[dwrodri]

IMO, Gmail is allowed to be "fine" because it did a lot of things all in one go:

- provide a decent browser-based client - lots of free storage! - spam detection that beat out a lot of other providers at the time

It didn't hurt that it was being run by the what was the Big Tech's darling child at the time. Now, it's kind of hard to exist with out a Google account, and thus a GMail account. Google doesn't make a lot of money directly through GMail, but they make a decent amount of money through the enterprise license for Google Workspaces.

As for Facebook, the product is "fine" in the sense there are lots of users, but "Meta" the company is having doubts about whether the Social Graph is truly the priceless asset we all thought it was. More on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192364

It might not be fair, but the expectation that users, Wall Street, and even Meta themselves place on Facebook is that it needs to do a lot better than "fine".