Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
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FB is hitting the issue the “growth at any cost” business philosophy hits, they’ve run out of subscribers. Like any system or organism(s) they hit the resource wall, in this case people. There really aren’t more people to sign up, they’ve pretty much squeezed what they can from advertisers. Now they are left with hairbrained schemes to push out into unrelated areas at the cost of accumulating debt. Buying up other businesses has a very mixed track record.
Wall St hates stable, steady, companies. They want endless growth when it ultimately isn’t possible. Without expansion the only way to grow profits is to cut costs. Shareholders and boards demand more. You lay off people, you cut benefits, you make the service poorer quality, cram in more junk ads, more scammers and fraud due to a lack of human monitoring, no customer service for aggrieved users, profits go up for a moment from the cuts but people start to leave so you cut more. The MBAs take the reigns, disconnected from the founders and no loyalty to the business. Execs get their bonuses for each cut and layoff and flee the sinking ship. Hedge funds profit off of the falling stock as they short it. Ads become click bait, toe fungus and ear wax ads. Down it goes…
Oh it also owns WhatsApp, one of the best messaging platforms for scammers. Their reels feature is mostly AI generated scammy crap. I’ve noticed a dramatic upsurge in blatantly fraudulent accounts on FB recently. I report them all but I doubt anything is done. I have never received any feedback.
Too bad Zuckerberg will walk off stinking rich with his Hawaii bunker.
Let Pele take him.
This crash is going to be more like one of those winter storm highway pileups
Oh dang, it might be time to buy the stock again. The doomers are coming out, saying people care about social justice, privacy, or whatever the flavor of the month is.
The stock basically doubled revenue in 4 years. People dont care about things, this is an echochamber.
🎉 🎶 Am Taaag als Facebook endlich starb 🎶 Und alle Gläser klangen 🎶 🎉
Yet none of this will reduce Fuckerberg’s cash pile. We need to take that back.
they botched their own product. lets stop using it.
My only exposure to Meta has been Facebook. I stopped using it regularly in 2019 when I became sick of all the political warfare and tired of losing respect for those I love. I completely deleted my account in 2025 after Zuckercuck started cozying up to Trump. I can only hope folks get sick of it. My friends all mainline FB on the daily and it sucks. So many community groups are run exclusively from FB. Events where FB is the only advertisement. They have a crazy hold on the town square and that’s dangerous.
When you speak of billions and trillions it’s all meaningless bullshit and everything has gotten too far out of hand.
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.
I’ve been spending a whole lot less time on Facebook recently, I’ve deleted the app off my phone, and just check in once a day or so on my computer.
They just don’t seem to grasp that I want to see what my friends and family are doing, not meme pages.
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.
I know a few people who have an account, but never post, and some who don’t even have an account.
It seems to be a generational thing, younger people (twenties and younger) just don’t seem to use it much at all.
Usage also depends on where, as there are some countries whose people have turned Facebook into their own encapsulated version of the Internet, where nearly every service is already embedded and they’re using those at maximum.
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.
Yep, so they fill it with memes and cojtent that isnfrom groups or creators that you dint follow. All in the hope that there is enough content that you dint notice the lack of content from friends and family.
Community groups are where there is engagement now. Sometimes with people you may have a loose connecrion with in real life but often its strangers. Or bots.
A nice blog you have, I think I’d explore later. I found you had/have a blog in German before (long time ago, I assume). Do you blog in German / Swedish as well? Even if not public. I’m busy deploying my own blog in English, and I thought of trying other languages too. Thought precisely of German and Swedish :) but for me, it would take a very long time, I want to finish my English blog first.
Thanks, my old german blog is https://paradies.jeena.net/ but the last post there is from 2012, so I’m not posting in German anymore. I stopped when I moved to Sweden and couldn’t share my blog with anyone, that’s when I started the new blog in English so that both the Germans and Swedes could at least in theory read it. Sadly I don’t have much time for well researched blog posts, so I only seldom post even there, but once in a while I do.
Swedish I never blogged in, even though it would have been good to improve my Swedish writing skills.
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
great. and I hope you did the same for whatsapp et instragram
fb was the only thing i was using. election '24 gave me the extra motivation to just delete the entire account that was sitting empty anyway. now it’s pretty much just piefed/lemmy, and will eventually delete these too
Cambridge Analytica gave me that motivation.
It was time then, and it past time now.
the psychological dependence is real. i get why it seems impossible for a lot of people, but yea–gotta reevaluate what’s adding value to life, and what’s wasting time at best, and causing harm at worst. noticing myself getting angry at all the stupid on fb was a big factor, but also all the anti-privacy bullshit like cambridge analytica, made it easier to ditch the platform
now it’s pretty much just piefed/lemmy, and will eventually delete these too
Really? What’s wrong with stuff here?
It’s social media. You’re putting yourself in a bubble. Humans never evolved for this kind of communication and it’s making us all sick.
