Comment by notahacker

Oh, they're A+ at low value ads (I don't even think it's the ads that's ultimately consuming the platforms, it's the unpaid content also being overoptimized for clickbait so people end up seeing fewer of the friend updates that brought them to the platform and more of the politics and clickbait videos they can get literally everywhere else). Just feels like they could easily have leveraged their user base into a slice of AirBnB's business and eBay's business and even stuff that's been difficult to scale without Facebook's user base like a much bigger Eventbrite, and that being useful would have given it more sticking power.

Instagram was clearly a great acquisition, much better than it looked at the time. But I'm not sure it's ever been as big or that it's destined to last longer or make more money. WhatApp is where it's at for me and a non-trivial number of others, and they're not making money off those conversations.