What is the antonym of “bubble”? Whatever the word, Facebook’s stock is now down about twenty-five per cent since its I.P.O. shareholders are suing the company. Mark Zuckerberg is no longer one of the richest forty people in the world. The F.T.C. is requesting information about Facebook’s purchase of Instagram. Steve Coll left Facebookistan.

It’s been a tough two weeks, but one can argue that the problems will pass. Looked at from one angle, the stock offering went pretty well. When a company’s stock price shoots up after an I.P.O, it means that the company itself—which sells shares at the initial offering price—has missed out on revenue. And, regardless of its share price, Facebook still has a dominant position on the Internet. As an article in The Atlantic pointed out earlier this week, we spend twice as much time on Facebook as we do on Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined. The author, Alexis Madrigal, wrote, “One in every five page views on the Internet is a Facebook page. If the Internet is valuable, Facebook is valuable.”

But the bedlam of the past two weeks does matter in one important way: Facebook, more than most other companies, needs to worry deeply about its public perception. It needs to be seen as trustworthy and, above all, cool. Mismanaging an I.P.O. isn’t cool, neither is misleading shareholders. Government investigations of you aren’t cool either. To slightly recast a quote from “The Social Network,” losing around five billion dollars—as Zuckerberg has done since the stock’s peak—definitely isn’t cool.

Facebook’s business strategy is essentially to colonize the rest of the Web. It wants your Facebook account to become a universal login to other Web sites. It wants news organizations to partner with it, so that your Facebook friends are notified of whatever you read. It wants transactions to go through Facebook, and it wants games played on Facebook. But each of these deals needs a partner, and the partner needs to feel good about Facebook. Facebook has done great things for Spotify, and Spotify has done great things for Facebook. Will such friendships be as easy to forge now that Facebook is a monetary giant?

Facebook is also about to enter a very different new stage in personnel management. For the past few years, the company could recruit and poach almost any engineer it wanted. It was still something of an upstart, and it had stock options. It was the place for hackers where everyone was going to get gold. Facebook was no longer the new new thing, but it was the surest, hippest path to riches. Now, though, most of the options are gone and the money’s been handed out. As happened with Google eight years ago, the company has suddenly been transformed into a place with income inequality like Brazil’s. Lots of people are really, really rich. And the people who joined later aren’t.

So how can Facebook attract smart coders, problem solvers, and free thinkers? It needs, first of all, to maintain its reputation as a place for hackers. Whether Zuckerberg intended it or not, his decision to meet with bankers in a hoodie before the I.P.O. was a smart way to send a signal that he wants to maintain an insurgent culture. The company’s decision to host an all-night hackathon the night before the offering was also bright. Recently, David Kushner published a New Yorker piece about George Hotz, one of the most talented hackers in the country. Last summer, Hotz had gone to work for Facebook. “Everything is very fast-moving and the culture is young,” he said. He’s since quit, and it’s not clear how eager young and talented hackers will be persuaded to join the company. A few months ago, I was out at Stanford, the breeding ground for talented engineers, and I asked a computer-science student whether he would work at Facebook. Only for the options, he said. What about using Facebook? “Everyone does it here,” he said. “But no one is proud of it.”

The reputation of Facebook’s management team has also been deeply tarnished, particularly by the accusations that it wasn’t entirely open to investors about declining growth in its advertising business. Prior to the I.P.O., the narrative of Facebook was one of redemption, and of the maturation of Mark Zuckerberg. “Incredibly, Mark Zuckerberg has grown up to become an ace CEO,” ran the subtitle in a glowing New York magazine feature. Ken Auletta wrote a long Profile of Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg’s deputy, a woman who, until the I.P.O. seemed to do nothing wrong. In part because Facebook has centralized an incredible amount of power with Zuckerberg, we need to trust him. Do we still? Yes, but not as much as we did two weeks ago.

No one is going to build a direct competitor to Facebook. Social networks grow from network effects. The more users you have the more users you’ll get. Facebook will be with us for a long time, and it will indeed make money. Sandberg’s reputation is deserved, Zuckerberg’s maturation is real, and the company may quickly steer its way out of its current mess. But things have not gone well of late. And there is a real danger that Facebook becomes like what Microsoft was in the mid- and late nineties: a company that is feared and resented—untrusted and rarely loved.

Disclosure: I helped found The Atavist, a technology start-up whose investors include people connected to Google, Facebook, and other technology companies.

Photograph by Scott Eells/Bloomberg/Getty Images.