They lied to content creators about how much money could be earned by switching to video on FB. This bankrupted multiple businesses, including Collegehumor and FunnyOrDie: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120?l...
Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.
And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"
FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.
You can fool some of the people some of the time...
This. Yes.
Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.
Greed
It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.
I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have