I believe that the ads play a more central role than you give them credit for. If you are a for-profit company selling something your incentives are aligned in

I believe that the ads play a more central role than you give them credit for. If you are a for-profit company selling something your incentives are aligned in a specific way - you want to do everything you can to maximize sales... If you want to sell ads this means in general you want to understand and be able to target specific users because this seems to be what advertisers are interested in. So FB is designed in a way to maximize that. Now imagine you have a different org not focused on selling ads but actually trying to measure and optimize things like usefulness to the user/city/country/world. It would live in a totally different optimization landscape and look totally different (over time)! FB could be very different from what it is today if different decisions had been made!