Just because there are features that you don't use doesn't make it a problem.

In fact people who like stories and camera effects likely way outnumber the people that don't.

I interpreted “problem” as the bloat problem in a 1.7 mloc chat app.

Summarizing it as a chat app is probably the first miscommunication here.

I strongly doubt that. The number of people in my list of friends (400ish) that use stories is marginal.

The number of people that use camera effects as anything other than a gimmick is even smaller.

Maybe a different age group?

> my list of friends

I think that most of people of HN have friend groups which are wildly unrepresentative of world population at large. We're talking not even an average US or European citizen here - we're talking 1+ billion. People from developing countries who very often access internet only from a smartphone (they don't own a computer) and who almost don't visit plain http websites outside of the few social apps.

It's a completely different world out there.

It's an inner-platform effect, certainly, but not one FB asked for. If they were allowed by the app-stores to factor their app into separate "plugins" that were auto-installed when a friend used them in a chat, the way iMessage does, they'd probably do that. But they're not allowed to have their own seamless plugin ecosystem, so into the monolith everything goes.

No, they specifically used Messenger as a way of pushing all of those different things on its massive install-base. Anything that distances them from the user in any way would compromise on that objective.

Facebook and all the rest benefit from developing closed ecosystems that others can't benefit from. It's not a coincidence that their systems are systems-within-systems.