[chrisseaton]

Software often doesn't look like a good idea up-front, so nobody would pay for it up-front.

If you went to the government or a charity in 2003 before Facebook and said you wanted funding to build it because it'll be critical to society in the future, you'd be laughed out.

[dnautics]

And there's no guarantee that what you would build wouldn't be horrible in the same way because it might be inherent to social media (vs inherent to ad-driven social media... I don't know but no one has the data), or possibly horrible in a completely different be way from how Facebook is horrible now.