Cory Doctorow

Give us pennies and we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity.

So the advertisers pile in, publishers pile in too.

They become locked to the platform.

They become very dependent on it.

And in stage three,

Advertisers find that ad prices have gone way up.

Ad targeting fidelity has fallen through the floor.

Ad fraud has exploded to levels that are almost incomprehensible.

Publishers famously now have to put their whole article there, not just an excerpt, and woe betide the publisher that has a link back to their website because Facebook's downranking off-platform links is potentially malicious.

And so they don't have any way to monetize that except through Facebook's own system.

And we've got a feed that's been basically denuded of the things we've asked to see.

It has the minimum calculated to keep us there.

And this equilibrium is what Facebook wants, but it's very brittle because the difference between I hate Facebook and I can't seem to stop coming here and I hate Facebook and I'm never coming back.

it can be disrupted by something as simple as a live stream mass shooting.

And then users bull for the exits.

The street gets nervous.

The stock price starts to wobble.

The founders panic, although being technical people, they call it pivoting.

And, you know, one day Mark Zuckerberg like arises from his sarcophagus and says, hearken unto me, brothers and sisters, for I've had a vision.

I know I told you that the future would consist of arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface that I invented so I could non-consensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates.