Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
I’ve been spending a whole lot less time on Facebook recently, I’ve deleted the app off my phone, and just check in once a day or so on my computer.
They just don’t seem to grasp that I want to see what my friends and family are doing, not meme pages.
it’s not that they “don’t grasp” what you want, it’s that they couldn’t care less what you want
the way i was able to eventually delete my account was to sit down and delete everything i’d ever posted, every photo, every comment, etc. makes it easier to just say YES i want to remove this bullshit from my life altogether
great. and I hope you did the same for whatsapp et instragram
fb was the only thing i was using. election '24 gave me the extra motivation to just delete the entire account that was sitting empty anyway. now it’s pretty much just piefed/lemmy, and will eventually delete these too
Cambridge Analytica gave me that motivation.
It was time then, and it past time now.
the psychological dependence is real. i get why it seems impossible for a lot of people, but yea–gotta reevaluate what’s adding value to life, and what’s wasting time at best, and causing harm at worst. noticing myself getting angry at all the stupid on fb was a big factor, but also all the anti-privacy bullshit like cambridge analytica, made it easier to ditch the platform
Really? What’s wrong with stuff here?
It’s social media. You’re putting yourself in a bubble. Humans never evolved for this kind of communication and it’s making us all sick.
Historically, “social media” meant non-anonymous social connections in which nearly everyone knew everyone’s real names; in contrast, Reddit or Reddit-like networks like Lemmy were called “content aggregators.”
We’re also not in a bubble (what bubble anyway, of anticapitalism?) if we’re diversifying our exposure to different sides. The most important aspect is that Lemmy instances seem to be among the more bot-free forums, whereas FB is completely overrun by “AI” spewing lies and fake studies, for example.
I would argue that it only makes you “sick” (what kind of sickness, anyway?) if this is your primary means of your socializing. Message boards involving strangers utilized in one’s life in this way should only be a temporary lifeline while you work to gradually build/rebuild a habit of regular, in-person contact. As long as you’re diligently striving towards that, it’s likely a (perhaps small) net positive. Social media, content aggregators, forums, message boards, etc. are only a net negative if they’re your primary approach to voluntary contact with people.
Re bubble: look at Lemmy.ml… just criticize China and you’ll be banned. They just keep telling each other that China is the best country on earth and no one will challenge that anymore, as everyone gets banned. It’s an extreme example but a pretty good one.
Re sickness: we’re a social species. That means interacting in real life. In real life you won’t have that many peers communicating with you all at once and you can gauge what your peers think by watching their body language. Online communication is all over the place and unfiltered. Humans haven’t evolved to process all of that information while still critically evaluating said Information. This leads to mental burnout, depression etc.
For the record, I am capable of limiting my exposure to this, because I grew up and witnessed the evolution of tech (born in 82). I’m also somewhat intelligent. I hold a Master’s in engineering, which requires a bit of intelligence. Many people only ever get basic education, if even that (not trying to sound condescending. Education is a privilege!). These people can’t handle this type of communication. That’s also the reason why they’re so easily manipulated by the right extremists.
I never said that it is bad to limit online exposure, though. We agree.
I said that it is not bad to have online exposure* provided that you either already have a decent, offline social life, or are legitimately doing your best to work towards growing one. If online discussion is the majority of your social connections, then yes, that’s bad.
*Apparently if it’s not Lemmy.ml… I guess I’ll just delete the alt I have on that instance since it’s that bad, wow.
interesting article from ~20 years ago (even before literally everyone was on social media) about this topic
https://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html
spending too much time on it
Did you try blogging? I think blogging can help.
my ultimate goal (wildly ambitious, i’m aware) is to not use the internet for anything except paying bills, buying things i need but can’t get locally, and getting news. and research, if i need to buy something expensive that i don’t know anything about. i think blogging could be a productive thing, but i’ve never been a “i want to write an article about my thoughts” kind of person.
I haven’t been opening it for years, I have half a thousand friends there. Most of which I know personally, so no some internet randos. Maybe it was difficult at first, I don’t really remember. Some people messaged me there, and I haven’t been reading their messages for a very long time, so they assumed I don’t use the platform. I tried this many times in my past, but at some point I succeeded and today opening Facebook once a day sounds like a lot to me.
Because of this, it feels like nobody’s at Facebook. That’s an interesting bubble to be in. I have no idea how many people I personally know are there, but I afraid it still a lot.
I know a few people who have an account, but never post, and some who don’t even have an account.
It seems to be a generational thing, younger people (twenties and younger) just don’t seem to use it much at all.
Usage also depends on where, as there are some countries whose people have turned Facebook into their own encapsulated version of the Internet, where nearly every service is already embedded and they’re using those at maximum.
While this is true, to be fair to them your family and friends probably stopped posting years ago.
I wrote about the same frustration a while ago: https://jeena.net/my-facebook-feed
In that article I also mention https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr which only shows posts of your friends which I used for some time as my bookmark for Facebook, but so few people post there that it’s just not enough for me to come back regularly.
Yep, so they fill it with memes and cojtent that isnfrom groups or creators that you dint follow. All in the hope that there is enough content that you dint notice the lack of content from friends and family.
Community groups are where there is engagement now. Sometimes with people you may have a loose connecrion with in real life but often its strangers. Or bots.
A nice blog you have, I think I’d explore later. I found you had/have a blog in German before (long time ago, I assume). Do you blog in German / Swedish as well? Even if not public. I’m busy deploying my own blog in English, and I thought of trying other languages too. Thought precisely of German and Swedish :) but for me, it would take a very long time, I want to finish my English blog first.
Thanks, my old german blog is https://paradies.jeena.net/ but the last post there is from 2012, so I’m not posting in German anymore. I stopped when I moved to Sweden and couldn’t share my blog with anyone, that’s when I started the new blog in English so that both the Germans and Swedes could at least in theory read it. Sadly I don’t have much time for well researched blog posts, so I only seldom post even there, but once in a while I do.
Swedish I never blogged in, even though it would have been good to improve my Swedish writing skills.