this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Great read, thank you for sharing. I know it’s about Reddit, but I’m going to indulge a digression inspired by the article. One of the questions that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I wandered back onto Facebook in December after a 2.5-year hiatus: when is a social media platform “dead”?
My Facebook feed feels like it’s in its death throes, with a handful of hearty souls occasionally posting their own thoughts or pictures or jokes, and like two fun communities that are reasonably active, while the overwhelming majority of content in my feed (other than ads and promoted reels and whatever) is friends of mine simply sharing screenshots from Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit without commentary.
I understand that my feed, full of people and organizations I voluntarily friended over the last…oh god…19 years (?!) isn’t necessarily representative of Facebook as a whole. But it seems like the enshittification, the erosion of Facebook’s most basic utilities—it’s not even good at event planning or photo sharing anymore; it was way better at both of those things in 2012—disincentives using the platform for anything beyond the most anodyne resharing of other peoples’ hot takes culled from other platforms.
Is Facebook dead? It seems like it sucks for promoting/advertising small local businesses, which was one thing it seemed pretty good at ~10 years ago. It sure isn’t good for keeping tabs on your actual friends, and hasn’t worked well at that in a long time. So what does it do? What’s Facebook for in 2023?
(Bigger question for me personally is when to leave it for real, and if I’ll ever have the courage to actually deactivate when, for better or for worse, Facebook efficiently captured a huge majority of my contacts between 2010 and 2015, and I feel a certain amount of anxiety about walking away from that entirely.)
The death of a website isn't a single event, it's a process that plays over potentially years. It plays out like your favorite restaurant dying: first the food gets expensive, then the food quality becomes garbage, and then you notice how few patrons come at peak hours. The day that restaurant died isn't the day the "We've shut down" notice appears on the door. It's started long before then.
Had a Burger King near me die. It seemed sudden, because one day I went there and got lunch, and the next day it was closed forever. But in retrospect, yeah, you run for like 9 months with only 2-3 workers on, you're not giving a very good impression, and it's inevitable.
I don't blame the workers in any of that, they were doing their best. If BK wasn't going to pay a livable wage, that's their own fault, nobody wants to work a job that isn't going to pay their bills.