I remember the love for Google products, scoring an invite to gmail. I don’t remember a distinct love for facebook. It was much cleaner than MySpace, and kind of exclusive because I needed my university email, but not love.
Yeah I don't think FB was ever very popular with the techie crowd: it didn't solve a problem they had as those people could like self-host their own blogs and photos and shit (and frankly took some enjoyment in the fact that the plebs couldn't). Techies had IRC and mailing lists and soon HN, etc.
Contrast that to Google which was an indispensable tool for any hacker on basically day one, people will forgive a lot from a company that they can't live without.
But many if not most non-techie people ranted and raved about how much they loved Facebook well into the 2010s, even if they started calling it Instagram at some point. The general public (especially lefty coastal public) didn't start taking out all their frustrations with Big Tech in general on Facebook in particular until 2016.
The story that Facebook got Trump elected is absurd (I worked in the abusive behavior / content moderation group then: I was in the room and the press got this one badly wrong), but it was a riveting story and most people seem to still believe it now. Even some Facebook employees in other orgs seemed to believe that FB had failed in not putting its finger on the scales.
As for why anyone would want CEOs of private-sector companies in San Francisco to unilaterally decide who the president is? That is a horrifying thought. I think Big Tech CEOs probably find that a horrifying thought. The fact that they probably could is nightmare fuel enough, and the fact that to my knowledge they don't probably means there is still some Anakin behind the Vader mask.
Sorry for the novel, but this is all going to go into the history books wrong, and it bothers me to be hung for the wrong crime. FB/Google/etc. have blown it many, many times by "moving fast and breaking things" on privacy, letting mid-level product managers do user-hostile shit with inadequate oversight, "warehouse first and ask questions later"-type stuff, any number of things. But it's an emergent property of rapid-cadence metrics-driven product management, not a Bond-villain stoking a mustache.
