Ed Zitron: New newsletter: Facebook is dying, losing 397 million monthly active users in the last 3 years as Mark Zuckerberg prioritized platform growth over quality control, turning it into an algorithmic hellscape full of AI-generated spam, scams and so much worse. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

New newsletter: Facebook is dying, losing 397 million monthly active users in the last 3 years as Mark Zuckerberg prioritized platform growth over quality control, turning it into an algorithmic hellscape full of AI-generated spam, scams and so much worse. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

We're Watching Facebook Diewww.wheresyoured.at In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “...

As of their last earnings, Meta doesn't share daily/monthly active users, replacing them with a vague metric called "Family Daily Active People." This is likely to hide that Meta's overall growth has begun to stall - and Facebook's has started to decline. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

Facebook's rapid deterioration is a result of Mark Zuckerberg's growth-at-all-costs mindset, where increasing revenue and growth metrics takes priority over content moderation, user happiness or even making sure that every part of the website still works. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

Meta's quality control is so lax that there are tens of thousands of people being scammed in groups offering fake customer support on the platform, with one group growing as large as 17,000 people that are being actively swindled by scammers every day. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

Facebook is precision-engineered to increase engagement, to the point that AI-generated spam content has begun to dominate the platform, and 404 Media reports that some users have begun to get AI-generated cartoon pornography recommended on their feeds. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

Zuckerberg's growth-desperation has led him to put Meta's unprofitable, unsustainable AI-powered assistant on every platform, hoping that it keeps users logging on - except it's started to act weirdly, commenting on one group that it had a gifted child. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

Yet Facebook has begun to buckle under the weight of Zuckerberg's growth-at-all-costs strategy. In the last 3 years, Facebook has lost 397 million monthly active users worldwide - and declined by nearly 50 million MAU in America. www.wheresyoured.at/were-watchin...

Instagram is becoming unusable... I drowned daily in endless ads and reels pushed into my face. I've been two and a half years sober, but it pushes endless ads for alcohol at me. I finally deactivated from FB 4 months ago because it was making my fragile mental health massively worse 💔

Odds on sooner or later an opt-*out* feature appearing where abandoned accounts will just post/reply random AI shit trained on that data to make up for loss of engagement?

Show me dat picture of Misty so I can jack off to it!

perfection dot gif

Counting (any social network) growth longterm solely by number of users is flawed their growth is dependent on convincing everybody to sign up who either doesn't have access or doesn't have a desire to access. It's an overall finite collection of potential users, and growth will stop eventually

Incredibly weird/dumb name for a metric

Internet ad placement/targeted advertising is so bad- it is crazy that companies spend their advertising revenue on this broken system and keep tech companies like Meta afloat, when they don’t provide verified data to evaluate ad effectiveness

started seems generous (I know, I believe you mean in DAU and I just mean in overall quality and hipness)

not related to your piece (good) but your friend's coffee company: it is cool as hell that he ships in this format (conical falcon tubes) tell him hell yeah for me

Thank you for recognizing the sweet form factor. Those tubes are the fucking best for international travel and dealing with TSA.

Are the bottom caps over the conical part something you found separately?

They’re something you can specifically request but they’re not common. *I* need them for people who order my stuff, everyone else has tube racks in the lab. The fact they fit in the cigar pockets on flight jackets is a bonus.

I must try this with our ARSE jacket of glory.

Already did. Our preeminent ARSE engineers thought of this detail.

I used to smuggle fish embryos internationally in these! 🫡

Does that mean you ship to Ireland?

And they make IG worse and less usable with every update, too.

IG is just garbage. So many ads and sponsored/suggested posts, completely buries the posts of people you actually follow, not that I use them but they’ve also made hashtags p much pointless, etc. everything in there now is just to push reels which isn’t even what I want from IG anyways

When they made hashtags basically nonfunctional, it really ruined the site for me. I'm not there to shop (which is clearly all they want you to do at this point).

I tried to search for a video that had just been unexpectedly refreshed from my screen and it gave me an AI generated picture based on the prompt. Worthless.

Yep.

The only thing IG has going for itself these days are its millions of still-zombified users tethered to the platform because of habit. From a serious content creator's perspective it's become a wasteland since long ago. Organic reach has been long shot dead, too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have pretty much zero interest in "content creators". I am there for my friends' pets and quilting and a few charities. I just wish hashtags still had a "recent" option.

Good riddance, but years too late. Facebook is probably the worst thing that ever happened to American society, maybe second only to Fox News. And it has global reach.

It just takes too damn long to die.

That’s when we left…3 years ago as our New Year’s resolution. Could never see my actual friends & family…just bile and disinformation. Never looked back.

I gave up FB ages ago but IG is so damn bad now. I follow 250+ accounts and it doesn't show me a single thing from the vast majority of them. Like 65% of my feed is ads and recommended-for-yous. The rest is week-old posts from like 10 specific accounts it's decided I want exclusively.

I feel like people are losing/lost interest in social media as a general concept, and these big platforms are just cruising by on momentum alone. And once they crumble, they'll leave a big void of nothing in their place.

Social media fatigue is real, I've noticed it even on people I presumed wouldn't have a beef with it. Sure there are all these alternate platforms popping up but there's a kind of "What's the use?" feeling lingering in the air.

It's basically unusable at this point but if I didn't have it I would have to get an address book and go through the trouble of filling it out. The notifications asking if I want to comment on a post I haven't seen nearly blew my mind.

Same and same. I checked Facebook and got a notification to send a friend request to someone I have never heard of. Friend of a friend who I haven't really spoken to in 7 years because we just drifted apart as they started a family. What does this accomplish?

The only thing keeping me here is Facebook Marketplace. There's no equivalent of it anywhere else. Otherwise, it's a cesspool of spam, scams, pornography, and AI-generated content posing as real. Zuckerberg knows Facebook is dying, so he's trying to squeeze as much money out of it as possible.

Excellent article. I logged onto FB not too long ago and, after scrolling for a few minutes, wondered why half the posts I was seeing were from people I didn't know, and the rest were groups that randomly post pages of comic books. This is a death I long for.

it has become a total dump of hideous wannabe TikTok "content"

My favorite thing now is people using my (not common) name in a profile, trying to friend my friends, often blocking me so I don't know about it, and then when people report the profile as try to impersonate me Facebook almost instantly sends a response that it isn't impersonating/not against rules.

The only part of facebook I ever use is Messenger which I use for group chats for friends who aren't yet online poisoned enough to be on Discord.

I never use Messenger because I refuse to install a separate app, but keeping in touch with old fiends is my only use for Facebook and having to scroll through 10 posts of ads or irrelevant bullshit to find 1 of their posts is maddening.

Use facebook with url parameter "?sk=h_chr" in a browser with ad blocker and you won't have that problem. It'll give you your friends' posts in reverse chronological order and nothing else.

I'll try that. Thanks.

is this the newsletter version of the latest podcast episode? i can't wait to read it!!

yes!

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