Is the End of Facebook Nigh? by Tom Luongo

If Facebook contacts are a big part of your life, condolences are in order. Are people figuring out that social media is not particularly social, especially compared to what used to be called socializing pre-social media? From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Last fall I warned you Facebook has a fundamental problem.

More and more people were realizing it and it would have an effect on the company’s business going forward.

Here’s the jist of it:

…the biggest problem with Facebook is it’s all fake intimacy; a pale simulacra of real life interactions with people you are supposed to care about.

But, I don’t care about 99% of the people I went to high school with.  I went to college 1100 miles from those people and barely looked back.  The people I truly value from that part of my life mostly feel about Facebook the way I do.

That’s what makes them people I value.

They value the value of their closely-held opinions and don’t dilute it by publicly sharing their banality.  They realize that being friends is more than dropping political stink bombs in someone’s digital living room and saying, “I dare you to not breathe.”

So, here you are on a platform that is supposed to be all about you and the last thing anyone really wants to be on Facebook is … themselves.

In the November 2017 issue of the Gold Goats ‘n Guns Investment Newsletter I led off that issue with this criticism of Facebook as a reason the company would soon hit the proverbial customer wall:

Facebook was built on the false premise that we want to be in contact with all of the people we ever met ALL THE TIME.  But no, we really don’t.  We all, as T.S. Eliot put it, “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

We are all different people depending on our venue.  Public social networks force us to adopt one persona or face the wrath of the self-righteous.

A billion plus people who are all wrong on the internet.  In real time.  Lovely!

Social media is taxing.  It’s fundamentally poor quality social interaction.  It’s either endless moral preening and virtue signaling or a time-wasting diversion.

That’s not to say I don’t love a good cat video, because I do.

To continue reading: Is the End of Facebook Nigh?