[cma]

Without commercial spam (which I don't think can be blamed on VCs) it is possible all this would be readily doable through things like email, newsgroups, IRC, XMPP. Inauthentic users/coordinated interests beyond commercial spam would also have been an eventual problem to overcome.

[fsdalkj]

This is like the infamous dropbox comment [1], only instead of you making it as a prediction, you made it over a decade after the company became wildly successful.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[cma]

You think without Facebook the choice would be $10/min long distance calls and that email wouldn't be an option? I can agree the big use case of Facebook probably accelerated internet access but I don't think it would be that severe.