Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over (newyorker.com)

https://archive.is/UnNjh

It's astonishing to read this and see not only Zuckerberg but also the article itself present this as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today: engagement bait, consumption of content creator and advertiser content, etc. resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions to pivot from a place to learn your first cousin remarried to a place where advertisers and monetization rule. Towards the end of my time on Facebook, I never, ever saw content from family, including from my own sister documenting her terminal disease. But I sure did see lots of car dealerships from states I don't live in, news stories about people with two heads, and nubile young women surely-SURELY-attractive to a middle aged man like me.

So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'

There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.

The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.

Social Media hasn't died - it just moved to group chats. Everything I care about gets posted there.

Honestly, I would love a running Feed of my group chats. Scan my inbox, predict what's most engaging, and give me a way to respond directly.

I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.

> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram

Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference.

> Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage,

So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube, and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?

Someone made the observation that the problems started when things changed from social networking (family/friend) to social media. From actually keeping up with people to 'keeping up' with content.

I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost. There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.

It should be pretty obvious, but…

When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted.

It was glorious.

But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money.

And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit.

It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now.

I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”).

But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.

If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.

I login to Instagram and I see:

- Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities

- Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech

- Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)

- Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant

I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.

So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption, competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc.

The article says FTC is in a bind here.

IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.

That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.

> The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.

I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.

Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...

[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...

[3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...

This has been called "pulling a Myspace", back from when Myspace lost to Facebook. The sequence:

- Competition appears, usage decreases, revenue declines somewhat.

- Ad density is increased to increase revenue.

- Usage decreases further as users are annoyed by excessive ads.

- Ad density is increased even further.

- Death spiral.

How could Zuckerberg not know this? He was on the other side of it last time around.

>During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

I find this very interesting. Yes, there has been a decline, but even before this decline, this data suggests that users "viewing content posted by 'friends'" was only at 22% on FB and 11% on IG. That feels incredibly low to begin with to me, and suggests that it already wasn't about friends. I wonder what the longer trend looks like.

This kind of reminds me of when Fox News had to admit (in court) that their news wasn’t really news, it was entertainment. It’s wild how they always say the quiet part out loud when they’re being sued.

I only have facebook for messenger, but lets look at my feed now.

1 sentence question from a page i dont follow.

Funny joke from a page i dont follow.

3dmakerpro ad

swimsuit picture of sister in law.

3d ai studio ad

anti trans post from page i dont follow

polymaker ad

Reels?

polymaker ad

picture from highschool friend

science/astronomy post from page i dont follow

planetarium ad

Less than 20% are anything I might even be interested in; the rest are pushed. I havent 3d printed in quite awhile. Astronomy is cool i guess.

SOCIAL media is over if you're on facebook.

Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with more media than social

I support a small group of elderly people on the side. At least once of week they land on a Facebook video which then leads to the "your phone has 78 viruses" scare ad. I tell them to stop using Facebook and they look at me like I'm crazy. One of them even said, if I turn off my phone when I get that scary ad, does that keep me safe?

> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years,

Yeah, because you filled the feed with garbage so obviously they don't get to see as much.

Has 'percentage of time viewing content' declined?

Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that exploits our psychological weaknesses.

Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement.

A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.

My mom's area in northern Michigan got hit by a huge ice storm last month that took out hundreds of power lines and cable/internet. Facebook was the primary way the community communicated during the 5-15 day power outage. That was extremely valuable. There are a few special topic groups that are still great as well. Other than that rare situation it's been a desert.

Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.

I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.

Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.

One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.

Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.

Social Media suffered the same fate as all companies. A constant, relentless, unnatural pursuit of growth by stripping all humanity and focusing on numbers.

Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction

We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy.

Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage entry painlessly?

Does anybody know a good alternative to Facebook that doesn't force you to read its feed suggestions? I only have FB because I'm member of some groups where people post content that I'm interested in. I'm not interested in anything else. I find FB's constant stream of suggestions annoying as hell.

I'm surprised most commenters haven't mentioned that the presence of Tiktok as the biggest reason why Facebook was pushed into this direction.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's a battle for attention.

What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.

From the article:

"The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram."

So they algorithmically force various other posts into your feed, and then observe that people are spending more time looking at that crap and less time actually connecting with real people and friends.

Colour me unsurprised.

All we ever really wanted was to watch nasty but injury-free car crash videos all day. Even Linked-in is getting into the game these days.

