Facebook is a dying platform, and due to its enormous size and momentum it may be a decade before its downward trajectory is fully appreciated. Facebook will al

Facebook is a dying platform, and due to its enormous size and momentum it may be a decade before its downward trajectory is fully appreciated. Facebook will also fight like all hell to remain relevant, and the cheapest way is making empty pronouncement like they can help "heal the divisions in our society". Helps that they can never be made accountable for it. Why do I think its dying? Generative youth culture has long left it for other social media platforms. In the US even the middle aged suburban demographic is getting tired of the Karens and Boomers spewing their hatred or turning what could be valuable online community spaces into their culture war battle ground. Facebook is very good at driving engagement in people that are susceptible to conspiracy theories, extremist views on any spectrum and generally excels at turning people into assholes that would not be tolerated in civil society. Just because its statistically easier to get high engagement metrics from people that are susceptible to fear tactics and have low critical thinking ability, their algorithm hyper focused on feeding them exploitative content. To be honest Fox News perfected this on an older medium. Facebook claims ignorance and plausible deniability: all they are doing is maximizing the daily-average-user analytics. Its no wonder that it was the birth platform for Zenga and genre of games that exploits dopamine reward system. The games industry was too obvious about it and now cultural opinion turned them. They'll never go away, much like slots and casinos. Facebook is going with the same playbook but substituting shiny coin rewards with confirmation bias newsfeeds and viral factoids. Only sadder is that most of the executive team has no idea what their critics are talking about because they have largely no social acumen, empathy or wisdom. Really good at convention keynotes:"But look, we're also doing VR and AI! We can't wait to see what you do with it, our free developers!"... They can point to numbers going up in fancy real time dashboard, they get praise for shareholders and bosses. They don't understand the what kind of people they snare up to make their number work. People quitting their platform is a lagging indicator, at least by years, that they built nothing of lasting human value, but exploited flaws in human psychology. I could be wrong of course, cigarette companies are still going strong.