The WHY in why Facebook (YouTube, Snap, Twitter, Et. al) are bad is so much more than their data policies or advertising it's that their entire existence is predicated on a LIE.
A lie so pervasive that almost the entire wold believes it.
That there service is "free" and that our contributions are not valuable.
When in fact there is nothing more invaluable than our time and attention, of which we are each given only a finite amount to spend.
@mangeurdenuage For sure a simplification of a few factors.
When the internet first came about we were kind of just happy to be able to connect with others and share pictures, videos, etc.
Though over time these became the places we needed to market, do business, or just communicate.
We never really stopped to consider the implications of the bargain we were striking with these VC backed platforms and how or why they could offer us a service for free and what they would want in return.
It's still a market, people wanted internet (ISPs got a market) and people with knowledge hosted servers for X reasons (Server renting and lots of other services became a thing).
--We never really stopped to consider the implications of the bargain--
I don't think there's any "we" with the amount of advertising that was and still is in use people would have jumped on the bandwagon, the actual state of the internet is mainly because of the shear population/consumer movement that as no knowledge of computers, there was a similar discussion some time ago about what would the web look like if gopher won over http ?
And the reasoning would be that it would look like the same mess, because the demand of the people who try to create new market would have asked for the same bad functions.
Imo there's no really new market/functions to create in computing but for marketers quickly reinventing the wheel to make it sparkly new is what creates even more sales and that's damaging not only software projects but people depending on how the wheel is re-implemented.
@rbenjamin their value is in their userbase, and they know it. A town hall without the 'town' is just a hall. A community notice board without a community is just a board.
@Hascobe yep. These multi Billion dollar platforms are by themselves no more than flea market parking lots.
We can also spend time on why the population is so overly abused by tech corps which simply is because of the lack of knowledge of the said population.