Trade secret ? What would that be ? Is there a secret sauce to Facebook's success beyond the early mass adoption and dedication to adtech/attentioneconomy from the beginning ?

I believe so, yes. Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Why? I think, because they cannot agree on how to finance their services on large scales. Facebook has vast monetary resources and they know to manage them.

I imagine the story of Facebook as this. In the beginning Facebook was just another campus project gone wild. But then there was an idea to grow beyond the campus, somehow. The question arose: where do we get the money? Answer: Well, we do online ads. Later: How do we grow world-wide? We need even more money, we need to bring in and convince investors, that we have a vast network of ads and that's basically a dead-sure cash cow. So, Facebook mutated from an innocent campus project into a cash cow, just because that's the way it goes. But, it doesn't mean that it's right. So, the question is: What does Facebook do to keep ahead of its competition (Apple, Google, ... as Zuck said)? It's a trade secret, right?

> Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant.

Would this not be adequately explained by the first movers advantage (or maybe not the very first, but very early), coupled with the network effect?

No, as Facebook was not first. Myspace was a thing, and before that Friendster.

I would suggest that it was a first mover's advantage into mainstream society. My mum and dad have never heard of Friendster and My Space

But these weren't the same products as Facebook.

> What does Facebook do to keep ahead of its competition

It's just the network effect. Google Plus was ahead of Facebook in multiple ways, but it just couldn't take off (sure the fact that Google set unrealistic goals and followed an awful strategy didn't help)

G+ UI was bad for mainstream adopters.

Well if they do something they want to conceal they call that a 'trade secret' :)

It's a crass kind of life achievement if all of his life has lead up to adtech. I refuse to believe that there is no middle ground between what facebook is doing and what the average user would like to see them doing.

Well that's an interesting juxtaposition. His life achievement would then be "he connected people all over the world" but what he essentially did "was selling ads and he was good at it".

There's always a middle ground. You give up a bit of privacy and benefit from some product "free of charge". See? The questions are how much is "a bit", who decides what is in it and who decides who gets what? To agree on middle ground there need to be ground rules/terms. So, the problem is that Facebook alone is deciding upon which rules users get to use their services.

There's no business incentive to scale down your ad sales even if you charged your users for the service.

I agree with you that there needs to be ground rules/terms, but in the form of regulation.

If Google chose a middle ground, they'd give away the Pixel phones for free, or at least heavily subsidized. But they don't have to, so they don't.

If no one stops you, sell on both ends.

> There's no business incentive to scale down your ad sales even if you charged your users for the service.

There's arguments for and against this:

For: Newspapers and magazines are an example of selling a product full of advertising.

Against: However many online businesses and a lot of iOS/Android apps do offer paid plans that turn off the ads and nothing else.

> a bit

It all revolves around what you define as 'a bit' and as long as there is a billion more to be earned by stretching that definition it will be stretched.

Middle ground would be possible after solo bootstrapping. Any form of distributed ownership will bring expectations of profit without responsibility.