That’s the thing though, free social media was giving them massive returns. But the line must go up. And once they completely saturated the market, there are only two ways to make the line go up: expand the market (give Internet to communities that didn’t have it), or extract more money from your existing users (enshittify). Facebook made a half assed attempt at the first one for a couple years, then pivoted hard to the second.
That’s the thing though, free social media was giving them massive returns. But the line must go up. And once they completely saturated the market, there are only two ways to make the line go up: expand the market (give Internet to communities that didn’t have it), or extract more money from your existing users (enshittify). Facebook made a half assed attempt at the first one for a couple years, then pivoted hard to the second.