It's been 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg first put thefacebook.com online from his bedroom. What happened next has been endlessly documented: Harvard's exclusive social network took over college campuses and, eventually, the world.
The social network occupies an increasingly uncomfortable space in the “family” of Meta applications. Most American adults use the service, but three in four Facebook – perhaps because it fueled a global misinformation crisis and promoted genocidal hate speech – is “making society worse.” Facebook still generates billions of dollars in ad revenue for Meta, but user growth has slowed to the point where the company simply will no longer share how many people use it.
It regularly appears in the Facebook posts list. The most prolific users of your game streaming service. In the face of increasing pressure from TikTok, Meta your feed, once again, to emphasize posts from people you know. But the change hasn't made Facebook feel like TikTok so much as a strange window into what Meta's algorithms consider most attractive and least offensive.
My own Facebook feed is flooded with posts from groups I don't belong to dedicated to bland topics like home remodeling, cast iron skillet enthusiasts, and something called the “Boring Men's Club.” I haven't shared anything on my own page in over a year, despite logging in almost daily. I am not an outlier. A majority of adults They are “more demanding” than before with what they publish on social networks.
As expected, adolescents have almost no interest in the social network of their parents and grandparents. Only 33 percent of American teenagers have “ever” used the service, up from 71 percent in 2015. This dynamic, in which Facebook's user base is aging faster than its product, has led some academics to conclude that the social network one day you will have more profiles for that I live
Today, Facebook has more than 3 billion users and remains the workhorse of Mark Zuckerberg's cinematic universe, even if it is no longer the main character. Rather, it is just one more of his company's “family” of applications. In 2021, Zuckerberg formally demoted it as a company to Meta. “Our brand is so closely tied to one product that it cannot represent everything we do today, much less in the future,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook. “From now on, we will be the metaverse first, not Facebook first.”
Whether Meta has managed to become a metaverse-first company is debatable at best. But few would say it's anything like “Facebook first.” More recently, Zuckerberg has attempted to portray Meta as a metaverse company. and An, joining the race to create on a human level.
At the same time, the only reason Zuckerberg's ambitions are possible is because of Facebook's success. Meta has lost tens of billions of dollars on its metaverse investments and expects to lose even more in the foreseeable future. The company also plans to spend billions more on ai infrastructure;elm:context_link;elmt:doNotAffiliate;cpos:15;pos:1;itc:0;sec:content-canvas”> (AGI is not cheap).
These investments will determine whether Zuckerberg's bet on the future of social networks is correct. And if he makes his vision of a metaverse-enabled ai chatbot future a reality, it will have been made possible in no small part by the unparalleled financial success of the oldest, most boring part of his empire.
