Technology

When an aging business starts to take on water, the quickest, easiest — and most destructive — solution is to make moves that will generate more money now but may cost the company later. And that’s exactly what Meta has started to do. In the first three months of this year, the company started cramming more ads onto its platforms while charging advertisers more. Those choices may have allowed the company to increase its revenue per user by a significant 27 percent in the first quarter of 2026, but they are also likely to further alienate users (and annoy advertisers).

oh no they only have 3.5 billion users how will meta ever survive, their ability to take on debt must mean they are seen as unable to pay debts

I believe the company is at the start of a long, slow decline ... if you look carefully, you can see chinks in the armor

Almost lyrical, free of palpable fact. Well, at least it's labeled "Opinion"

The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures.

This seems to be what got the author spinning their vision. I'll take it. Here's to hoping 🥂

You can down vote such bullshit headlines too. It is clear that it is nonsense.

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

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.

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.

Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter -- the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc -- and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you're not familiar with Huey Long: he's been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn't changed a bit.

It's exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there's a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there's also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.

"But," you may ask, and rightly so, "why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?" and the answer to that is, "Yes."

One of the sure signs you're in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.

RGB :3

I don't understand why businesses don't predict this downward spiral. I recall a city with crap bus infrastructure saying ridership was down so they had to increase fares. So then a while later, oh ridership is lower again, let's increase fares. Duh, its down because the routes suck and you've increased the barrier to choosing to use it. SMH

Yeah, it's wild. I think these numbers are really literally making people into obsessive power hoarders like smaug. All this time and humanity has not yet learned it's not a great idea for any one person to have amassed such wealth and power.

Yahoo and MySpace come to mind. Probably could count Nokia and Blackberry, although they were more phone/hardware.

Possibly AOL, but their "death" may have been more than 20 years ago.

And while technically some of those companies "exist" in some capacity today, I don't think we'd consider any of them except Yahoo as anything but a name/brand at this point.

Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years.

None of them entirely die ... they just become hollow shells of their former selves, sold off to another company to use the IP rights. See: Yahoo.

Don't forget that a lot of them are bots

They're not public services. They're hostile psy-ops around the world, helping destabilise other governments.

It's high time other countries just outright blocked that cesspool, and Twitter while they're at it.