It's a huge waste of resources, IMO. I've setup Raspberry Pi's that sync photos between myself, parents, siblings, and some friends that care. We can, from ou

It's a huge waste of resources, IMO. I've setup Raspberry Pi's that sync photos between myself, parents, siblings, and some friends that care. We can, from our phones, drop them on the local Pi, and SyncThing powers the sharing. But of course to share cat pictures, we should fire up thousands of machines running 24/7 in data-centers, and rely on tricks of psychology to keep people coming back as justification for keeping those computers on. Services like FB are akin to a TV show -- not a broadcaster -- novel at first, but the story/characters don't change much (or for the worse in more cases than not), it grows stale for the masses, loses ratings, and eventually it'll end and only die hards will care. And their real contributions, large scale compute cluster knowledge, is relatively well known and copied by others.