who actually want to quit) is also comparable, at single digit percent.
The actual ads on FB desktop are the newsfeed ads, which you see as you scroll.
If you think of it this way, you can see how you may need 2MB of CSS: to battle the bots trying to scrape your information and replicate your network, to sidestep the evil developers of adblocker software that threaten to destroy the sweet value transfer, the JS required to track every single movement you make both online and off, the A/B testing framework that allows you to determine how to most efficiently extract that extra 0.001% of valuable eyeball time, and so forth...
Connecting the world? Well, I guess that could be a nice side-effect...