2.4 billion monthly active users is "doomed" now? Just because in the tech bubble Facebook is viewed negatively it doesn't mean they are not doing just fine.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
The negative outlook instead seems to be that since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society.
And at this point, seems to have ossified into a form that lacks the agility and will to make major shifts.
Their current emphasis on purchasing other companies for their product pipelines, to drive business to their advertising, seems more akin to pharma majors or IBM than anything in the startup world.
Perhaps Facebook hasn't increased value delivered for each user for each day that much. Or has even decreased it. But the baseline is definitely "value to society" IMO
Did you mean Facebook has delivered little marginal value?
> since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society
That requires a different rebuttal than 'to a user.'
If we rewound to ~2010, froze Facebook at its then-current feature set, and had Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), Oculus (2014), and the myriad of other aquhires still in existence as independent companies, society would be a better place.
Sure, I can see that.
And if Facebook the product went away, society would IMO be in a worse place (until it's replaced :), because Facebook the product is delivering value every day
Mine is, does this product and/or service represent a net benefit to humanity without egregious side-effects?
the answer isn’t always so clear-cut
I should add, you're not wrong to question the necessity of including the second part. It is most certainly a factor. There's a natural justice strand in the formulation of Benthamite utilitarianism (which is, broadly speaking, where I'm coming from) that reinforces an enlightened approach to individual consequences, since in the long run the absence of individual justice poisons the greater good anyway.
However that's a bit of a mouthful, and it does need surfacing because there are other formulations of utilitarianism that lead to dystopian nightmare societies, and besides, I'm rather fond of the word egregious.
However I do regret forgetting to riff on the laws of robotics in the phrasing
In any case I've found it preferable to "does this corporate entity create shareholder value?", which I must confess I was suckered by some rather Austrian-school economists into accepting as a valid proxy for human advancement and/or happiness in my mid-thirties.