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I read "it's dying" by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It's been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!
I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying "who uses Facebook anymore lol" is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.
I still have it because it's still the easiest and most convenient way to message people that you've just met. There's a sort of snowball effect in which having lots of people incentives even more people to stay on the platform. Nobody I know actually uses Facebook as a social media site - they only use it for Messenger.
Although, I've found that more and more people are starting to use SMS as their first choice rather than Messenger
honestly to me it feels cozy now relative to how shitty other platforms have gotten. i guess it was always leading the way at being shitty, so it doesn't feel like as stark a change (reddit, twitter)
Lotta people keep Facebook for the marketplace.
Also, a lot of scammers make accounts to use for the marketplace.
The marketplace fluffs the numbers.
Normies.
Facebook Marketplace, it is literally the only reason I even use it.
It'll probably stay insanely popular until the boomers die off. They're not gonna switch to another one, but I don't any of the younger gens gravitating toward it.
It fulfils roles as
It's large enough that any amount of enshittification is compensated by network effect.
It was years ago, but I used to work for a US based ISP. I'm a Canadian and the place I was working at had a contract to suppliment their support team.
My team did enhanced support, beyond what the ISP would deal with. Basically it was remote geek squad type service for people's computers.
While I was working there in the mid 2000's, there was a Facebook outage. All of Facebook's services were unavailable. We broke records with how many calls we got that day. Almost all of them went something like this:
Client: "the internet doesn't work!" Tech: can you open a browser and... Client (interrupting) "it says page cannot be displayed!!11" Tech: I understand, can you tell me what it says at the top in the address bar? (Insert some explaining of how to find the address bar) Client: "facebook.com" Tech: okay, I want you to click on that and erase it, then type in google.com, hit enter, and tell me what the page says. Client: " it says Google, with a (some bad description of a text entry field)" Tech: this is Google's website, it loaded from the internet, so your internet works. Facebook is down. Client (without missing a beat): "can you fix Facebook?" Tech: No. (Call ends)
I'm certain my employer made bank that day, since clients had to pay an extra monthly charge on their internet bill to speak with us, and their support made a point of dumping calls to us whenever they could. If someone wanted to speak to another tech, sure, but you have to buy this service....
I did not like that job. I actually got a call from an inexperienced Linux user who couldn't get DNS resolution. I tried to coach him over the phone to determine if his internet was working at all. Before I could actually give him an answer, my manager dropped by (he was monitoring the call) and told me to tell him we could not help him, that the support center only supported Windows based systems, since, out of everyone there, I was the only one with enough Linux knowledge to know what to do, and he didn't want to give anyone the impression that we could help with Linux.
All the guy needed to do was change his resolv.conf to valid DNS servers and he would have been fine. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it did at the time, and I knew it. I did not feel good getting off of that call. It's like, I have the answer, this guy needs the answer, he paid to speak to me, and I really want to help him out, but I would probably lose my job if I do. I was very blunt with him. I said that I could help him, but I wasn't allowed to. He understood, but I still felt like shit. I was too timid to realize my worth, which was part of the reason I was there to begin with.... Now, I would have just made it clear that he'll only get help on this once, and when we hung up, never expect to reach me again, and that nobody here knows what I do about this stuff, then helped him anyways. Fuck that manager. I'm so glad I don't work there anymore.
How the fuck did some one misspell 'Lemmy' as 'Facebook'
Facebook is the only company with a server at both the North and South Poles. That gives them the liberty to have longer months due to time dilation, which lets them "technically" inflate their numbers.
/s
Wtf is doyin 😂
Separate Chinese version tiktok, because tiktok itself is banned within China.
There are billions of morons?
Are you surprised?
Many overseas countries have Facebook preloaded on a lot of their phones. They also have data caps but Facebook is exempt from counting towards their data cap.
It's the one place some of my family can figure out how to use where they can make a transphobic joke about Mother's Day for men in dresses is April 1st and get enough positive interactions that they think they've actually re-posted something relatable and clever. So it does have that going for it.
A huge chunk has to be scammer accounts
I don't feel like looking it up, but I've heard statistics like the Breaking Bad finale had half the viewers of the average episode of CSI Miami. The general lesson is don't underestimate the average person's appetite for garbage.
I literally have to use Facebook to know what's happening in my small community. It's the most convenient place to learn about what's going on and I hate it
I feel like this is the best answer so far.
Given that that's a third of the world population, I think they may be misreporting their users. Meta has been caught boosting numbers artificially before (when they released Threads they gave everyone who had an Instagram account a free Threads account, and then bragged about how fast their social network was growing).
I think it is still extremely popular in Southeast Asia. At least here in Hong Kong, there are so many business still relying on Facebook so people just can’t move away easily
It's like that in the USA too. Most businesses use Facebook for their "website."
This is location specific. In the mainstream US FB use is down among youth and because of that it is has gone down among older adults. FB marketplace is still pretty popular and so is Instagram. So even in the US Meta is doing okay.
Internationally, specifically Latin America, Europe and SE Asia, Facebook, WhatsApp, Marketplace are effectively the most popular way to communicate on anything.
WhatsApp is basically the phone, Marketplace is in some places the only way to find real estate and just about anything else. And Facebook is used by every business.
Meta internationally is raking in Ad money in the billions and billions. People have been convinced that their privacy is worth less than the convenience and utility. Because for them there is no better alternative. In addition in some of these cultures the idea of privacy is a foreign concept.
