My analysis of the Facebook experience shows that despite claiming in its third quarter results that it retains 3.3 billion users.
My analysis of the Facebook experience shows that despite claiming in its third quarter results that it retains 3.3 billion users, the social network is nevertheless in terminal decline, and is kept alive merely to rake as much money as possible while avoiding any investment to improve it.Facebook perfectly symbolizes Meta’s trajectory: the world’s most popular social network was only able to survive in a highly unpredictable environment by copying or buying out the competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, etc.) and eventually succumbed to the poor reputation it acquired through repeated scandals which ranged from electoral manipulation to genocide.
As a result, the company changed its name, fleeing from an intangible asset that had already become a problem. Now reborn as Meta, Facebook had already fallen out of favor among younger people, while there were a growing number of inactive accounts due to the fact that their owners had died and nobody had bothered to close them. At the same time, timelines were no longer a way to keep in touch with friends and were simply the thread for a succession of ads, while more and more people were asking online how to “reset” it back to what it had once been.
The name change to Meta didn’t convince anybody, because the promised metaverse just didn’t work out: who would want to establish a presence or invest in a platform where someone like Mark Zuckerberg set the rules? Instead, Meta began to invest in AI, which may make sense but says nothing about a new business model other than aggressively personalized advertising. Meanwhile, Meta simply turned its already creaking platform, Facebook, into a cash cow, with zero maintenance and open contempt for its users.
I have little to do with Facebook. I have not closed my page because I have more than 37,000 followers on it, although I have no idea how many are alive or still interested in what I have to say; for all I know, they could be bots. I continue to log in twice a day to upload the link to my daily article in the Spanish and Engish versions. I open my page, refresh and close. Sometimes I reply to a comment, but that’s all. I don’t go on Facebook for anything else, I don’t update my personal profile, much less do I have it installed on my smartphone, which as things stand, would be crazy.
From time to time, there are serious problems, giving the impression that the platform is run by a bunch of drunk baboons. Poorly posted requests, images that won’t upload, messages that have to be repeated two and three times, and the worst: algorithms that decide what you have sent is spam or contains malicious links, and therefore must be eliminated. Needless to say, it is impossible to discuss this with anybody at the company.
I have never sent spam. My work could be described in many ways, but never as spam, and what’s more, as an academic, I consider it an insult. Malicious links? What kind of algorithms do these people use? I know that Facebook uses algorithms to save money on content moderation, but it could at least bother to create ones that work properly.
It’s clear that Meta is running Facebook into the ground, extracting what value it can while letting it languish until the last user comes to their senses and abadons it.
We are where we are: all things have their life cycle, and Meta has allowed Facebook to decline to such a degree that only a few misguided companies think it is worth advertising on it. To be able to do something like this with a platform that reaches more than three billion users, almost half of the world’s population, is truly commendable. Facebook’s reputation is already at rock bottom, and only the ill-informed bother using it to read news, interact with friends or advertise on it. Things will only get worse. So if you hadn’t questioned your presence on Facebook or had simply forgotten that you had a profile there, now’s a good time to delete it.
