Meta is a capitalist social media company and they seem to be doing okay. Facebook might be uncool with the kids these days but it’s still massive. And Instagram and WhatsApp are still very popular.
I think the difference between Meta and Reddit is that I bet Meta would issue some sort of apology and carefully crafted PR if they found themselves in Reddit’s current situation. But Reddit doesn’t even seem to care about angering its users, which just feeds the anger more.
Meta is doing great if all you care about is liking pictures of your nieces and nephews. That’s not totally fair, they do allow niche communities to post information and share photos. But there’s no where near the thought provoking discussion that Reddit or Lemmy provide.
Depends on a country. In Poland Facebook is the place for discussions in many many communities gathered on Facebook groups. They have all the Reddit vibe of sharing informations with similar variety of topics from cats to serious military analytics.
The difference is Facebook doesn’t want to be indexed so those posts never reach beyond Facebook audience.
Meta is just a shell of its former self these days. I went back a few times recently and I shit you not : 3 out of 4 posts on my feed are sponsored or suggested content. Almost nothing of my friends, it’s just full of garbage people are trying to sell, or clickbait videos.
I love and appreciate my Facebook friends, but it is a weird time capsule now. The people still on it are basically unchanged from who they were 10 years ago.
I get the sense that the folks on it see it as their ‘retirement social media network’, in much the same way as a stable, well-paying job in your late 40’s looks like your ‘retirement job.’
Facebook has been stagnant for a while, as they focused on pushing advertising and monetising users. It’s not just “uncool”, it’s broken what made it good in the first place. I left Facebook a few years ago due to it’s enshittification, and it’s very very different to what it was right back at launch. It’s a very similar issue to Reddit’s but just manifesting in a different way.
Meta bought Instagram and Whatsapp to stay ahead of it’s competition, particularly with younger users when it comes to Instagram. It’s increasingly pushing ads on Instragram and trying to monetise users, and at the moment trying to monetise Whatsapp by getting businesses to pay for access via new tools. They’ve already changed terms of services on Whatsapp to the benefit of businesses and Meta, and are trying to merge it in with Facebook and Instagram messaging. On all platforms it is harvesting and selling user data.
Meta’s revenues fell for the first time in 2022, and profits are also down, plus the “metaverse” is not succeeding despite heavy investment. Expect “enshittification” to accelerate as ultimately Meta cares about it’s share price more than anything else, and shareholders in the tech space expect year on year growth. Meta’s pivot to the Metaverse is because the company knows there is not much growth left in it’s core social media products, and also a lot of competition it’s struggling to beat (TikTok for example).
Meta is treading water at best, and it already monetises it’s users and disrespects their privacy and data in ways that people wouldn’t tolerate if they understood what is going on. I honestly wouldn’t hold Meta up as a company that Reddit should look to for good PR.
This is an important point. Just because a platform is profitable, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been enshitified. It’s far more likely to have been enshitified to drive profits, imo.
And the underlying problem is capitalism itself. There’s nothing wrong with making money. But capitalism is based on the pursuit of infinite growth and profit, which of course is impossible, which means that every capitalist enterprise is doomed to follow the same predicable path of enshittification and eventually collapse.
Capitalism is a plague on society—a malignant cancer on humanity.
Enshitification does not mean it becomes unpopular. It means it becomes non-valuable. If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, there are other platforms that will happily absorb those users because nothing important happens there anymore. Facebook is much the same; the only reason to engage on FB these days is because you are trying to do some kind of locals thing or neighborhood association nonsense.
I recommend you read the essay for enshitification, because I think you’re mistaken my use of the word for a random pejorative instead of a description of a process that platforms go through in which they become bad for their users.
Reddit, maybe, will have a longterm position as “a place you go to for product reviews”. Unless most people do the right thing and nuke their posting history. But it’s gone down the enshitification road where it intentionally squanders its value for profit.
Meta also does A LOT of data harvesting, which is what drives profits for them. Due to anonymity, Reddit could never really do the same. Meta, Instagram, and Whatsapp all serve as different routes of recurring revenue for Meta, they can park millions of users on each platform and sell the data collected to interested advertisers. Reddit could never really do the same, so they come up with the next best (worst) thing.