Facebook loses users for the first time

> false news and hate speech

I believe there's something much more sinister than that going on with that feed. I believe it's specifically programmed to fish out your mental vulnerabilities and bully you with content that touches on exactly that.

This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me:

Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.

Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.

Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies.

Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business.

Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.

This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades.

I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent.

What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company.

Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.

I used to use Facebook for events, but faced a bug recently where random friends could see the event details for a private event, as if invited, despite not being invited. A pretty serious bug, leading to some awkward messages!

In any case, I now only use FB for one single niche community. If that goes elsewhere, so will I!

My FB isn't full of fury and hate speech. It's boring!

Half of my friends like to post anodyne motivational quotes, "hilarious" forwarded jokes, pretty pictures of events they attended, and their own not-so-interesting musings. Unfortunately, that half is by far the most active on Facebook.

The overall atmosphere is mawkish. The best aspect is seeing pics of people's kids. You can't fault that.

I think the shift to VR is actually FB acknowledging they lost the mobile platform battle and can not depend on Apple and Google for its future, so it must move the game on. VR is a platform in which they have a head start and own top to bottom with Oculus.

Essentially Zuckerberg is fast forwarding the future so he’ll have place to sell ads in without a 3rd part like Apple setting the rules.

This is also why he goes full VR and not AR which would likely require a phone somewhere on the side.