When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook's only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple of years. This obviously turned out wildly wrong but I always thought the user moat was always an issue and Facebook’s downfall would be related to it. I guess what this lawsuit says is that they essentially just bought their way out of people platform jumping.

On the same note, a relative asked me the same thing when they IPO.I thought if Google could make money selling ads why couldn't Facebook. I bought in at IPO price for them. I sold for them about 2 years ago when the price was dropping due to privacy scandals.

Why the hell is HN so downvote happy?

Why can't I downvote?

You need 501 karma.

Thanks for answering my question instead of downvoting it!

You may find this page helpful, I know I did (In the sense that it let me better understand what all was going on).

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented