It's a discussion worth having. I was talking to my wife the other day about how much culpability Facebook has in all this. I pointed out that Facebook was a tech company like Reddit... and that I, personally, had chatted, had phone calls, had in-person sit-downs with five successive community managers at Reddit over the erosive effects they were having on online discussion, the vectors they were opening up to weaponizing community, the negative impact their inaction was having on the character of the internet at large. And five successive community managers stared at me (figuratively and literally) with a mix of disinterest and helplessness. And when they came for me, I left. One of the main guys who started /r/TheDonald was a troll I used to curbsmile regularly. They're not sophisticated. But when the waters in which they swim aren't kept safe for other swimmers, the sharks take over. One man with a harpoon is useless. Facebook and Reddit have a lot in common: their monetization is based around virulence and impressions. The more inbound links they generate, the more eyeballs they poke, the more clicks they generate, the more money they make. And controversy sells. Anger sells. Base emotion sells. Long-form does not. So they rock the controversy. My wife pointed out that in her community, mostly what she sees of Facebook and censorship is people getting their breastfeeding videos and images taken down. I pointed out that their content needs to be policed by $7/hr monkeys, which means they have a flowchart including boob/not boob. "Boob but breastfeeding" opens up a whole can of worms in the land of MILFporn and the like and "boob/notboob" is an easier decision tree to write. Because if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. That's what it comes down to - what's the profit margin on an eyeball? Up until now, this has been a discussion between Facebook and anybody buying eyeballs. At the moment, the eyeball-buyers are fuckin' pissed. Now, the people whose eyeballs are being sold are fuckin' pissed too. Fundamentally, Facebook's profit margins are gonna get a kick in the nuts. As they should. Because they're doing what they're doing for money and when bad behavior is incentivized, bad behavior prevails. Digg died in a week. Everybody in tech remembers. Snapchat is dying in months. Everyone is watching them do it. The conversation is not whether or not Facebook will change, it's whether or not Facebook is agile enough to change. They're losing $150/mo from this advertiser, I tell you what. We'll see what they're willing to do to get us back.
Perhaps I was too willing to look at things as set in stone when I put forth my argument. The way I see it (which echoes what someone else — maybe you? — said in a different thread), if they're only thinking about changing things now, after such a massive and extensively-publicized cock-up, things are already too bad. I don't think there's coming back from that. Even if Facebook is revived, they aren't going to be the same thing they used to be... right? Then I look at Reddit. I'd read the comment section on every one of the big, publicized Reddit derbies (remember "chairman Pao" and the Ellen Pao-Hitler memes?), where people swore off the platform en masse. 2+ years later, and Reddit's still alive and kicking. Voat's been getting enough of a sunlight that I occasionally see GIFs watermarked with the... whatever Voat's subreddit equivalent are, but it's not nearly as big (and, as Wikipedia says, full of alt-right member et al.). So, the way I (so narrowly) see it: what does Reddit have that led to it staying afloat, and does Facebook have the same quality to it? (I remember reading about how Facebook is very important in South-East Asia (Phillipines?) because for many people it's the only way to keep in touch with their families back home when they leave to other countries to look for work. That seems like a decent factor for it to stay afloat)it's whether or not Facebook is agile enough to change.
Someone somewhere (mighta been Twitter) that Facebook is a monopoly. It's not, though. It just happens to be the only social network anybody bothers with. Once upon a time Digg was the only aggregator anybody bothered with. Then they decided to monetize and they were dead within two weeks. Everybody bolted for Reddit and never turned back. Of course, traffic was higher-quality back then and people had better taste and the only people bothering with aggregators were computer nerds but the point remains: Reddit makes no money but is worth $1.8 billion. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. As soon as they have to make money, they'll have to act like they respect their customers (advertisers) and advertisers will go out of their way to avoid pissing off the people buying their soap. It's my opinion that the horrible stuff Reddit gets away with, they get away with because nobody holds them accountable. As soon as they have to sing for their supper like every other company in the history of mankind, they'll sing a different tune.