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Also, back in 2010 Joseph Perla wrote a similarly titled article, but less targeted around fake accounts and more around the supply of advertisers trying ads when fb was growing (was a couple years before its IPO): http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme (discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293119, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116062 )

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook%20ponzi&sort=byPopula...

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I'm the author (Aaron Greenspan). Funnily enough, Joseph Perla used to be my roommate in Palo Alto. But I had nothing to do with him writing that piece, and I think he later ended up working for Facebook. So maybe his convictions weren't quite so strong.

It's true I wrote that independently. Hi Aaron!

Hey!

I republished this in 2012 during the IPO actually and it was quite popular then too. That was right before FB made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

Note that I do believe that FB has changed since 2012 (and I may have helped launch FB Videos which are definitely driving influence and probably make useful ad time) and many people do effectively reach new users with FB ads.

In terms of FB's growth slowing, that is likely given that it has the majority of the world's population online already, and Instagram is growing fast still (and entirely owned by FB).

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