If I know these guys I imagine a very clever statistician ran the numbers on this call. My guess is that Facebook realized that being a "shouting in the wind"

If I know these guys I imagine a very clever statistician ran the numbers on this call. My guess is that Facebook realized that being a "shouting in the wind" platform is an excellent way to retain what I'd call the "low engagement" tail end of the distribution. i.e. the explicit goal was to provide content for those without all that many actual friends on Facebook. I look at Facebook now and it seems like the connect with friends part of it is very much secondary to just driving groups, marketplace, and all the parasocial paraphernalia of the modern internet. Which is of course a very profitable thing to do if you're in the eyeball minutes business. All those features are after all, there for users 24/7. And don't rely on the vagaries of end user content creation.