> Was it always this bad and we just didn't see it before?
I definitely remember reading some pretty-accurate-in-hindsight scare pieces about Facebook's only way to monetize around the time they IPO'd.
That said, it's almost impossible to separate signal from noise with the earliest folks to cry wolf, and it doesn't help that some of them (looking at you, Peter Schiff) love to trot out their sky-was-falling predictions after the fact as proof of their clairvoyance.
While they all nailed it with Facebook, I don't remember a single piece about Google's similarities as they were rolling out Gmail/GChat/GDocs/GDrive for "free".
I definitely remember reading some pretty-accurate-in-hindsight scare pieces about Facebook's only way to monetize around the time they IPO'd.
That said, it's almost impossible to separate signal from noise with the earliest folks to cry wolf, and it doesn't help that some of them (looking at you, Peter Schiff) love to trot out their sky-was-falling predictions after the fact as proof of their clairvoyance.
While they all nailed it with Facebook, I don't remember a single piece about Google's similarities as they were rolling out Gmail/GChat/GDocs/GDrive for "free".