Again, shareholders explicitly love this action by the CEO. As for survival rate, it depends on your definition of longterm but every social network eventually dies. Most people simply don't care about the internal politics of a company whose social network they're using. For all of Facebook's scandals, they still have 3 billion monthly active users.
Maybe myopic share holders sure. There’s no way a logical person would think this is going to increase their returns on this company. Alienating your top creators is not a great strategy.
As for your Facebook analogy, I don’t buy it. Every young person I know (less than 45 yo) both in US and India maybe logs into FB once a month to see if someone in their extended life got married or bit the bullet. That’s it. The 3 billion number seems to be some clever accounting to me. I agree that between instagram and WhatsApp they have covered most people however, but not by just Facebook. And I’d argue that’s not necessarily because they alienated their users actively anyway. Not like Reddit is doing now.
