What makes you so confident that this alternate path is actually real and as good as you describe it? You say that the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost, but what makes you think that? The thing here is that any of these megacorporations has hundreds of people dedicated solely to exploring every conceivable strategy they have to making as much money as possible. So why hasn't even one of them from any company thought of what you said? And why did no one try?
Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?
The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.
Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.
> the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost
I don't think anything would have been easy.
But I do think that if you want to be more than a one trick pony, as Meta desperately does, the best bet is leaning into creating value. Getting better and better at that. From whatever unique position you start with.
There is more potential value to create than extract.
Watching Zuck's VR and AI initiatives. It is clear he hasn't a clue, has no unique insights, into what would be useful or non-trivially engaging.
His big vision is to create bigger milking machines. Even before creating something worthy of being milked. Even for a predator, that puts the cart before the hyena.
Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?
The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.
Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.