Posted on 05/12/2026 7:11:38 PM PDT by Red Badger
It’s hard to even imagine now, but immediately after it launched in 2004, there was nothing on the internet cooler than Facebook.
It was initially available only to Harvard students, then gradually expanded to students at other elite colleges, giving it an aura of exclusivity that founder Mark Zuckerberg clearly coveted. By the time it opened up to public accounts in 2006, the hype was palpable, paving the way to an explosive initial public offering in 2012.
Since those salad days, its trajectory has never been quite the same. Sure, it’s maintained market share with a series of cynical acquisitions of would-be competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp, but Facebook’s feeds have been inexorably taken over by industrial-scale engagement bait and sleazy ads as users failed to stick around.
By 2026, after a failed pivot to the Metaverse — oh yeah, it changed its name to Meta back in 2021 — scrolling Facebook feels like an infinite timeline of AI slop, ads, and lazy misinformation, none of which the company seems to have an iota of interest in cleaning up.
Add it all up, and you start to wonder whether the behemoth venture has entered the long decline that eventually killed other former stars of the web like Yahoo and AOL. That’s the case that acclaimed investigative journalist Julia Angwin made today in the New York Times:
Meta’s earnings are starting to show the strain from years of growing consumer disaffection and reckless spending. The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures. And the slumping stock confirms what we have all known in our guts for a while: This is a company entering its zombie era.
Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teens wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.
If she’s right, it’s hard to imagine that this death spiral will cause any human on Earth quite as much suffering as Zuckerberg, who got a little taste of true cultural clout during those golden years after he dropped out of Harvard and, for the one stretch in his life, was the head of something genuinely cool.
He’s trying, of course. Ever since his pivot to VR failed, he’s been practically setting money on fire to try to establish dominance in the red-hot AI space — but so far his efforts have lagged far behind the competition and the only real tangible effects are that Facebook’s feeds are more clogged with garbage than ever before.
He’s probably got some surprises left in him yet. If there’s one thing Meta’s taught us, it’s that a formerly beloved site can always get worse.
😆
Yes, they changed their corporate name a few years back............
I have stuff posted on EBay, OfferUp, Craigslist, and FB Marketplace in anticipation of a move.
EBay is best for the media mail stuff. But I get the most sales from FB Marketplace. That’s been a good application.
I think I saw where Zuck spent an astounding $90 Billion or more on this Metaverse thing universe and the goggles to use it.
It was way beyond it’s time..............
He’s married to a Chinese girl and I have often wondered if he’s a spy bent on destroying the United States. He’s all for Bernie Sanders talk against billionaires and was for the no kings rally. What a joke.
Now they stare mesmerized for hours at TikTok like lobotomized idiots.
I detested Facebook since it first came online. Why would anyone want “friends” they’ve never met? Do glance occasionaly at our neighborhood page that is usually about lost cats and dogs. I know where my cats ate. Booth need dinner npw and sodo I.
About a week ago I saw some kids waiting for the school bus and they were throwing a football around instead of standing there staring at their phones. First time I've seen such a thing in some time.
I deleted my account in 2017 and deleted evrey post I ever made on it, which weren’t many.............
> Why would anyone want “friends” they’ve never met? <
I’ve got a few of those, but for informational reasons only. These are FB sites where you can ask an obscure question and get good answers, quickly.
Kinda like Free Republic, but more specialized.
I hated FB from the very first day I signed up. Out of nowhere I was getting friend requests from people I've never known or heard of, and it seemed endless. In less than a month I'd had enough. I looked for ways to disable my sign-up but that was very hard to do. Seemed impossible to get rid of it. I finally did figure it out and have not missed it in the least.
I've never even looked at METAVERSE but I'm not surprised to hear that it's failed.
Yup, I had the same thought. Like, he thought he could throw a couple billion down and double up on stupid?
Well, Facebook isn’t exactly “Meta.” Meta also has two enormous assets: Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which are doing just fine.
My wife still has her Lycos e-mail account. Lycos was once the #3 site, and a top e-mail carrier. It has deteriorated to Zombie mode, complete with outages. BUT, she has kept the same e-mail address.
I still have a ‘hotmail’ address that I use for times when a website or company asks for my email..............
FaceBUT, SnapCRAP, etc. I investigated, learned how to use them because others come to me for tech assistance when something goes wrong. I have never created my own accounts, used any of it.
Before the World Wide Web, there was CompuServe. When El Rush-Bo said he also used CompuServe, I knew it was cool.
Same here.
Same here.
I had a CompuServe account once. Seems like they had what would now be called chat groups? I think even Free Republic started that way, on CompuServe.
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