It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarked on or unnoticed by most people. Until it changed. AOL is around, as Facebook likely will be, but it'll see a similar fall, and no one will see it coming.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110124001004/http://www.nytime...
Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook moderators deal with.