Hacker News Reader

All of those points would likely be true of independent Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. They are still huge companies, with huge budgets.

If anything, being a centralised conglomerate makes them less stable, less secure. And with less competition, they actually become more wasteful.

The argument’s about societal wastefulness, not FB’s business acumen.

I.e. It’s nontrivial to be more wasteful than it would be to have multiple teams duplicating the same product.

(Strong disagree on your suggestion that the centralisation generally makes them less stable/secure, but granted on the tail risks.)

If we want to talk about "societal wastefulness", then we can probably stop wasting resources on Facebook in the first place.

Sounds good to me. My social media usage is restricted to GitHub and Hacker News. HN is on the chopping block however.