Facebook only ever had a monopoly because they bought anything that looked like a competitor. When they failed to acquire Snapchat and TikTok, they were guaranteed to lose their monopoly. They have no idea how to get and keep users' attention without infuriating them at the same time.
Yeah facebook stayed ahead by buying any social network that could become a competitor. Instagram and Whatsapp are the biggest examples without buying those facebook would have already lost huge number of users.
I'd argue this take falls into the "all social media is interchangeable" fallacy. Each of those platforms facebook acquired has a different usecase. I've got family in South America and friends in Europe, Whatsapp overlaps in uses with Facebook but it'd be wrong to call it a competitor in the sense of claiming them to be similar products. The same I'd argue extends to Instagram as well. The cross-platform interoperability is a feature for users of course but that's because the modern reality is that if you're not (nearly) every platform then you're probably not one of the people who's overly social digitally. Because on top of those three I also use Twitter, TikTok, and Discord.
Insta and WhatsApp of today are not threats to Facebook because they are the same company. Had they not been acquired, their trajectories may have been very different.
Good riddance.
I came here simply to +1 this.
I don't remember exactly when, but 15 or 20 years ago there was the first vawe of Virtual Reality that failed big time. Lots of businesses and investors lost lots of cash by investing in VR.
Now we are seeing the second big vawe of VR dieing and with it the Metaverse.