In my country (CZ) Facebook is now only used by people 40+ for Russian/Anti-government propaganda (and it works sadly)

To quote David from the Acquired episode on Meta:

> I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that the company didn’t see coming. Because once you shift social from the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to divorce media from social. You’re already getting your social now in private, in your digital living room. The town square can become something that is completely not social.

Ok I am going to click on FB for the first time in a month or so. Here we go, not expecting much.

I have two notifications, one is about a birthday today, one is about someone I don't know asking me to like an AirBnB page. Let's go to the feed.

1. Sales thing from some group

2. A Boomer looking "reel" of a classic car (I don't like classic cars and nothing I have done suggests I do)

3. People You May Know (I've seen these same suggestions over the last several years, still don't know any of them and still don't want to connect)

4. Friend post, death in the family

5-9. Also friend posts

10. That exact same Boomer reel again

11-15. Friend posts or people I follow

16. "Memes Daily," which I don't follow so must be an ad

17-20. Friend posts and a group post from a group I follow

Overall, this really isn't bad, surprisingly. At one point, which is when I stopped checking it for months at a time, it was literally post after post after post from people I don't follow of the most garbage AI generated slop, like the sloppiest you can imagine. For example, the AI generated ones with the wounded soldier and a birthday cake with some message like "it's my birthday and no one came" level of slop, or an AI generated lady with an AI generated picture saying something like "this is my first painting but no one liked it," each with tens of thousands of likes and Boomers commenting things like "It's ok I am giving you a like happy birthday," just maddeningly ad infinitum and nausea-inducing.

So, maybe they fixed the above. Still, I can live without Facebook so am not planning on going back.

Social media has become tribal media, where people form strong tribal structures and stay within those. IMHO that has caused the great division we are seeing in many places. Maybe "cult-media" is a better term even.

Instead of coming together we ignore (or berate) each other, which in turn gives rise to the many extremist and authoritarian movements we are witnessing these days.

So there is now a new possbility to create a new social network, retro style in a sense.

If social media is over, why isn't Zuckerberg laying off staff in social media? Instead he's laying off Reality Labs staff[1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-la...

I think it just took the world a while to realize that social media is a replacement for cable TV and magazines, not a replacement for communication tools. Looking at old high school classmates' lunch and vacation photos was never good content, never good for business or mental health, and higher quality communication works fine with texting + Discord.

He tells it like its bad thing.

Anyway.. I was listening Acquired podcast on Meta yesterday (yes, the whole 6h30min thing) and what we have today is so far away and different than what he was preaching 15-20 years ago and so distanced to original idea of connecting with people you know and you want to be connected with. Don't even want to talk about ads..

Not once in the article does Mark say social media is over.

A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook anymore, save maybe for Marketplace.

But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook.

Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And, to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a lot! Not for me.

The irony is that Meta's defense in an antitrust trial is basically "we're not dominant anymore because everything is a chaotic content soup now." And… they're not entirely wrong? But also, who made it that way?

It could also mean that their recommendation algorithms are highly effective and managing to get people to spend more time on social media. And if "friends" aren't publishing enough, then foreign content will fill that void. Probably other content the user is interested in.

> “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years

Which does not mean that the time overall has declined. This could even mean that the time itself spent viewing content posted by "friends" did in fact increase, if the percent of time spent on social media increased enough.

Everyone relax - this moron Zuck still has Whastapp left to shittify and it's already begun with businesses spamming people en mass

Old firms that did sms spam as a service now all do whatsapp spam as a service - just one example of the process already inevitably started

I can't wait until people are communicating entirely via algorithms/OS clients with donations running server temp storage.

Then this 21st centure nicotine dealership that has created riches by extracting untold value from people's lives will finally be in history's dustbin where it belongs.

I've just loaded my Facebook home page. 6 'pages' (I know it's infinite scroll but you know what I mean) before I saw an actual friend's post, and it was from 2 weeks ago.

Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?

E: haha, the rest of the comments say likewise. Redundant comment but +1 anecdata.

Also for what it's worth I've checked a few profiles and yeah friends are still posting, I'm just not seeing it. I guess I scrolled past some post about something too quickly and now Facebook thinks I don't care? Maybe the algorithm is just broken lol.

The disproportionate amount of impact this one hit wonder had on civilization is astonishing.

LinkedIn is the only social whatever that I still use, and that's only bearable with a LOT of filtering courtesy of uBlock Origin. Even after that, it's 95% corporate advertising and 5% humans I know.

