I feel like had smartphones not come sooner Zynga could of reached a point where they would of outright bought out Facebook. Smartphones were just slowly becoming relevant during these years.

I almost want to call it the Eternal September Part 2 when Facebook took off like wildfire on the last year or so of MySpace being relevant.

Smartphones taking off specifically Android meant people could just play games on their phone and not have to wait to get home to a computer.

Maybe there are other less shady ways of earning a living than selling people's privacy or profiteering of their addiction?

Google and Facebook don't really sell personal data, and least not directly. They might buy some, and advertisers happily give them data, but I rarely hear about them actually selling it. They do let advertisers run ads that are targeted using this data, but that's not the same as "felling personal data." It's more like selling user attention.