It's been 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg first put thefacebook.com online from his dorm room. What happened next has been endlessly documented: Harvard's exclusive social network took over college campuses and, ultimately, the world.
The social network occupies an increasingly delicate place in the Meta “family” of applications. A majority of American adults the service, but three out of four Facebook – perhaps because it has fueled a global misinformation crisis and encouraged 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 just it will no longer share how many people use it.
appears regularly in the list of posts. The most prolific users of its game streaming service . Faced with increased pressure from TikTok, Meta its flow, once again, to emphasize on messages from people you know. But this change hasn't made Facebook look like TikTok, but rather a strange window into what Meta's algorithms deem most engaging and least offensive.
My own Facebook feed is flooded with posts from groups I don't belong to, dedicated to mundane topics like home improvement, cast iron stove enthusiasts, and the so-called “Dull Men's Club.” I haven't shared anything on my own page in over a year, despite logging in almost daily. I am hardly an exception. A majority of adults they are more “picky” than before about what they publish on social networks.
Unsurprisingly, adolescents have almost no interest in the social network of their parents and grandparents. Only 33 percent of American teenagers “never” using the service, up from 71% 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 will one day have more profiles for than alive.
Today, Facebook has more than 3 billion users and remains the workhorse of Mark Zuckerberg's cinematic universe, even if he is no longer the main character. Instead, it's just a “family” of his company's apps. In 2021, he was officially demoted when Zuckerberg the company under the name Meta. “Our brand is so closely tied to a single product that it cannot represent everything we do today, let alone in the future,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook. “From now on, we will prioritize the metaverse, not Facebook.”
Whether Meta has succeeded in becoming a “metaverse first” company is debatable at best. But few would say this is a “Facebook first” approach. More recently, Zuckerberg tried to present Meta as a metaverse company And A joining the race to create a human level .
At the same time, the only reason Zuckerberg's ambitions are possible is the success of Facebook. Meta has lost tens of billions of dollars on its investments in the Metaverse and expects to lose even more in the foreseeable future. The company also plans to spend billions more to (AGI is not cheap).
These investments will determine whether Zuckerberg's bet on the future of social media is correct. And if he realizes his vision of an AI chatbot, metaverse-enabled future, it will have been possible in large part thanks to the unprecedented financial success of the oldest, most boring part of his empire.