Facebook: the rot has set in

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…