Opinion | Is Facebook yesterday’s news? It sure seems like the social media site has peaked

What is Facebook for anymore? It seems a strange question to ask of one of the most massive human experiments in history. Three billion people log onto the social platform every month, a sort of mind-bending figure that beggars imagination.

Yet it’s getting harder to see what the point of it actually is. Want to share photos with friends? Instagram is much better if you want to be public, and messaging much better for something private. Want to post something to the world and engage with ideas? Use Twitter instead. And if you want to be connected to the world at large, you should be on TikTok, where short videos have become the engine of contemporary culture.

Facebook and its parent company Meta know it, too. In a memo obtained by tech site The Verge, a Facebook executive laid out a plan to reshape the Facebook feed to make it more like TikTok: more short-form videos and more content from people you aren’t connected with.

Whether it will work is yet unclear. But it does put into stark relief a rather surprising idea: Facebook appears to be in decline, fading in cultural relevance as it is usurped by something new.

What makes that assertion especially strange is that Facebook is nearly historically unprecedented in its size. There are almost no companies on Earth — not Walmart, Amazon or GM — who directly have as many customers as Facebook.

Yet, for the first time Facebook actually lost users last year. As the report from The Verge points out, the company’s users are also aging and younger users are spending time elsewhere. TikTok had 20 per cent more downloads than Facebook and iPhone users spent a whopping 78 per cent more time on TikTok than on Meta’s platform.

Put another way: it sure seems like Facebook has peaked.

This is precisely why the company is now Meta, not Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recognizes that people will only scroll through a feed of text for so long. Instead, he is seeking to build out a “metaverse,” the idea that there will be a digital replica of the world in which people will meet and play.

Whether that will actually come to pass seems profoundly uncertain. While there are many intriguing applications for a metaverse — think of a virtual 4D architectural plan that will let designers catch issues before any concrete is actually poured — the idea that you and I will hang out in virtual reality with headsets over our faces seems a lot more dubious.

But the other part of what’s going on here is that social media always lived in a bit of an odd in-between space. On the one hand, it is a way to keep up with friends and family. On the other, it is a place to keep up with the world: news outlets, local businesses, one’s community.

Perhaps part of the reason for Facebook’s decline is that it tries to service both halves of that divide, being both the way to connect with one’s immediate social circle while also being the place where you find news, buy and sell groups, and funny cat videos.

TikTok, by contrast, struck gold because, instead of trying to be the place for friends to connect, it focused on showing you content by interest, not whether or not you were actually connected to a person. The app, which started out as predominantly focused on lip-synching and music, now shows very short videos of all kinds. Watch a few videos about cooking or humour or makeup and TikTok will serve you more of the same, all while occasionally inserting popular viral clips or things that are new to you.

If you want to feel plugged in — the way we used to feel when turning on MuchMusic or listening to the radio — TikTok is where you go because it is where young people are making culture. And Facebook, which instead is showing you your uncle’s vacation photos or posts from Ben Shapiro, feels more like yesteryear.

To be clear, Facebook is still pulling in billions in ad revenue and has few challengers in the social space as we know it. But that’s just the thing with digital: the social space as we know it may change radically, particularly since an app like TikTok can come out of nowhere to amass about a billion and half users — which, just to put in perspective, is about a fifth of the entire world’s population.

There is, however, one bright spot for Facebook and it’s not even Facebook itself. It’s Instagram, the photo-sharing app, which continues to grow. It’s not a mystery why either: it does one thing and one thing well, instead of trying to be all things to all people. Alas, that may be a lesson that may come too late for Facebook, which may soon find itself yet another remnant of the past in a digital world that waits for no one.

Navneet Alang is a Toronto-based freelance contributing technology columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @navalang

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