This, however, is why The End of Facebook stories are probably right this time. Last week I shared an interesting article — on Twitter, not Facebook, which has grown uninteresting in its feed — that claimed Facebook has been running a new payola scam. That’s exactly what they’ve done. They even steered businesses into positions in which only their pay-to-play would work — until they changed the rules, of course.

Payola is hard to regulate, but that doesn’t matter much because the public doesn’t like the game. To do it, the game has to be small and quiet. So it is self-limiting. But FB got cocky. People had been frustrated with the need to “boost” to reach existing followers already. The drastic cut — Little Things will be one of many companies wrecked by the quick change.