It’s been 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg first launched thefacebook.com online from his dorm room. The social network, originally intended only for Harvard, went on to take over college campuses and eventually the entire world.

Currently, the Facebook social network occupies an increasingly uncomfortable place in the “family” of Meta programs. Most American adults still use the service, but three out of four believe Facebook is “making society worse.” Perhaps this is due to the global crisis of misinformation and hatred. Facebook continues to generate billions of dollars in ad revenue for Meta. However, user growth has slowed so much that the company has decided to no longer publish information on how many people use the social network.

Facebook has been flooded with spam lately, and the feed is focused on recommendations designed to increase views, rather than posts from people the user actually knows. This annoys and alienates users.

It is not surprising that teenagers are almost not interested in social networks, which their parents are still devoted to. Only 33% of US teens now report that they have “sometime” used these services, compared to 71% in 2015. This dynamic, in which Facebook’s user base is aging faster than its product, has led some scientists to conclude that the social network will somehow end up with more profiles of dead people than living people.

Today, Facebook has more than 3 billion users, and it is still the workhorse of Mark Zuckerberg’s universe, although it is no longer the main character. The company even changed its name to Meta to be less associated with the social network. Now Facebook is just one of the company’s “family” of applications.

More recently, Zuckerberg has tried to pitch Meta as a metauniverse and artificial intelligence company. So far, these projects have drained the company of billions of dollars in investment without providing a return. They manage to be funded by the success of boring old Facebook.

Source: Engadget