Facebook, is the social network everyone loves to hate. Or hates to love. The relationship between Facebook and its users has always been tricky, due partly to many users' utter dependence on the site for communication and social interaction.
Facebook has been the major social network that connects people from all over the world and all parts of your life. There are a lot of great things Facebook offers:
The chance to reconnect with old friends, share your photos, list your likes, join interest groups, and more.
Despite the many wonders the social network offers, I felt that Facebook, boasting approximately 800 million active users and an estimated $4.27 billion in annual revenue, was overdue for a critique. When Facebook released their iPad social utility app in October 2011, which many considered a disappointing failure of an application, I decided it was time to file a list of Facebook failure grievances.
Wall Of Shame:
There have been some epic Facebook failures during the long journey from Mark Zuckerberg's pet project to the social media giant. Some Facebook failure moments include:
Ongoing privacy concerns and backlash: Facebook faces
continuing criticism for non-transparent, user-unfriendly privacy policy changes. Facebook changes its privacy policies regularly, with default settings that force users to share more profile information, photos, contact information, and personal details than they would normally like.Facebook Lite: This was supposed to be an alternative to the normal bandwidth-hungry Facebook for users on slower networks, but this Facebook fail disappeared after eight months.
Facebook FBML: FBML was a markup language Facebook fail, in which Facebook developers attempted to make their own version of HTML that would enable a company to create a custom landing page for their Facebook company page.
Facebook Gifts: With Facebook Gifts, users had the opportunity to give silly little picture gifts to friends. They were fun and cute for a while until Facebook started to expect people to pay $2 (which is about 863 in Nigeria's naira) to send a thumbnail image of a dog in a birthday hat.
Facebook Message: The 2012 launch of Facebook Message enabled users to send and receive Facebook messages with an @facebook email address. While people still use Facebook messages, it didn't eliminate Gmail or revolutionize message sharing the way some predicted it might.
The Main Problem
In October of last year, Kevin Roose wrote a column titled, "Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew." His hook was a series of stories in The Wall Street Journal, based on internal company documents, which revealed the company's failure to stop content that damaged teen mental health, spread vaccine misinformation and more. In this story, I'll lay out the four biggest problems facing the company.
1: The age problem
If you have children, you've probably noticed that they prefer other social media platforms. To many of them, Facebook is for older people which is not exactly a recipe for growth. Helen Lewis of The Atlantic, among others, has described the platform as a "Boomerbook."
Yes, many teenagers and younger adults use Instagram, which Facebook bought a decade ago. But even Instagram has been struggling to keep up. "TikTok is absolutely eating Instagram's lunch right now, in terms of usage and cultural sway, and advertisers generally want to be where the young people are," Kevin Roose said. "Even though Meta has tried to copy TikTok's most successful features and shove them into Instagram Reels, they're limited in how much change users will accept without a fight."
- The innovation problem
"The company just doesn't appear to know how to invent successful new stuff," Farhad Manjoo of Times Opinion has written. "Most of its biggest hits not just two of its main products, Instagram and WhatsApp, but many of its most used features, like Instagram Stories were invented elsewhere. They made their way to Facebook either through acquisitions or, when that didn't work, outright copying."
That's a big change from Facebook's first decade when it transformed social media. Especially important was its News Feed, which meant users no longer had to spend time searching out other accounts to know what people were posting. Since the company went public in 2012, it has been much less innovative.
- The metaverse problem
Zuckerberg feels so strongly that the metaverse based around the world of virtual reality, or VR represents the future of the internet that he renamed the company after it.
"It's been almost a year since Facebook rebranded itself Meta and announced its big push into the metaverse, and there aren't a lot of big, obvious wins to show for it," Kevin Roose said. "VR is still pretty niche, and it's not clear how much usage apps like Horizon Worlds are getting. (Although, if any Meta employees are reading this, I would love to know!)"
When Zuckerberg **unveiled parts of the company's platform earlier this year, critics mocked it as looking dated. He responded by acknowledging it was "pretty basic" and promised "major updates**" soon.
- The antitrust problem
Some "Meta supporters" argue that the company's recent struggles prove that it isn't the omnipotent force that its critics claim and that the federal government should go easy on it. But I think that claim misses what's really going on.
The company has become less dominant partly because both the Trump and Biden administrations have taken a tougher stance toward mergers.
"If Mark Zuckerberg could acquire his way out of this problem, as he did by buying Instagram back in 2012, he absolutely would," Kevin Ross said. "But regulators, at least under this administration, aren't going to let him."
Depending on your point of view, it's either ironic or fitting. As Kevin said, "Facebook became so dominant, in part by acting in anticompetitive ways for so many years, that Meta is losing its dominance as a result."
The bottom line: Facebook remains among the world's most powerful companies, with the ability to influence elections, public health and much more. It also continues to produce huge amounts of revenue, which will allow it many chances to create successful new products. But its struggles are real, and they don't show any sign of disappearing.
One positive sign for the company: It has sold more than 10 million of its VR headsets, which may suggest the niche is growing. But it remains unclear whether VR has anywhere near the mass-market appeal that social media does.
Thank you for reading. zip it now!
Top comments (2)
Facebook Lite has been around for years, and is still available.
That's what I was about to say.