Reading this article the one idea that persisted in my head was that this was a case of people not really knowing anything about ecology trying to create an ecosystem. Sure they used the word "Platform" and maybe that was actually the first clue, but what they really wanted was an ecosystem of actors creating increased value for their domain.
I think that my favorite piece of writing by Cory Doctorow is his essay "All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" and I thought of it early into this piece. Any ecosystem of any interest will always have parasites within it. When you attempt to indiscriminately remove them all you almost invariably end up with something sterile and far less interesting. When I discover a weed on my lawn, my reaction isn't to burn the lawn and pave it. Sure I wouldn't have any weeds that way, but a concrete sheet is far less interesting (to me at least) than a lush lawn. So I suck it up and deal with the weeds on a case by case basis, because that is the only way to do it without torching the rest of the ecosystem that I want to maintain. It seems like Facebook, when faced with the weed problem, went the concrete sheet route, torching both the parasites and the rest of the actors that actually made up the ecosystem. Sure, it means that there are no more weeds, but it means that there also aren't any of the other organisms that create value in your ecosystem.
Another thing to consider is the energy cost of "putting down roots" so to speak in an ecosystem and evolving with changes. An organism has to spend energy to establish itself within an ecosystem, and it also has to spend energy changing itself to adapt to changes in the environment. Every joule of energy it spends doing this is a joule it doesn't spend enriching the ecosystem it is a part of. Going back to my lawn, I don't change the soil composition every year, and I also don't pull up the grass and set it back down to resod every 6 weeks. Eventually it would die, because I would be forcing it to spend all of its energy adapting to changes I introduce rather than helping the ecosystem thrive. And then I'm back to my barren field problem.
I don't have a good ecosystem analogy for competing against their developers, but I will note that it can be framed in energy terms again. Any other organism, after watchers other repeatedly expend their energy in a particular ecosystem only to be crushed will likely decide against attempting to establish themselves in your ecosystem and instead choose one of several other competing ecosystems, even those that appear initially less attractive, because what is the use if you likely end up failing anyway?
So, my takeaway given only my shallow knowledge of what happened based on this article is that other organizations attempting to establish an ecosystem (and that is really what they want when they say platform) and reap the numerous benefits that an ecosystem can produce should spend some time thinking about how ecosystems become established and thrive in the real world before charging clumsily forward with their own naive attempts.