Every time Facebook is buying something I feel sad and imagine Facebook like the black plague that will swallow that normal organism.
I can imagine an alternate 2020 where an independent Instagram is growing like a weed and the founders are much more wealthy.
Hundreds of millions of smokers do harm their health, and through it their own and their neighbors' wealth. But quitting is indeed hard.
You must come from a nice family.
Some people don't. Some people are actively in hiding from their families and things like that.
Some schizophrenics go to in-patient treatment, get better, go home to their nutty relatives and get worse again. This is a known thing.
You're right: It's easy to smoke outside without harming anyone but yourself -- and even if you smoke indoors, you only harm one room full of people at a time.
Don't get me wrong, I use Facebook once in a while to keep in touch with my friends, and in rare occurrence I even feel "Damn, I'm thankful that Facebook exist" I can see the good in them, but the problem they cause to society cannot be denied. The witch hunt, the cyberbully, the echo chambers, the life's hilight showreel effect, the "do whatever in order to get the Like", etc. (Ugh, I need two A4 to list them all!) These problems may existed since the dawn of internet, but it is amplified by social media, and many of them pioneered by Facebook.
I log into FB about once a day and see some pictures of friends who live far away and their children. Sometimes people post funny things. A couple of friends occasionally post interesting or thought provoking articles. My experience as a user is almost entirely positive.
Meanwhile at some level I know it can and is being used in abusive and bad ways. Cyber-bullying, sure. The ever-present outrage machine, pitting the God-loving Americans against the God-hating ones, certainly thrives there. And I once read something or other about enabling horrible hate crimes in Myanmar. And the company itself seems to be a scandal factory, bent on a kind of dystopian mission of collecting data on everyone.
I do struggle a bit with how much to blame the company versus, well, the people who are misusing it. I think a constant lesson of this whole internet thing has been: you can develop the most utterly amazing tools ever, but at least some of your users will take them and use them to be absolute shits.
The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.
Hard to feel bad about it.
That's an incredible leap to say IG couldn't develop their own ad network as a stand alone company. Hire a few people away from Google with options in a growing company the same way FB did.
If IG didn't sell they would have fully killed Facebook's relevancy by now.