It's funny how facebook got so political all the normies left, then they downranked political content so much that the political people left too. Facebook is a ghost town now.
Meta has a big problem coming up. They'll get to the point where they won't be able to hide Facebook and Instagram's lackluster appeal. I suspect we'll start seeing advertisers peel away, followed by a few savvy investors first. Let's just hope this doesn't trigger a market-wide correction.
My flippant, "I hate social media and think it was largely a mistake and needs to go away," view is to cheer for that correction. That said, I understand that I'm very biased here and might be ignorant.
Is there a reason I shouldn't cheer for such a correction?
Facebook and Instagram's (pre-Reels) strength was that it was easy to have accounts of all sizes engage and be engaged with. Whether you have 10 or 100000 friends/followers/etc, the barrier of entry to have some engagement wasn't high and it encouraged people with all sizes of accounts to post, comment, and "like". Social networking felt much more intentional with these platforms.
Instagram Reels certainly has a lot of activity, but it's activity is driven by users passively consuming popular and trending media. This isn't a bad model, but it's a shift away from intentional social networking.
Ultimately, I think Reels is more evidence that Meta has had a user engagement problem for a while. Their current strategy for Instagram seens to be to hope passive consumption keeps everyone in the app and fall back on the "town square" model for comments as a means of engagement.
Every one of their core user value propositions is worse now than it was in the 00s.
And all of them by allowing revenue optimization by 1,000 cuts to whittle away customer centricity over time.
Facebook has positioned itself so that it’s almost a necessity if you want to be involved in your community, however you define it. You may hate Zuck, moderation, and ‘the algo’ and yet you can’t get away from Meta the company. And millions of other users feel the same way.
not really; I haven't had a FB account in 10 years
I use Craigslist for local ads.