Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew

[tinrobot]

Good article in the NYT outlining Facebook's troubles (outside of today's outage)

Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew

A trove of leaked documents, published by The Wall Street Journal, hints at a company whose best days are behind it.

....

You can see this vulnerability on display in an installment of The Journal’s series that landed last week. The article, which cited internal Facebook research, revealed that the company has been strategizing about how to market itself to children, referring to preteens as a “valuable but untapped audience.” The article contained plenty of fodder for outrage, including a presentation in which Facebook researchers asked if there was “a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?”

It’s a crazy-sounding question, but it’s also revealing. Would a confident, thriving social media app need to “leverage playdates,” or concoct elaborate growth strategies aimed at 10-year-olds? If Facebook is so unstoppable, would it really be promoting itself to tweens as — and please read this in the voice of the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme — a “Life Coach for Adulting?”

The truth is that Facebook’s thirst for young users is less about dominating a new market and more about staving off irrelevance. Facebook use among teenagers in the United States has been declining for years, and is expected to plummet even further soon — internal researchers predicted that daily use would decline 45 percent by 2023. The researchers also revealed that Instagram, whose growth offset declining interest in Facebook’s core app for years, is losing market share to faster-growing rivals like TikTok, and younger users aren’t posting as much content as they used to. “Facebook is for old people” was the brutal verdict delivered by one 11-year-old boy to the company’s researchers, according to the internal documents.

A good way to think about Facebook’s problems is that they come in two primary flavors: problems caused by having too many users, and problems caused by having too few of the kinds of users it wants — culture-creating, trendsetting, advertiser-coveted young Americans.

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In other words, Facebook is quickly becoming irrelevant and is acting out of desperation.

Worth the read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqohlSFUbBybJUNMnqBqCgvfeh7I1jXL0Ky-WDDhDy-kORYic_kOHLYxSW-wO5RXJDtlQLO1oA_Vo0u5UO0EqE1jw-MaPlsxAcylk8cfuBW07mpjHVu99qjGyYzazc-smzrbk9VqcPTexINHX1nwqLA1uppp3Jxr9iTFTmPCzQqMi0cJ-3PwiGph4WT4GASGBtPHqABx8U86UOlCeskJlHrEEBkyA2IKU-LkCcw1NCVvZTHIZ4WY06NpUOdt_L78TgQpN1eG3EAZpEdcb96Tw&smid=url-share?utm_source=digg

[lagomorph777]

1. They need a mascot, like Joe Camel or Pepe the Frog

And they should offer free candy and a ride to school.

[underpants]

2. Facebook is old people stuff

People I knew from high school etc.
the kids laugh at it because it’s so boomer.
Zuckerberg bought up other sites simply to keep his hand in the info stew. Remember, if it’s free then YOU are the product.