What Does the Death of Facebook Mean?

Chris

Administrator
Staff member
What Does the Death of Facebook Mean?
Will social media matter less?
By Daniel Greenfield

Facebook was always the weakest member of the FAANG gang.

Where Amazon and Google had worked to build platforms for captive audiences, Facebook had little hold beyond a fragile social media ecosystem.

Mark Zuckerberg was well aware of the fate that Myspace and other social media companies had met and so he worked to head off competitors by buying them up. That worked until the Chinese deployed TikTok.

TikTok has carved up the social media market for teens and pre-teens. Advertisers and investors are reacting appropriately.

Zuckerberg’s pivot to the metaverse was a bizarre stunt that could only end one way. It was, ironically, an escape from reality marketing escapes from reality as the future of the company.

Facebook isn’t gone yet. It has a sizable audience. But that audience is older.

FAANGs run on the promise of endless growth. But you can’t offer endless growth without generational demographics or international horizons. And Facebook has neither.

All of this has some implications for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the social media business, which some conservatives are diving into.

Twitter has never defined itself by generational market share. It was a niche product connected to trends. As a private company, Twitter wont’ have to worry about meeting aggressive growth metrics. Musk presumably has his own plan to monetize the company. It’s hard to imagine how those plans can possible compensate for its inflated purchase price. But that’s his problem.

Facebook’s collapse is more potentially intriguing because it has dominated social media almost as monopolistically as Google has controlled search, because it remains a major source of news and because its older audience is more demographically conservative.

A new management team could upend a lot of existing practices, but isn’t likely to make it more open.

The outright collapse of Facebook could potentially open up the market to conservative companies and make way for user choice. At least that’s what should happen. And yet I suspect that in this marketplace, it’s more likely to be replaced by yet another monopolistic monstrosity.

There’s a third possibility though which is that social media will matter less.

Conservatives turned over their brand, their presence and their audience to social media companies with disastrous results. While some influencers and some sites that trafficked in influencers as a subscription revenue source became highly profitable, the movement was gutted. Censorship quickly showed the folly of moving from sites and platforms controlled by conservatives to those owned by a single monopoly.

On the Left, digital media went through a similar shakedown with a similar realization.

Social media is socially unhealthy and politically disastrous. On the conservative side, it spawned influencer grifters who have misled the movement and hijacked it for their own agendas, renting it out to influence operations both foreign and domestic. On the mental health side, studies have pretty clearly documented how damaging immersion in social media can be. Especially for teens.

I don’t anticipate it going away tomorrow. Much as Facebook won’t vanish overnight. But without a single company operating at monopolistic scale, perhaps social media will become a less dominant presence in our lives.

https://www.raptureforums.com/politics-culture-wars/what-does-the-death-of-facebook-mean/
 

Tall Timbers

Imperfect but forgiven
When your business model is reliant on children and teens making your platform popular, your days are numbered as that is a very fickle audience that will move to something else once adults have moved onto the same platform.

Facebook has become much more than a place for youth to interact but it could easily fade into the sunset as new platforms rise up to compete for those advertising dollars.

The Metaverse may have been a good idea that some company other than Meta will be known for in the future.

IBM introduced more than a few gadgets to the world first only to see its efforts flop in the marketplace... then later some other company gets credit for the thing when their effort with a similar gadget was successful in the marketplace.

I don't think platforms where people interact and/or conduct business will become less important over time but will become increasingly central to people's lives, unless major global disasters breaks the internet, in which case commercial activity would grind to a halt as much of the world is reliant upon the internet.
 

InMidian

Member
I got rid of Facebook a few years ago due to the drama over the 2016 election, and I don't miss it at all. What concerns me is that Facebook appears to be completely entwined in our lives. Events, appointments, news, etc are all connected by Facebook. I miss alot of announcements and events due to not being on Facebook. I have to rely on my husband to inform me of what's happening. When I tell people that I'm not on Facebook they look at me like I just fell off a turnip truck. I bet I have more free/quality time than they do.........
 

RedRx

Well-Known Member
My brother asked me about TikTok recently. They have two teenagers and of course my niece and nephew love it. I said if you have that app on your phone and text “Hello China” to anyone they’ll get the message. Doesn’t matter who you send it to either.

I still have FB because my wife closed her account first and wanted me to keep mine active just in case whatever that means. There’s also a really good RV group I’m a member of that I desperately wish would move off FB but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m still very rarely on FB because I just can’t tolerate leftist whining about everything under the sun. Same reason I can’t watch CNN or ESPN either by the way. Let’s just say you can count on one hand the number of times I was on FB in 2022. That number will actually decrease in 2023.

Social media and the companies that run their platforms can only control you if you let them. I refuse and honestly most of the content isn’t geared towards me anyway. I’m none of the following which would make social media infinitely more tolerable: leftist, 12 years old, homosexual, immature, and/or constantly bored out of my mind. If I was any of those social media might be important to me.

Maybe I’m just a grumpy old man ahead of my time? Who knows but I would recommend anyone that is seriously considering getting TikTok to carefully read their terms of service agreement- scary stuff and quite shocking.
 

lightofmylife

Blessed Hope-Prepare To Fly!
My brother asked me about TikTok recently. They have two teenagers and of course my niece and nephew love it. I said if you have that app on your phone and text “Hello China” to anyone they’ll get the message. Doesn’t matter who you send it to either.

I still have FB because my wife closed her account first and wanted me to keep mine active just in case whatever that means. There’s also a really good RV group I’m a member of that I desperately wish would move off FB but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m still very rarely on FB because I just can’t tolerate leftist whining about everything under the sun. Same reason I can’t watch CNN or ESPN either by the way. Let’s just say you can count on one hand the number of times I was on FB in 2022. That number will actually decrease in 2023.

Social media and the companies that run their platforms can only control you if you let them. I refuse and honestly most of the content isn’t geared towards me anyway. I’m none of the following which would make social media infinitely more tolerable: leftist, 12 years old, homosexual, immature, and/or constantly bored out of my mind. If I was any of those social media might be important to me.

Maybe I’m just a grumpy old man ahead of my time? Who knows but I would recommend anyone that is seriously considering getting TikTok to carefully read their terms of service agreement- scary stuff and quite shocking.
I don't have anything to do with TikTok it comes from China.
 

Ghoti Ichthus

Pray so they do not serve alone. Ephesians 6:10-20
Some businesses use the FB platform to host their websites. USAA is one of them.

You can tell in many cases because there's a FB identification tab on the side of the window (kind of like a Levis tab). Doesn't go anywhere, just advertises they're the platform for the company's website.

This sets up a bunch of security and privacy-related questions and issues :mad
 
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