Facebook Is Dying, Quickly, And That’s A Good Thing
It’s ironic that Facebook began out of bitterness and spite, since that’s how it’s dying as well.
As anyone who has watched the movie or read the book detailing the origin story of Facebook knows, it began out of a website created by Mark Zuckerberg after a breakup, essentially to get petty revenge on the girl who’d dumped him, and the other people around him who he felt looked down upon him. Like so many great inventions and entrepreneurial endeavors, it started with a motivation to prove someone wrong, and was fueled by a need to succeed to show that he was better than people thought.
However, as Facebook begins its quickening slide down the toilet, the reasons for its demise are inexorably tied in with its spiritual onset. Facebook is dying due to its toxicity, its poisonous blend of people spewing bile, expelling jealousy and petty revenge, and using it as a dumping ground for mental illness and hatred.
Sure, there are still some positive realms on it, like there are on all social media platforms, but increasingly Facebook, as well as its ostensible twin, Twitter, a.k.a. X, are just caught in an echo chamber of negativity, and people are starting to move quickly away from it.
Since its peak, interest in Facebook has dropped 92 percent. In January of this year, it was reported that one in three Facebook users has lost interest in the platform and stopped using it. An article in Marketing Brew from earlier this year noted “as Facebook has gotten older, its user base has aged even more quickly, with the percentage of US teens saying they use the platform dropping from 71% in 2015 to 33% in 2023.”
Over the past four years, Facebook has lost a large percent of its audience, especially among young people, who have not just fled to other platforms, but are leaving social media entirely. There’s a burgeoning movement to get off-line and go back to living in the real world, or, for a lot of young people, to get off-line and to start living in the real world for the first time. There’s a definite romanticism among teens for the ’90s, a decade in which they never lived, but which they see as a halcyon place, in large part due to the lack of social media and all-watching, all-pervasive technology.
People aren’t just tired of the repetitive hatred and anger, they’re also tired of being a commodity. The facade has been revealed, and now everyone knows they, their money and their attention, are the products of social media. They’re being spied on, listened to, manipulated, brainwashed, and sold to constantly, and they’re sick of it.
Could Facebook die over the next five years? It could certainly happen.
After all, it happened to Xanga, and Vine, and, most notably, MySpace.
There was a time, around 2006, when EVERYONE was on MySpace.
The social media platform was ubiquitous, especially if you were under 30. Everyone you knew was on it, everyone was having fun on it. And to be honest, it was a really fun time in society and online life and MySpace was the pinnacle of that.
MySpace wasn’t political, it wasn’t full of conspiracy theories and hate speech and ridiculous falsehoods, and vicious arguments and people being blocked. It was largely about people posting fun pictures of themselves and sharing music that they enjoyed, and then people generally commenting in a friendly and civil fashion.
There are over 2 billion active Facebook users globally, 190 million in the U.S.
You could rank your top friends, and it was fun to see who would be up there on a frequent basis.
It just seemed like a much more fun and lighthearted time.
And then along came Facebook.
Like so many others, I started up a Facebook profile in 2007 just for the heck of it. After all, at that point, every time a new social media platform popped up, I would start up a profile on it, because social media wasn’t big business, it was something fun and escapist. Nobody really took it seriously. (And yes, somewhere out there I have a xanga.)
Tom would never have done this. He only wanted us to have fun.
Flash forward two decades.
MySpace is long gone. The shell of it is still there, but it hasn’t been relevant in more than a decade.
And as for Facebook?
It’s feeling an awful lot like MySpace was in 2009 — not in terms of content, because MySpace then was still 1,000 times better than Facebook is now in regard to that — but in terms of it being a dead man walking. The only difference being, Facebook’s zombie is still waiting for its social media Negan to completely annihilate it.
That Negan has yet to emerge, but it’s out there. It’s just a matter of time, and that time is probably down to about a year or two at most.
Facebook is dying.
Yup.
And, good riddance.
