I see most of FB's "scandals" (eg: dark patterns, illegal ad-buying filters, API over-sharing with third parties) and flaws (re: "teenagers couldn't post" without pinging grandpa) as the result of garbage product design.

At a glance, our comments appear to differ substantively. At closer inspection, the only disagreement we have is what to include in the 'building garbage' bucket.

In case I misused language, I can rephrase my original point: FB is in a bad place today not because FB was ever slow to build, but because what FB did build was too often bad for users (for that matter: bad for humanity).

I'm going to have to disagree.

They built an amazing product... for a world that had only teenagers on social media. This was the truth for quite a while, and was true of the world they created their product in. They just never really updated their product to account for the new reality. Sure, they changed the algorithm a ton and re-tweaked the UI, but the algorithm and the UI weren't the product. The experience people had on the site was the product.

They're sort of like IBM's mainframe division. Mainframes are kind of cool if you ever get to tinker around with their hardware, and they're impressive engineering marvels (so are facebooks systems). But the world has changed since IBM was on top, and they don't fit what most people need anymore.

Misleading privacy controls, privacy-negligent API, FB Beacon... these FB features date back quite a few years, and were terrible for users. That is the sense in which I say it's bad design.

If I make a pizza with tasty, fresh ingredients - but then top it off with rotten fish guts and mouse turds – it's a garbage pizza.

None of those are the product. Once again, the product is the experience using the website. Those are implementation details that only weird nerds like you and I are concerned about 99% of the time. The privacy loss that most end users (or former end users) are worried about is their parents/spouse/employers being on facebook. These are not things facebook built, but consequences of the social graph changing.

And those "features" are all fine in a world where the internet is mostly young twenty-somethings with no power, as the internet was in the early-mid 2000s. Also for a product where you can just put in a fake name, as we could back in the day.

So apparently we do disagree substantively:

  those "features" are all fine in a world where the 
  internet is mostly young twenty-somethings with no power

No matter a FB user's age, it is a problem to implement a dark pattern that leaks private information. There are countless illustrations of that, but one obvious one is how it resulted in many early FB users falling victim to financial fraud (eg: http://givemebackmycredit.com/blog/2011/04/facebook-and-iden...). As for Beacon, it was clearly poisonous from the start (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon).

I closed my FB account in 2011 specifically because the design of the site abused its users in countless outrageous ways (come to think of it: "Are you sure you want to close your account? [These friends] will miss you").

I really don't see us coming to any agreement. It's been fifteen years and, while FB has pumped out plenty of LoC, FB has never shown an iota of respect for its users. No surprise then that the brand is dirt, and Zuckerberg has to spin fairytales about how its 'metaverse' will stem the decline. Their ability to execute is not the problem; the demographics of their user base is not the problem; the product itself is the problem.