Assuming that the comments are even real, they show a naive and fundamental lack of understanding of how marketing is a tough skill to master on its own.
Even if you were to be handed the keys to a perfect replica of Facebook, with a whole new brand, it would be anything but trivial to gain traction with it.
Success is above all determined by the execution of the idea as well as its marketing.
Some of the commenters are no doubt annoyed by the fact that the idea was (in their eyes) easy to execute and TC did most of the marketing for them. So I think it comes down to petty jealousy for some.
Success is above all determined by the execution of the idea as well as its marketing.
And even with brilliant execution and a fantastic marketing strategy, most things are still doomed to fail. Luck still plays a brutal and major part - the internet is chock full of successful startups/sites/projects that lingered in obscurity for many months or years without catching on, and then suddenly blew up and started to go viral without any particularly clever action on the part of the founders.
The important thing is to resist the urge to explain success and failure as if they are deterministic when they're really driven by essentially random factors (to be precise: they're not random, but they're so unpredictable and difficult to control that to us they might as well be). The "execution is everything" mantra is true for most types of products, and poor execution can explain failure, but IMO it's far overrated for things that rely on virality. Even if you do absolutely everything right, there's always a significant chance that an inferior me-too ripoff is going to be the one that gets all "your" users.
Which is why it's so much smarter to build things like Breakup/Crush Notifier as weekend projects rather than startups.
Even if you were to be handed the keys to a perfect replica of Facebook, with a whole new brand, it would be anything but trivial to gain traction with it.
Success is above all determined by the execution of the idea as well as its marketing.
Some of the commenters are no doubt annoyed by the fact that the idea was (in their eyes) easy to execute and TC did most of the marketing for them. So I think it comes down to petty jealousy for some.