Buy/cultivate influence with sympathetic publications/journalists or create/acquire your own media presence and just hammer them with every negative thing you can find about the management of the company, the business, the users, the content, anything. Pay moles inside the company to leak sensitive information to you.

Then when/if you manage to bring Facebook's reputation down enough, target advertisers with a coordinated campaign to boycott this "horrible" company.

Another is to leverage evangelists with creative donations to lower brand reputation

A long term approach might be to instill agents who are loyal to your cause within the company through hiring. Corporate espionage with the intent of making intentional poor decisions in order to cause harm.

Same as when Microsoft billions to "disrupt" Google in search with Bing. Fail.

If it was simply a matter of money then there are plenty of companies with alot more than $1B to spend on stealing FB's business.

When companies fail, as most do in the end, it is usually because not of external reasons but internal reasons - typically the company has grown too dogmatic in its own beliefs about its plac in the world which makes it ripe for disruption and replacement. This happened alot more in the early days of computing when the platforms were in flux - today the platforms are relatively stable which makes for long term stability of those companies that won the "winner takes all" battles.

There was a time, hard to believe now, where it looked very much like Microsoft woud own all computing for the foreseeable future. That didn't last long, and dogmatism and internal politics are to blame for that future not happening as anticipated.

How to do it? That's the $1B question.

2) willingly promote pseudonym. Enforce as much as possible single profile, but adopt the "circles" concept from google+

3) pay celebrities to get in.

4) pay a weekly $100 to top 50 "most" active users (where you define what "most" active means. instead of one top 50, it can be five top 10). Pay "internal" money for the rest of the top 100. Internal money is a lot, e.g 1USD is 9999

5) pay top 5 celebrities real money too

6) manufacture your own celebrities.

7) pay "internal" money for every bit of information the user provide (location, "taste", purchase made elsewhere). Make is SUPER easy to report.

8) add games where user can spend the "internal" money

9) add dating

10) add cheap content (ala buzzfeed). and longer form serialized fiction (romance, scifi,erotica...).

11) add "chic" content that user have to pay internal money to get it.

12) gamify content access with "limited exclusive" content and other tricks.

13) pay other sites to adopt your internal money as a way to get "digital" stuff.

14) do an ICO for the "internal" money as soon as it has some traction.

15) be heavily "one-handed editorialized" on opiniated content generation, to cover all possible angles.

16) once there is a bit of traction, make sure to have a few "scandals" for people to want to be "inside" your closed world. Stay an invite-only club.

17) Make a paid API to have an "ecosystem" of add-ons ($100 a year). And take a % of payment (only done with your internal money) to incite ecosystem to charge.

When people try to consciously disrupt an entrenched business with massive inertia like Microsoft of 1990s, it fails. Examples include Netscape (hubris of "the web browser+internet Windows is the new operating system and MS Windows is obsolete") or Linux (cue recurring joke of "1995 is The Year of Linux Desktop!!!"). When your agenda is transparent, you just paint a huge bullseye on your back and fail.

Google/Alphabet for the first time in 2017 is about to pass Microsoft in revenue ($100 billion.) It took Google 19 years to do it. When Google started in 1998, they didn't know they would be working on a thing called "Android" in 2006/2007 that makes MS Windows less relevant -- especially for emerging web users outside of USA. Today, a mobile internet user with a cheap Android phone can check email (GMail instead of MS Exchange), look up encyclopedia facts (Wikipedia instead of MS Encarta CD), look up actors in movies (IMDB instead of MS Cinemania CDROMs), etc. Of course, that list includes Google creating a "launch pad" to other websites (PageRank search instead of MSN as web portal). MSN in 1998 was a small part of Microsoft's business. And things like GMail were not in Google's roadmap in 1998.

You can't disrupt Facebook head on with an obvious goal of disrupting them. Instead, you hit them sideways. You disrupt them by doing something else that doesn't look like you're disrupting them. For example, instead of creating a new "social network", you create a micropayments system that's easier than PayPal or Apple Pay. Or you create an entertainment platform with a "social" component as an afterthought. Maybe one of those non-social networks accidentally becomes a new focal point for social gathering and accidentally disrupts Facebook.

Put another way, the startup entrepreneurs that will disrupt Facebook are working in their proverbial "garage" right now -- but they don't know they will disrupt Facebook in the future. (That's because they're not working on an "obvious" social network.) It's good that they don't know that they're competing with Facebook because if they did, they'd trip over themselves with their ambitions and they'd start a battle they can't win. (E.g. Snapchat losing to Facebook's Instagram.)

