Is Facebook really doomed this time?
People have been predicting the end of Facebook for not long after it started but over the last few years, it’s begun to feel as if it’s going to be a permanent part of the Internet. Over the last year I’m not so sure. It’s started to feel as if nobody really cares about the core platform that pays everyone’s checks at Meta.
This essay has been prompted by my experience over the last year or so when every change to Facebook just appears to make it worse. I’ve had a Facebook account since 2008 but would not describe myself as a typical social user. I only have around 50 friends and have mainly used Facebook as a Page user for the promotion of social clubs and businesses. I also spent a couple of years using their APIs to funnel tens of thousands of euro worth of advertising revenue through their system.
I’ve seen two obvious things recently that indicate to me that Facebook simply no longer care about their core app that still generates more than 50% of their revenue. The first was some changes to pages that they made so that when you click on a notification for your page, the app changes context to post as that page. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Facebook with several pages attached to your account, but it generates a lot of notification. The basic choice is bad but it is far from good that it takes about 4 taps to get back into posting as yourself. And because there is little to tell you about the context change, it is very easy to accidentally post to the wrong page.
The second thing was that my account got hacked. Overnight, I received several warnings about my account being hacked and when I logged in to change my password and log everything out, I found out my account was suspended for community standard violations. So one arm of Facebook knew my account was being hacked and another arm of Facebook locked me out because of what my hacker had said. I went to fill out an appeal and the form is literally a button to say I disagree with this.
I’ve no idea of what I’m supposed to have done and I can’t get in touch with a human. And as a customer of nearly 15 years who has sent significant quantities of revenue into their advertising systems, I’m cut off with no explaination and no obvious means of appeal. So at this point, I’m done with Facebook and Instagram — whether or not they restore my access. It’s a long time since they’ve actually done anything for me. I suspect that at some point in future I may end up back managing pages or using their API but as an end user (or the product), I’m done with it.
If I had to guess why it’s ended up this way, the most likely explaination is that Mark Zuckerberg after decades of untrammeled power has given up caring about Facebook. His attention is on Metaverse and he’s let the cash cow slip. This is an error of epic proportions. Nobody wants the Metaverse and if a trippling of the cost of the basic cost of the required headset is all they’ve achieved since their pivot to the Metaverse, the end of Meta as an imporant player is basically inevitable.
