You're right -- this has always been true. The only people bummed out by it are the people trying to recreate Facebook's core value proposition (maintaining a d

You're right -- this has always been true. The only people bummed out by it are the people trying to recreate Facebook's core value proposition (maintaining a digital representation of our meatspace relationships) themselves. But the reality is that the available market space for "social" is very small because Facebook occupies so much of it with a very general purpose product. This has always been the case in the startup world too: you always look at markets over $10B with caution, because that's big enough to interest AGAF (Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook) if they're already in an adjacent market. Your only hope is to target a less-profitable sub-sector of that market, develop expertise and hope that AGAF didn't bring their A game to that market (in which case, your company makes an excellent acquisition target at crazy valuations as AGAF bid against each other!)