Facebook, unlike many services, has the luxury of not having to worry about backwards-incompatible changes and data migration when it comes to their user-facing

Facebook, unlike many services, has the luxury of not having to worry about backwards-incompatible changes and data migration when it comes to their user-facing experience since that's not where their money comes from. I doubt this problem was intentional, and is probably being fixed, but seems characteristic of an engineering culture that can afford to be apathetic towards such concerns, if not downright contemptuous (i.e. A/B testing user psychological/emotional state thru content manipulation).