Is Facebook Done?

Facebook itself seems to be screwed. I just reactivated my FB profile, with the goal of deleting 80% of "friends", because the feed has become so toxic.

1. Half of my friends have stopped being active since 2020. Some say goodbye, most disappear quietly. But I think antivax and all the anti-gov rhetoric was the last straw for most people.

2. The most active accounts are selling something. Some sell insurance, others sell politics.

3. It's unattractive to people in their early 20s or below.

4. Like many other social media, it has become a game to see who can publicly humiliate other people. It's not as bad as Reddit, but the absence of downvotes mean that people can play really dirty.

5. FB moderation is either AI or untrained minimum wage people basically clicking random buttons. The AI is very predictable and documented, so actual trolls know how to get around it or trick people into self banning (e.g. "white trash")

6. Everyone feels that FB is failing, so they stopped investing in it. Less photos, videos, content, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think FB is effectively a sinking ship, a Yahoo. Perhaps the Meta rebranding was them distancing from FB. Instagram is still hot, though.

People seem to forget about Instagram and Whatsapp when talking about Meta/FB. Both are acquisitions that kept FB relevant for a new generation. They still have a huge amount of market capital. Even if they don't develop the Metaverse in house, they can still just buy whoever makes it or the next Big Thing. They probably would have bought TikTok if it wasn't Chinese-owned.

Does anyone know where this metaverse crap came from? Was it just straight out of Zuck’s mind? It’s so funny and bizarre to watch him torpedo the company like this. Not that I’m complaining.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/mark-zuckerberg-shows-early-...

Meta is Facebook's Google Plus without all the potential of Google Plus. Google Plus at least had the independence to potentially be something before the corporate machine reasserted itself. Meta's VR stuff is ugly. People organizing and sharing photo walks helped carry Google Plus in the down months. Who's going to go on a photo walk in Facebook's idea of virtual reality? There's nothing there except what the machine has dictated must be built. And they've bet the farm on it in the same way Google turned the entirety of the company into a funnel for +.

Instagram was still new enough to beat, and they had the seed for what a more patient company could have grown through all its early mistakes. They might very well have shown Facebook how important chat and photos were in trying to make a Facebook clone and drove them to buy WhatsApp and Instagram. Google built what Facebook had to buy, but they didn't understand what that meant and let them become just another unchanging set of things bolted on to Google.

I don't know if the failure of Google Plus and all the changes they made to the company to serve it were the cause of Google's current state, but it probably didn't help. Facebook was already in the PR pit Google is in before the Meta rebrand. Meta isn't even good VR. There's so much better.

Let's find out.

> But it feels like fb is abandoning all of it and going full force to metaverse. It feels like fb wants to be either the biggest or nothing.

It is Meta, which includes (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Oculus) that is pushing for this 'metaverse' thing and this reminds me of Microsoft trying to own everything in the software landscape as soon as they won the desktop PC industry.

The failures of Ping (Apple), So.cl (Microsoft) and Google+ (Google) was when Zuckerberg knew he won with social networks with FB and has already expanded beyond FB very early and quickly.

> Also isn't like 95% of the engineers at facebook all mainly web developers or related.

Where did you get that figure from? I hope you are not being serious about that claim.

> And metaverse is basically game development.. something facebook has no experience in.

So Oculus isn't in games development industry? They have been selling shovels to game developers and companies for years.

> ...Maybe they should acquire or partner up with epic to have some hope.

What is this then? [0]

> is fb done for?

No.

I would not bet against the first and the fastest company to reach $1 trillion dollars in the 21st century to be quickly dead in the next 10 years. Meta is more than just Facebook.

[0] https://metaverse-standards.org/news/press-releases/leading-...

The VR metaverse is not going to take off, although their devices are nice. Strapping a blindfold on face is not very tolerable, and it's not a device that makes you look cool to your friends.

But zuck is right that people (Especially genZ) will use gaming and virtual worlds for their social life. Real life is too busy , disconnected and probably economically much harder than before. The virtual one is better, richer and permanent. My guess is he believes that the world is ready for Second life to go mainstream, and he's building the "whole world" version of it. I have to say he s off-track currently, too much focus on VR. Their avatars really suck. But they'll get there eventually

Facebook done an Alphabet and have an umbrella brand, for which Facebook is basically a side project now and not to be taken seriously. Facebook is still a cash cow for Meta just like Google is a cash cow for Alphabet and fuels their AD business. Tectonic shifts and pivots like this just mean they have the opportunity to branch out into other markets and not rely on singular revenue streams which could become unreliable in the future. It’s a risky bet that could work. Only time will tell and I’m not predicting anything.

Facebook is a slow outdated platform with an aging population and no future because younger people want speed and an actual reason to use it. Even looking at the "timeline" of a Facebook profile is an outdated method of showing data.

I think as long as the ad dollars continue to pour in, the platform will remain strong. As much as it has been affected in the U.S. I wonder how strong it still is in other countries outside of the US market.

lots of good points, let me sell my FB stock

It seems they’re putting all of their money on VR. It depends on how that evolves over the next couple of years.

> is fb done for?

Everyone is on Instagram.