This is a pretty good write-up of the social media cycle. Short version is at first a new platform gains value from having more users so they focus on improving it for the users. Once they have a large enough user base, they phase into focusing on advertising and how to monetize off their users. Last stage is the company is large enough and their focus is on their shareholders now.
Makes sense to me, updates at first to a platform improve it. Then later updates add more ads. Then the platform gets manipulated to maximize monetization.