Many of these giant sites are really in the business of talking money out of investors, so their main business is not really selling a service at all (its "investor storytime").
I don't think that arbitrage model is useful because one side is paying cash and the other is not. Its like calling dating a marketplace, a bad metaphor.
Facebook makes money by creating a product that attracts a bunch of people to use it, and then they sell ads.
The whole thing falls apart if they don’t do #1 properly.
> Facebook's business was providing a common platform for people that know each other to share publicly. Twitter's business was a billboard to share what they're doing. Google's business was to provide a way to find things on the web.
They may have other businesses in banner ads but I’m specifically responding to the question,
> do all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.
by trying to make the point that if their business is selling attention, then pissing off end users - thereby reducing the supply of attention - is bad management.
The thing is, all of these companies make money by arbitraging value consumed by the end users versus value produced by advertisers. It’s a two sided market, except that consumers pay in attention rather than currency.
It’s catchy - and probably true - to say that if you aren’t paying, “then you are the product”. But these companies still need a quality product or, eventually, the advertising and data collection is not valuable to those with money.
Which is what we seem to be seeing with Twitter.
Abusing end users is a very short sighted strategy, even if they’re not paying.