I hope so, and things might go back to having nice platforms for niche verticals, im making one of my own, for wildlife photography now that insta hates us :D

https://toggr.io

> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

But Meta controls what people get to see, so this is pretty dubious data, right?

Social Media is over because the quest for infinite growth killed it.

Yea, well. Facebook will eventually disallow you to even search marketplace without a face picture. Punishment for not feeding their databases I guess. It doesn't matter if you have 100 friends. It doesn't matter if you post 1,000 pictures of your farm. That's some dystopian ish right there. People have definitively noticed and many in my circles have refused to engage because of it. Good riddance.

So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a public good and what we’ve seen is a result of Facebook’s perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the perverse incentives? That’s kind of difficult when Citizens United represents regulatory capture by corporations.

The title of this article is misleading. Nowhere in the article does Zuckerberg say "social media is over" or anything close to it.

Another way to put this: Tiktok won.

I agree that the days of posting "this is what I had for dinner" are over. Facebook is a cesspool of your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories. IG isn't a friends network anymore. It's for following influencers.

Tiktok has a following tab but anecdotally I don't know anyone who uses it regularly and as a significant portion of time on the app. It's all about the FYP. And Tiktok's algorithm is far superior to any other in this one way: how quickly it updates. You watch a video about ducklings and within 2-3 videos you'll be seeing more videos about ducklings.

Compare this to FB, IG and Youtube: it seems like the process of learning what you like is far less responsive, almost like there's a daily job that processes your activity and updates the recommendation engine to your new interest levels.

Also, Tiktok is very good at localizing your interests. By this I mean, the other platforms will push big creators on you. On Tiktok it's a common occurrence to stumble on a video from someone I've never heard of who has 20M+ followers and this is the first video I've seen in 2+ years from them. On FB or IG, if someone has a massive following, you'll almost have to block them to avoid seeing them if it's something you have zero interest in.

These companies like the whole friends connection because it's a network effect, keeping users on the platform. Without that, it's so incredibly easy to switch when the new thing comes along.

I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.

Does this confirm at least part of the dead internet theory?

The relevant fact here is contained in this article's subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial..."

He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his company, which dominates social media, does not have market power and thus is not a monopolist.

The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the government.

Ack, I'm getting the sense that the author of this article is getting caught up in the argumentation prepared for use in the trial. Of course the Meta people are going to do everything they can to get everyone feeling it's like this to shake at the logical foundations of the case.

The F.T.C. is not chasing an old problem. A case like this may serve as precedent.

This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's niche and expensive.

I recall having Facebook and always had that feeling the algorithm was messing with me and my posts… Come to find out a few years later it was exposed that Facebook was conducting mass social experiments to users and their comments and posts. Shadow banning and I just never liked the feed…it was not organic.

It’s been over for years. At least Facebook has for me. I got rid of it several several years ago - didn’t delete it, just never logged in again and deleted Facebook from my phone.

Never looked back. One of the few online actions I can honestly say made my life better.

Oh my god it was an antitrust trial? Of course he's going to say it's "over" to reduce it's perceived relevancy and hopefully avoid having the legislators break it up

$ URL="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke..."

$ lynx -dump $URL | less

Social media predates the term social media by decades. It isn't dead and won't ever die because humans love to socialize and we will continue to use tech to facilitate that.

Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.

Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video. March 20, 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY

He's a bit late to this conclusion. For a while, Facebook supposedly didn't see TikTok as competition because it isn't social, but Facebook and Instagram have been entertainment feeds for a decade, now.

Shouldn't be too hard to rewrite 2010 Facebook from scratch, and keep it like that. Follow what your friends are doing, and when you post yourself be certain that your friends will actually see your update.

isn't that the same guy who said the metaverse is the next big thing?

>Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it.

Sure, and as long as people are making things Ford can't monopolize the auto industry. As long as people talk to each other Bell can't monopolize telephones.

This thing where people just generalize the conversation into meaninglessness is so frustrating. Everyone knows what social media is and does until it's time to do something about it then all of a sudden like a Roman salute no one actually has any idea what this is and really telephones are also social media but also social media doesn't exist anymore at all and also some social media is an existential threat to democracy and human rights but not the one that I own which, again, doesn't exist but still somehow makes me enough money that I can put the president on layaway.

I generally trend away from authoritarianism but I can see the appeal in just saying "Jesus Christ shut up we all know what's actually going on here" and just doing something

Zuckerberg saying this is more or less perfectly analogous to Jared Leto's character killing the nascent replicant in the Blade Runner sequel.

The more you consider this assertion, the more true it will appear.

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