[antirez]

Think at the problem of communities like HN: as more users are arriving the quality of submissions and comments inevitably starts to be impacted.

Now think at Facebook as this exact process on steroids. Facebook is different because almost all the other sites on the internet where there is production of user-generated content is frequented by the elite of the internet users.

Facebook is different, a big percentage of facebook users are not really internet literate, they think the internet is confined into facebook, a few common sites they visit, plus searching with google when needed. They don't have a blog, don't write into forums, don't know reddit, they don't even know how to properly use a search engine.

So the quality of Facebook reflects a lot the average quality of their users, and with 1 billion users this quality is not exactly very high. Sorry, average people may be good at parenting, at helping you, at getting their work done, but the process of content production is something the belongs to an elite. Most people will just share pictures, write non-sensical status messages, and so forth.