More serious. I think we are nearing the time this could be done. People are getting fed up by facebook. The complaints you hear frequently all focus on no actual content anymore on timelines but just ads and friends sharing news items, other adds, winner actions, etc. Furthermore, privacy is always said to be a concern (though in truth hardly ever is).

My guess is. Attack those. Get real content on. Get people to actually share again their own content instead of others. An keep an eye on privacy.

To expand on this idea, one problem that has irked me with YouTube (I know we're talking about Facebook, but bear with me) is the decreasing amount of original content, at least from what I see. (I don't actually have objective data about this, only commenting on what I see from recommendation lists and the homepage). There are way too many content farms that just post videos of "Top 10 X" or "Most shocking Y" or "Z things you need to know about ...". It's almost a form of rent-seeking: these people aren't contributing much to the platform, but want to rake in the ad revenue or likes/views. They don't create, only re-arrange.

Objectively speaking, though, Facebook has seen a decrease in original content [0]. People are writing fewer original posts about whatever, and instead just re-sharing things more. It's (in my opinion) a sad trend for any social network; what was once supposed to be about the user has become more about clickbait and celebrities who churn out content.

This was probably one of the greatest contributing factors for me quitting Facebook - even though I had friends from school friended, the platform didn't provide any value in terms of reading more about their lives, seeing the things they were doing or thinking, etc. All they did was re-share clickbait, mainstream articles, or articles that appealed to emotion and "teams" (Democrat/Republican).

If someone out there is to design a competing social network, they should consider explicitly marking posts as "Original" where appropriate. If someone shares disproportionately compared to the amount they write original posts, send them a notification, and possibly scale back their posting abilities so the network doesn't turn into a giant cage of parrots like we have now, just re-posting digital noise.

[0] http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing-decline/

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp all famously started off on shoestring budgets. In contrast, large budgets and huge ambitions are probably toxic to building social networks. Google+ and post-acquisition MySpace are two good examples of this.

As a result, the best opportunity for disrupting Facebook is taking the billion dollars and starting a social media-focused venture capital firm. The firm's goal would be to make it easy and risk-free for college students to create mobile-first social experiences.

Hopefully, some of the seed investments will gain traction, and you should have enough of the initial billion dollars left over to provide significant follow-on capital. Ideally, your most promising Facebook competitors will not need to rely on advertising for several years.

After those several years, your top winners will probably be approached by Facebook's corporate development team... and they'll be offering to acquire your most promising portfolio companies. In order to avoid Facebook winning the final round, you'd have to use your influence over your portfolio companies to block any sale to Facebook. I'm not sure how practical this is because it would probably anger the founders, all their employees, and all other shareholders in the company.

Eventually... ten or fifteen years after your VC firm made its first investment... you might have a portfolio company that could stand up to Facebook.

Or you might not.

If this strategy was a sure bet, I'm sure that Google Ventures and CapitalG would already be halfway there.

I honestly believe the future of social media will be such that (a) user data is stored on a user-controlled [owned?] platform (b) user data is then [based on custom rules set by user] distributed to social networks.

Once the data is decentralized any Joe can then build a network and instantly take advantage of data, since the user will simply "flip a switch" and suddenly all of their data can be transferred / added-to the new network.

I do think (a) if it existed, and (b) it was simple / reliable / durable / secure enough that users had the option, they would care.

Every once in a while (a few months, sometimes once every day, sometimes almost a whole year), there will be a random selection among those who participate and that person will win $1 million.

If you put the money in an index fund, you could potentially do this for a very long time.

It's going to be decentralized with zero ads or monetization of user data. Its adoption would be best served with an above-board advertising campaign to decimate the public's view of Facebook. It will also leverage an existing company's technology, and merely be a value-add to that company's core business.

Campaign to have all these different data protection rights rigidly enforced.

The good: Connection to and updates from long-unseen friends, family and acquaintances; community organizing; universality.

The bad: Placing our thoughts, ideas, memories, pictures, opinions and habits into a closed, for-profit ecosystem with dubious ethics and the tendency to meddle with the presentation of that content (and the content itself) like a scolding, self-serving parent. Opaque content curation designed, at best, to maximize advertising revenue.

Better: Placing the above in the hands of individual users: self presentation, feed curation entirely under user control.

