Jason Koehler: Has Facebook Stopped Trying?

Recommended: At 404 Media, Jason Koehler writes about the (very public) collapse of social media giant Facebook.

The reason I have been so interested in what is happening on Facebook right now is not because I am particularly offended by the content I see there. It’s because Facebook’s present—a dying, decaying, colossus taken over by AI content and more or less left to rot by its owner—feels like the future, or the inevitable outcome, of other social platforms and of an AI-dominated internet. I have been likening zombie Facebook to a dead mall. There are people there, but they don’t know why, and most of what’s being shown to them is scammy or weird.

“It’s important to note that Facebook is Meta now, but the metaverse play has really fizzled. They don’t know what the future is, but they do know that ‘Facebook’ is absolutely not the future,” Roberts said. “So there’s a level of disinvestment in Facebook because they don’t know what the next thing exactly is going to be, but they know it’s not going to be this. So you might liken it to the deindustrialization of a manufacturing city that loses its base. There’s not a lot of financial gain to be had in propping up Facebook with new stuff, but it’s not like it disappears or its footprint shrinks. It just gets filled with crypto scams, phishing, hacking, romance scams.”

Has Facebook Stopped Trying?

Facebook has been overrun with AI spam and scams. Experts say Facebook has stopped asking them for help.

404 MediaJason Koebler

Read it at 404 Media.

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