Great comic overall, but that's BILLIONS of dollars that Facebook is raking in by being heinous, not millions. Here's a handy reference to illustrate the vast difference
Reminds me of an old joke:
"What's the difference between a million and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars."
Network effect. It's not the platform or the business, it's the userbase. FB is in this niche where it's kind of the only way for a lot of people to keep in touch with family. People joke about FB being full of boomers, which is kind of true, but those boomers are all somebody's parents. Twitter was always for celebs and brands, Reddit was for weird little niche communities.
I used to think this, but then I realized the friends and family who are close to me are the ones who I text and call, and it's alright not to have constant updates on what my second cousin in Atlanta is up to. Most of my extended boomer family are only sharing outrage bait anyway, and it's better for my well-being not to engage with that.
But also Facebook has never killed 3rd party apps because (to my knowledge) there hasn't ever been any, and they don't rate limit their users. They also at least pretended to care about the right wing propoganda plaguing their platform, unlike Elon did. They also also haven't locked being a recommended person on someomes feed behind a pay wall.
Facebook does shady shit, but the difference is it's shit that most of their users don't notice.
There have been third party Facebook clients, there used to be a few back in the day. Facebook didn't actively kill them, they just coincidentally kept changing their API in arbitrary ways without telling anyone. Eventually it just became not worth it for the devs.