Existing technologies such as RSS, open IDs and authentication, blogging software, etc, can, glued together with the right protocol TBD, to allow individuals to have more control over their own data and identity, while still allowing all of the good that Facebook and other social media actually bring to the world. Individuals host their own equivalent of the "Facebook wall" (or hire a host), and can subscribe to other "walls". Posting on your "wall" can have different levels of security - available to trusted audience or public, rather like Facebook is. Only, the user owns it. A free, open-source protocol that emphasizes interoperability and user control would allow devs to create any kind of client that suits them.

Revenue through consultation and marketing the deep expertise that comes from knowing the protocol inside out.

What I would do is the Snap or Telegram route. FB's weak link is that everything is too public. People can see things like who has read your message, what groups you like, who you are in an argument with. A medium that is less intrusive and lets you build more tight knit communities will be much more popular.

Another problem of Facebook is that it no longer consists of real world friends. It's about acquaintances, not friends. A social media that is more about real friends can do better.

I would actually attack it from the angle of some kind of community - gaming, certain hobbies, sports groups. Make something with similar features to Slack, Telegram, or Discord, but more suited between friends.

A good hint that it's on the right track is that it should initially be a little repulsive to people who use "acquaintance" or "personal branding" kind of social media, like Twitter, Linked In, Instagram.

How can you compete with that? Well, just say "no" like Snapchat did and cross your fingers because FB would litteraly copy/past your idea. They would use the couple of billions of dollars from your unsuccessful acquisition in order to hire an army of attorneys and to stop you from any legal action.

From another perspective, It's very hard to disrupt a social graph because it's very simple and pure. There's no need for it to be duplicated which is why FB keeps winning since they were the first who really created it. The rest is just about ads, billions of dollars, random features/startups and a lot of rich people. At the end of the day, the real value/data of FB is a very simple social graph.

Because it promotes bite-sized and current content over depth? A website that's just a personal to-read queue with a share button.

Because its one-size-fits-all approach that's only suitable for a narrow band of life events? A toolkit for making small community forums where moderators control what sort of posting model and user profile they have but users control which of their profiles are visible from each other.

Perhaps you could use that money to start another company, not a competitor, and hopefully turn enough of a profit that one day you'll have enough money to either build a competitor or just buy Facebook?

The only thing Zuckerberg cares about is his company, so unless you can threaten that you've got no leverage on him.

In that scenario, I don't think it would be impossible to make it vastly more respectful of user rights and still make enough money without charity to cover its operating costs.

Or you think it's a necessary prerequisite to succeed in some of your ideas?

If it's latter - just follow the implementation of your ideas and forget about FB.

If it's former - it's a worthless goal. Sort of like negative publicity - it just gives more attention (and power) to something you want to eliminate.

Also a piece of advice about graph visualizations: never show your user a raw graph vis of any kind, because it's UX suicide. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen CS grads make a force-directed graph vis and think it constituted something usable, I'd be rich.

[0] http://www.kumu.io

And magnify all the negatives of Facebook.

Read danah boyd's accounts of how MySpace fell to Facebook in the first place.

You will raise not $1B but $100 BILLION if you can convince investors that you'll disrupt FB. The problem is....you know what it is.

One thing I learned from designing websites is that no one goes to your site for it's artistic design. If your site looks great then it won't hurt. But, if the design gets in the way of accessing the information they're there to find, people will hate it.

MySpace was a perfect example of this, from what I recall.

Use the remaining funds to stir up sensational controversies that make people wary of Facebook, lobby governments around the world to harass Facebook, and offer monetary awards to get influential groups of people (e.g. schools) to switch to your platform. Once you've got a bit of momentum, spend the last few million dollars to hire a bunch of shady guys to take out Facebook's leadership and infrastructure -- either physically, with bombs and guns, or virtually, with very powerful malware. By the time they recover (if ever), you're the one who has two billion users.

This is how you destroy a company when you're actually intending to do so.

For the rest of us who don't want to get our hands dirty with guns and viruses, I suspect that $1B and the lofty goal of disrupting Facebook are actually going to get in the way. Facebook won't be disrupted by something that's trying too hard to disrupt them. Zuckerberg will see the competition coming from a mile away and respond with $2B, $3B, or more.

The key is to come up with something that's so completely different from Facebook that they'll have a hard time even seeing you as legitimate competition. You fly under their radar, make no headlines, and refrain from making ambitious statements like "I want to disrupt Facebook" until you've created a whole new market and they can't pivot to compete with you.

The reason the illegal solution above works is because Zuckerberg doesn't expect to be assassinated on his morning jog. Do something that's just as unexpected, only legally this time.