For the most part, it’s grown incredibly tedious. I used to love Facebook when it first emerged. Because it still had some of the fun of MySpace attached. You could share pictures and stories, and posts, and although it was missing the really fun musical elements and the “top five” of MySpace, it was more expansive and interesting.
But especially in the last four years, it’s become a dumpster fire, and as the company has become more greedy and allocated more of its editorial decisions to robots instead of people, the choices to “ban” people have become increasingly ludicrous.
Just this weekend I was notified I was banned from posting on Facebook for 24 hours.
Why?
Due to a post not following their “community standards on nudity or sexual activity.”
That content?
I shared a story from QuadCities.com about a local couple who received a surprise holiday phone call from Dick Van Dyke.
DICK Van Dyke.
Yes.
THAT’S why Facebook banned me for 24 hours.
Dick Van Dyke, who turns 99 this year, made a personal video for Scott and Melita Tunnicliff.
Apparently because of the name “DICK VAN DYKE.”
Even Dick Van Dyke can’t believe this bullshit.
In the meantime, Facebook has become a cesspool of disinformation and asinine conspiracy theories. If you can think of a ridiculous chunk of conspiratorial crap that’s emerged in the past few years — everything from pizzagate to QAnon — it’s been spread to the masses on Facebook. The platform has become an intellectual disease hotbed of stupidity and ignorance.
And people are quickly recognizing that.
Sure, we still acknowledge that there are a lot of people on Facebook, and so we use it to promote our events and business interests.
But more and more, very few people I know are spending significant time on there.
Most people, myself included, go on there to promote their things — maybe they throw in a few posts beforehand to boost up the algorithm and get into people’s news feeds, and THEN we promote our things — and then they leave it alone.
Another incredibly offensive Dick pic.
Dick Van Dyke recorded a holiday video, ordered as a gift from an old friend.
Most people I know — and I know a lot of folks who tend to be on the cutting edge of new trends and ahead of the curve on social waves — have pretty much abandoned it other than to use it for utilitarian purposes. And those utilitarian purposes are only going to be relevant as long as Facebook holds on to its status as the only major game in town in regard to social media audience. Once the tipping point hits — and it will, soon — in which Facebook begins to fade in terms of audience, people are going to start abandoning it in droves, and it’s going to end up becoming basically what MySpace is now. It’ll still be there, but nobody will really be on it in an active way.
Facebook is only relevant because nothing has emerged to challenge it on a macroeconomic or macro-social scale. But give it time, because we’re already seeing large groups of people leave and avoid it in droves.
Parler, the new social media site geared towards conservatives, has drawn a big crowd of those politically leaning folks away from Facebook; TikTok and Snapchat have pulled everyone Gen Z; Instagram and Snapchat are pulling more millenials; so the signs are there that people are looking for other avenues and they’re sick of Facebook and its crap.
If something comes along to pull Gen X, it’s all over. Because most boomers could take or leave it, and many are only on there to keep in touch with their younger family members and friends.
Mary Poppins would be very disappointed in you, Mark Zuckerberg.
MySpace Tom. Damn I miss this guy.
And honestly, I look forward to that day, which will be coming soon.
Unlike MySpace, which I still miss to this day, I don’t foresee me having wistful memories for the halcyon days of Facebook. It’s always seemed like little more than a corporate entity which was forced upon us because we had little choice in the matter. It’s like the only dive bar in a small town. It’s a hellhole, but, hey, where else are you gonna go to see your friends?
Personally, I enjoy Instagram, with its panoramas of beautiful and interesting photos and stories, and TikTok, with its goofy videos, a whole lot more.
None of them are MySpace though.
And wouldn’t it be ironic, then, if it was a return of MySpace that killed off Facebook?
Doubtful. As much as I, and many other Gen Xers would love to see it.
But something will. And soon. The writing is on the wall, in big block letters, for anyone to see it.
Except for maybe Dick Van Dyke. I hear he’s been banned.
