100% agree. It’s not like it’s impossible to enforce social norms on the internet. But you have to bake it into the product from the beginning.

One of the huge fails here is that early Facebook was actually a nice and civil place to be. I’m talking way early, circa 2004-2007, when it was you and your real life friends in college. Compared to the free for all backwater that was MySpace, it felt like a refreshing online community where people acted decently because everything was tied to your real identity. There were no followers or any of the gamified attention seeking nonsense that FB eventually turned into. That was a big part of why it blew up. Because it really felt like an amazing product and community.

You could say that Facebook got lax about moderation, but I think it’s worse than that. As far as I can tell some time around 2008 onward the management made a calculated decision to prioritize growth above everything else. You can see the fruits of this philosophy in the infamous “Boz” memo from earlier this year. But it started years ago, and you better believe this attitude came straight from the top ie Zuck. It’s part of what made the company so ridiculously successful. But now facebook will finally pay the price.

It’s a shame because I think they could still have taken over the world and managed to enforce positive social norms. Focusing on moderation and community quality would definitely have slowed down growth, but after 2008 there wasn’t really any chance for a competing social network. Trust me, I worked at Bebo (#3 social network at the time) before it was acquired by AOL and we already knew before the acquisition that we were getting steamrolled by FB along with all of our competitors.
All that to say, Facebook’s competitive advantage meant that it could have afforded to take its time and continue focusing on quality over growth. But company management got greedy and stopped caring about anything other than DAUs.

It’s easy to say in hindsight of course, it’s hard to make these kinds of product decisions when you’re crushing it as hard as Facebook was. And then it IPOs and all the early people are worth 10s of millions in their twenties, which can kind of mess with your head and make you think that you’re basically omnipotent. And for many years it looked like they were.

I’m glad to see the backlash finally hitting where it counts. It’s not that I want Facebook to fail - I drank the koolaid hard early on and genuinely loved the product. Also turned down a PM offer from them in 2007, but that’s another story. But I’m really sad to see what could have been a world changing product for good turn into an absolute cesspool of manipulation, misinformation and narcissism. I view the current backlash as a forest fire, clearing away all the crud that’s been piling up over the years in order to make space for a new vision of online community at scale. If Facebook needs to burn to the ground in order to create that future, so be it. More constructive would be a complete management overhaul where Zuck and co would be replaced by leadership who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of the community. That is unlikely to happen until the stock craters enough that investors will finally revolt and demand change. My prediction is that it will get way, way worse for Facebook and its shareholders before it gets better.