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Notes -
Network effects, mostly.
The last novel model was TikTok's: short vertical videos fed to you by an algorithm forever. Everyone replicated it as quickly as possible, but couldn't defeat TikTok.
Twitter is another good example: no amount of money spent by FAANGs helped them build a viable clone. Bluesky is thriving purely on network effects.
The engineers are paid to lower operating costs and improve engagement with the ads. Social networks are some of the biggest datasets in the world, and people expect them to work for free and 24x7: every dollar you spend on running them is coming out of your ad revenue. At this scale it makes sense to do things like develop your own compression algorithm for data and get the major browsers to support it to lower your traffic costs by 1%. Or to hire the author of the programming language your software is written in and to give him a team to improve its performance.
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