I have ad-blocking turned on on all websites, by default, so I don't get a good sense of what advertises on Facebook unless I happen to see someone else's Facebook feed (as, for example, a family member's) on a computer without ad blocking turned on. It all looks like schlock.

What I have seen on my own home page feed on Facebook is a small number of some of my more remote Facebook friends who go absolutely NUTS over the Facebook quiz applications. I enjoy posting links via the Facebook link application to webpages on the marketing tricks and security holes embedded in Facebook quizzes. (Many thanks to HN readers who post some of those links here on HN.) I'm trying to use positive peer pressure in my circle of Facebook friends to make it uncool to respond to Facebook quizzes at all, and I'm gratified to see that several of my friends immediately put all my new links about the perils of Facebook quizzes up on their personal Facebook feeds.

So I think this is the problem: sophisticated users will not only not fall for the schlock on Facebook, they will try to educate their friends about the schlock. I don't know if Facebook has a revenue model that overcomes the cost of serving up lots of pretty pictures and videos to unsophisticated users. (I don't think Facebook is anywhere near as technically savvy about reducing bandwidth or running server farms as Google, but I could be mistaken.) It may be that a lot of the users who have the highest-quality conversations to share will jump ship and find yet another online community--that has happened many times since the 1990s, and I always follow the flight to quality.

And, yes, I agree that sometimes Facebook has appallingly poor response time. That might get a lot worse as the user base expands.