Introduction: On Monday, American internet entrepreneur and investor Andrew Chen wrote that the Facebook platform is gradually losing its appeal to developers due to a variety of factors, including the lack of virality, frequent tool revisions, and relatively high advertising rates. In light of this, the company must change its model and provide targeted assistance to help developers succeed if it wishes to regain their favor.The following is the full text of the article:Public perception of the Facebook platform has changed. Recently, Bill Gurley of the U.S. venture capital firm Benchmark wrote an article discussing how platform companies like Facebook, iOS, Android, and eBay manage their ecosystems. It's worth reading. I agree with his views on Facebook. After recently communicating with other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, I found that there seems to be a consensus in the industry: the Facebook platform is not suitable for startups.Last month, I even heard a well-known venture capitalist say: if most of your users come from Facebook, then it's not worth investing in.It seems things are indeed bad. This seems to be completely opposite of three or four years ago, when everyone was developing applications for Facebook and deeply integrating this social network into their products. I remember visiting an incubator once where their manager proudly said: everyone on this floor is developing Facebook apps. At the time, people believed that something new would emerge, believing that a social operating system would create a new layer of the internet.So what happened? Why have developers started to hate Facebook?This article will elaborate on these factors in detail. Perhaps it can inspire future platforms to better collaborate with developers, and also help Facebook ultimately resolve these issues. I don't agree with all the views in the article, but to fully articulate them, I will list all the opinions I've heard.1. Lack of ViralityWhen the Facebook platform was first released, it seemed to open up a vibrant new world. You could almost do anything you wanted. I heard that iLike music sharing service experienced significant growth when the Facebook platform was first launched because they discovered that they could display an invitation interface while viewing friend names, and people would click OK without hesitation. Since it was easy to invite all of a user's friends, it helped the application grow rapidly. Since this was detrimental to the user experience, it was reasonable for Facebook to cancel this mode, although developers still had a soft spot for it. Zynga and Viddy benefited from this as well.Now, however, this viral channel has been completely shut down, though the reasons are valid, third-party applications find it difficult to achieve sustainable viral growth within this ecosystem. Many channels that existed last year have disappeared this year, without any alternative solutions. As a result, developers' enthusiasm has cooled, and they now launch mobile applications at TechCrunch events, hoping to succeed on the iOS platform — a method that still works for some developers, so they focus on it.2. High Advertising RatesThe appeal of platforms like Facebook and Google lies in the fact that they offer both organic marketing channels (through news feeds and search results) and paid channels (paid content can be mixed with organic content). A few years ago, there were many low-cost ad spaces on Facebook, and many businesses used both organic and paid channels simultaneously. This was because Facebook had long-term goals and wanted to build its own advertising infrastructure; they allowed advertisers to slowly increase their ad business through bidding rather than filling all pages with AdSense ads.Facebook gets one trillion page views per month, so there are inevitably many cheap ad spaces. Many developers and advertisers could buy large amounts of cheap traffic and then monetize this traffic through virtual goods or e-commerce businesses.However, as advertising rates have gradually increased, this model has become less effective. And with the reduction in virality, the actual cost of acquiring users has also increased because developers receive fewer free users. By 2013, this model had become difficult to profit from. In a sense, Zynga and Groupon succeeded by leveraging Facebook's massive page views. They could buy 100 million users a few years ago, but now, attracting new users has become much more difficult, and they have begun looking at other platforms.3. Frequent Tool RevisionsI once heard a joke: the thing developers fear most is receiving emails from Facebook because Facebook uses these emails to inform developers that they need to upgrade their applications to adapt to the company's new API (application programming interface). Facebook has an excellent engineering culture and reacts very quickly, but this also means that their developers need to frequently adjust their applications. Your adjustment speed needs to keep up with Facebook's. Just take a look at Facebook's developer update page to see how frequently they revise.These adjustments also bring high maintenance costs to applications on the Facebook platform because you need to assign excellent engineers to continuously maintain them, sacrificing some innovative projects. Channels available today may not be usable tomorrow. Even if you consider personnel, business models, financing carefully, and make important decisions, you still have to interrupt everything if Facebook makes changes. This happens every few months, and the entire process is filled with uncertainty.4. Competing with FacebookAt least in certain service areas, Facebook hopes to enhance the competitiveness of its own products instead of being just a completely open platform. If you talk to developers of some text or image applications, or even walkie-talkie applications, you'll hear many stories about applications being forced to shut down. Due to the wave of mobile applications sweeping the globe, functional overlaps are inevitable. I even heard that Facebook does not allow some messaging applications to purchase ads on its platform—not only shutting down APIs but also directly refusing their advertisements. This is indeed interesting.5. Limited News Feed SpaceMany of Facebook's channel problems can be attributed to limited space in the news feed. Users typically check the first 10 or 20 items each time they visit Facebook, and getting into this sequence can yield rewards. This leads to various problems because as users spend more time on Facebook, new activities also increase:They like more pagesAdd more friendsSubscribe to more celebritiesTry more applicationsLogin to more applications using their Facebook accountsAll of this means that the News Feed algorithm needs to filter more content. Not only do user activities increase, but advertisers buying likes and app installations also increase. This leads to everyone trying to secure a spot in the news feed, but it’s a zero-sum game. All of this causes saturation in marketing channels, gradually reducing the attractiveness of the channels.6. Better Prospects for Mobile PlatformsThe rise of mobile platforms seems to be an undeniable trend, which is why developers' attention has shifted to mobile platforms, seeking a new lease on life. You might have heard that Supercell recently raised $130 million at a valuation of $770 million. When was the last time you heard about a Facebook app? How many investors are willing to invest in Facebook apps now? In my communications with others, I found that many people believe that the mobile market still holds a lot of opportunities and offers sufficient stability.Where Should the Facebook Platform Go From Here?From many perspectives, the Facebook platform has achieved remarkable success. Besides Google, perhaps no company has delivered so much free traffic to developers without expecting returns. Therefore, we shouldn't complain too much about Facebook. The platform has changed significantly since its launch, and we have learned many lessons from it. One lesson is that satisfying developers and satisfying users are two completely different things. The same decision can make Facebook a good company but may not necessarily make it a good platform for helping developers acquire users.Can Facebook attract developers' attention again as it did many years ago? I think it can, but they first need to figure out what kind of applications their platform really desires and help these partners succeed. They need to provide evidence that developers can grow and develop on their platform. Microsoft is an incredible platform because many companies based on Windows have gone public unless they target a highly valuable market, Microsoft rarely competes directly.I believe that if developers and the startup community hear about Facebook's success stories again, they will definitely be willing to give it another try. But at the same time, iOS and Android are indeed attracting developers' attention with broader opportunities.