Do you remember what the alternative was? You be really chaotic nerdy and use Lynx, Usenet, BBS to find what you want? So that you can write it down on a txt file just to remember to check it again later or store it for later?
No one's got time for that.
AOL was the rubber floaties around your arms as you first took a dip into cyberspace. AOL scoured, organized, and packaged the internet into consumable portions and served it up for 50 hours a month.
This walled garden idea only makes sense when what is outside the wall is better than what's inside the wall. And even back then it took awhile before you made the jump from AOL wrapped MSIE to paying for Netscape.
The world always needs malls. That's just how humans socialize. When the deep web gets colonized, it too will inevitably get its own mall. Facebook put together that mall now, it serves as land lord and it polices itself somewhat to the extent of not pissing off its users to the extent of serving its own needs.
That's not a very hard intuitive idea to pick up. Piss off Google, get delisted, and poof, same thing. Piss off Ebay, get banned, and poof, same thing. Piss off Uber, get blacklisted, and poof, same thing. Piss in the community pool and get kicked out.
So here's the big so what: saying screw it and doing it yourself is also really, really hard. Try to match up the vanity facebook numbers yourself on the wild wild web. Explain to the average person how to buy a domain name, setup web hosting, login to FTP, setup a blog, add content, add social sharing plugins, comments plugins, recommendation plugins, then convince millions to pay attention without the benefit of a push-pull network in effect.
That's not even what the writer's intent is with this article. All of that has been stale since the IPO days. We're way past the IPO days--Facebook is a great walled garden. We're also way past the privacy days--privacy is dead.
We're now at the part asking: is Facebook a public utility or not? Does it want to be? Does it want to be treated as such? Does it deserve to be treated as such? Will it then kowtow to serve the public as such?
That's what all these recent #facebook posts are really wagon circling around. Wondering out loud why Zuckerberg doesn't want to run for office as president with the dawning of the realization that as a corporate master, he doesn't have to to be presidential.
PS: The internet at 100MM people was pretty f-ing great. But the internet at 7B scares the living bejesus out of me. But I'm not going to be running to declare make the internet great again. There is no shame in this. Just rational and pragmatic decisions to be made to keep going forward.