I hate FB and stopped using it a few months ago. But the people behind the company are pretty clever. They might have seen the writing on the wall and are trying to move pretty quickly to act against it. You've already alluded to one, but FB has also bought Oculus, Instagram and WhatsApp. All for ridiculous amounts of money, but with a crazy amount of potential. As a company FB isn't going anywhere, any time soon and by extension nor are its ideologies and practices.

I have read this comment so many times over the years, but if you look at the actual figures, this simply is not true. Young people all over the world continue to make Facebook accounts at record rates month over month, at higher rates than they do snapchat accounts or any other social media account. Younger people just make more accounts, and shape their identity in different ways across different accounts intentionally or not. 18-35 demographic is by far the largest on Facebook. If you look just at the U.K, 1.17 million 18 year olds have Facebook accounts vs. 920,000 Snapchat accounts (Experian is the source for these figures). Of course you could make the point that Facebook has a ridiculous amount of fake accounts, but I haven't seen any recent attempts at quantifying that, and they wouldn't be alone in that regard anyway. Facebook continues to aggressively update their products, and they aren't a stranger to what their users like or how they use their product, I think it is naive to declare it a fad, and it has already been around too long for it that term to describe it.