I was once a Facebook fool
Wow, well, this got way more attention than I wanted.<p>First, to be clear -- I have nothing against the guy who took Dave Morin's job (who wasn't supposed to be named -- Amazon CloudFront didn't bother to invalidate its cache when I uploaded the final edit of that paper).  He played his cards right, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, and then he <i>got out</i>.  He's not in this to control your social life or anything, he just played the Silicon Valley game and got his.<p>The issue is really about the people who <i>are</i> trying to control your social life, and who are trying to convince the sort of people who read Hacker News to use them as a stable, reliable piece of infrastructure for your projects and businesses.  My story is just one datapoint of so many -- most of which are private, but easily discoverable by quietly asking around the Valley -- that should help you realize that Facebook is definitely <i>not</i> the company you want operating the world's social infrastructure.  The code might work, the pages might render, but on a deep social and ethical level, Facebook and its platform are <i>not</i> web-scale.<p>Also, the "sharecropper" and "beware of your platform" arguments don't apply here.  Social infrastructure isn't like being a developer for the Playstation -- this is very basic and very global stuff, similar to water or power, and you shouldn't have to question its integrity.  I shouldn't get dirty water, or my power shut off, because the CEO of the utility company allows his/her VPs to play God.  There's a reason these guys don't call themselves a "social utility" anymore... But anyway, that's a whole 'nother subject, and I'd rather be coding (or socializing!) than writing.<p>And to all of the people who question why I would even publish something like this -- chill out bro, I'm just obeying Zuckerberg's Law!  /disconnect