Historically, “social media” meant non-anonymous social connections in which nearly everyone knew everyone’s real names; in contrast, Reddit or Reddit-like networks like Lemmy were called “content aggregators.”
We’re also not in a bubble (what bubble anyway, of anticapitalism?) if we’re diversifying our exposure to different sides. The most important aspect is that Lemmy instances seem to be among the more bot-free forums, whereas FB is completely overrun by “AI” spewing lies and fake studies, for example.
I would argue that it only makes you “sick” (what kind of sickness, anyway?) if this is your primary means of your socializing. Message boards involving strangers utilized in one’s life in this way should only be a temporary lifeline while you work to gradually build/rebuild a habit of regular, in-person contact. As long as you’re diligently striving towards that, it’s likely a (perhaps small) net positive. Social media, content aggregators, forums, message boards, etc. are only a net negative if they’re your primary approach to voluntary contact with people.
Re bubble: look at Lemmy.ml… just criticize China and you’ll be banned. They just keep telling each other that China is the best country on earth and no one will challenge that anymore, as everyone gets banned. It’s an extreme example but a pretty good one.
Re sickness: we’re a social species. That means interacting in real life. In real life you won’t have that many peers communicating with you all at once and you can gauge what your peers think by watching their body language. Online communication is all over the place and unfiltered. Humans haven’t evolved to process all of that information while still critically evaluating said Information. This leads to mental burnout, depression etc.
For the record, I am capable of limiting my exposure to this, because I grew up and witnessed the evolution of tech (born in 82). I’m also somewhat intelligent. I hold a Master’s in engineering, which requires a bit of intelligence. Many people only ever get basic education, if even that (not trying to sound condescending. Education is a privilege!). These people can’t handle this type of communication. That’s also the reason why they’re so easily manipulated by the right extremists.
interesting article from ~20 years ago (even before literally everyone was on social media) about this topic
https://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html
Did you try blogging? I think blogging can help.
my ultimate goal (wildly ambitious, i’m aware) is to not use the internet for anything except paying bills, buying things i need but can’t get locally, and getting news. and research, if i need to buy something expensive that i don’t know anything about. i think blogging could be a productive thing, but i’ve never been a “i want to write an article about my thoughts” kind of person.
What a stupid cope.
Meta is simply too big to fail, they can do whatever they like. Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years. Hell, even Oracle who make basically nothing of real value is doing incredibly well.
Ask Jeeves
speaking of oracle, they recently loaded up on debt and got into deals that are all but impossible to fulfill, and in a couple of years their survival will depend on openai making profit. (not revenue) put a pin in it and come back to that in a year or three
Fingers crossed
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.
Yahoo isn’t really dead. It’s still in the top 20 sites, and Yahoo Mail still has 225 million users,
Damn, I didn’t realize it was still that high. I know that yahoo finance was big for a long time, but figured that had finally passed.
I guess I wouldn’t count that as dead then.
Was it Worldcom? Or was that also older than I think it was? I forget when Gateway died, same with Compaq. Cell carriers die off all the time.
Worldcom was more than 20 years, but I also don’t know how “big” they were.
Gateway and Compaq might count, although just around the cusp.
Worldcom was absolutely huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.
Nokia is doing just fine. They’re mostly focused on networking stuff nowadays. They left the phone business when MS bought it.
Yeah, I was kinda considering the phone part a separate business and it definitely died after MS bought them.
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.
A great opportunity to pivot to using their vast resources to help save the world.
They have all this data that fucks people up, should be easy to just do the opposite.
Bullshit:
Meta reported for its most recent quarter (Q1 2026, ended March 31, 2026):
- Revenue: $56.3 billion
- Net income (profit): $26.8 billion
That was up from:
- $42.3 billion revenue a year earlier
- $16.6 billion net income a year earlier
You can down vote such bullshit headlines too. It is clear that it is nonsense.
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).
while charging advertisers more
The major online ad networks like Meta and Google don’t actually set a price on most of their ads. It’s an auction system. Advertisers enter a bid for how much they’re willing to pay for their ads. When serving ads, the system displays the ads that have the highest bid for the user’s demographic.
Yeah there’s a lot of wishful thinking in this article. They still have a shit ton of cash, a lot of smart people, an incredible ad engine they can deploy onto any internet property. The metaverse was a complete wank but they still have more to work with than just about anyone out there.
Even if this article is right, and their arc has finally turned downward, it’s because they’ve finally hit the peak of an absolutely epic run. Stink of death? I hate them as much as anyone, but yeah… no.
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 🥂
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
When you don’t understand how full accounting works.
Fraud and tax evasion, right?
I’ll open a bottle of something nice when this happens, along with doing a happy dance, but I think that cork is staying put for now.
I left Facebook after 18 years. It’s nothing like what I originally signed up for.
Facebook is nothing but boomers, bots and AI generated click bait. A cesspool of our own creation.
Burn. It. All.
