Facebook’s fading utility

Management at Meta should be thankful to Elon Musk for his ongoing destruction of usefulness at what used to be Twitter–because without that singular feat of self-harm, Facebook might now be unchallenged as the major social network to have taken the most dents from a hammer in its own hands.

This week has had me thinking of Facebook’s decline more than usual, thanks to the start of the suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission in 2020 that seeks to hit the “undo” button on the company’s previously-government-blessed purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to stop that trial over months of unsuccessful sucking up to the Trump administration, outlined at length Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal, that left him looking like more of a self-serving loser than he already did after his post-election pivot to being a MAGA sympathizer.

But this problem of Facebook decay has been going on for years. In retrospect, the two Zuckerberg appearances I saw at MWC in February of 2016 should have been my own warning.

One, pictured here, had him gushing at a Samsung event about how virtual reality would change how we experience the world; the other, an onstage Q&A, had him holding forth about Facebook’s plans to bring broadband to the developing world, among other things.

Nine years later, consumer adoption of VR still hasn’t happened, while Zuckerberg (who in that Q&A said “Facebook isn’t a company that hits a roadblock and then gives up”) has acted as if those connectivity projects were Facebook journalism initiatives by scrapping them in 2022.

Facebook itself, meanwhile, has become a vastly less pleasant place than it was in 2016. The default feed is so overrun with ads and suggested pages and groups–with frequent outbreaks of AI-generated slop–that it has become difficult to keep up with friends, the reason for Facebook’s entire existence.

And the new, friends-only tab that Zuckerberg just introduced as a return to “OG Facebook” turns out to be available for now only on the platform’s Android and iOS apps, not its iPad app or the desktop Web site that was the real original Facebook. The latter is also the one Facebook interface I can count to remind me of which friends have birthdays today.

I can, however, rely on Facebook’s Android app to show me notifications featuring my brother’s profile picture even when he doesn’t figure in any of them (he hasn’t posted there since maybe December for reasons similar to my own) and to treat me to weird experiments in #engagement hacking like “Blast to the past” suggestions to revisit years-ago posts.

I haven’t quit using Facebook or Instagram entirely–so many friends and family remain on those platforms, plus I have an occupational obligation to stay current in their workings. But I have cut back on my own posting there almost as much as my brother has.

And I have outright quit trying to do anything with the public Facebook page that once represented one of my major forms of reader outreach. I turned off messaging there after getting fed up with all of the scams sent my way and then posted an I’m-done-here signoff March 19 in which I invited people to look me up on Bluesky and Patreon.

There is, however, one Facebook app that I continue to use fairly regularly: Messenger, which doesn’t subject me to algorithmically-pushed crap from third parties and does provide effective privacy via end-to-end encryption. Messenger also looks like the part of Facebook least likely to help the company make money off me, which is not nothing these days.