I agree, but what can we do? Snap Inc. isn't exactly some teenager trying to make it out of their parent's garage. Patents obviously don't work, or at least not in their current form – troll litigation should suffice as proof of that – and besides, the big co's can just as well have departments doing nothing but patent all-the-things.
As so many like to say: they idea matters less than the speed and strength of execution. It's clear that the network effects of Facebook makes it very difficult to compete, but is the problem really that they are copying features from other products, or is that just the symptoms of a bigger issue?
Facebook effectively has a monopoly on the digital social network, no matter how many millennials say it's "not cool anymore" – they're still on it.
My personal hypothesis is that this is because we lack a decentralized identity feature on the internet. For better or worse, Facebook and Google solved that problem, and now everything you do is connected to either your Facebook account or gmail. It doesn't matter if you don't have those accounts, becasue everyone else does, more or less, and they're locked in. You can't bring your identity with you. Sure you can close your account and possibly download your data, but if you do that you sever the connections, which is the true valuable bit of the network – the nodes less so.
I really don't like the sheer dominance of Google and Facebook, but I have no idea how to get away from it either. Makes me small just thinking about it.
This is a very scary situation, where patents were originally developed to prevent exactly this.