These artificial numbers applied to all social interaction, fuck society up in all kinds of unexpected ways. These numbers are required to keep the advertising revenues flowing and can still be collected and supplied to them without causing social fabric damage.
The fallout and constructive handling of this mess is going to take a while to understand and get right. That said I think Facebook and YouTube and Twitter even though they are responsible for the mess, are also our best bets at figuring this stuff out.
These aren't tech problems. These are social problems requiring expertise from community builders, politicians, sociologists, ecologists, psychologist, lawyers, journalists, law enforcement etc
I think the evolution/next stage of the social network will be driven by such folk much more than the techie. The techie was required to create speed and scale. That job is complete. How we use the scale and speed, understanding it's positive and negative effect on society and utilizing it for the greater good is something tech companies will be hiring a lot of non-tech expertise to figure out.
I would like to see someone like Obama put in charge of Facebook to see what is possible.