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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First they’ll collapse slowly, then all at once. The debt is catching up to them, they’ll start laying off even more people, and they’ll try to increase revenue by running more ads, and charging more for the ads, etc.
If you think they, or any of them, including our own government, are “too big to fail”, well, it’s happened before.
I don’t understand why businesses don’t predict this downward spiral. I recall a city with crap bus infrastructure saying ridership was down so they had to increase fares. So then a while later, oh ridership is lower again, let’s increase fares. Duh, its down because the routes suck and you’ve increased the barrier to choosing to use it. SMH
I believe what you’ve described is intentional with any service that someone is looking to cut. Step one: this service sucks and doesn’t deserve as much funding as it has. Step two: cut funding. Step three: see step one.
“Starve the beast”
Smaller businesses or privately owned businesses with a smart owner do.
Large publicly traded companies are sustained by a perception that an investment in or loan to that company will pay off in a higher dollar amount in the future, so if the perception becomes the company is shrinking then the investments and loans slow down which makes the perception worse, you get that feedback loop which turns into the death spiral.
So the bigwigs at the top of these companies have to be professional liars and gamblers to change the perception and make it look like everything isn’t just fine, they’re doing great! The line must go up.
Oh, hey, they are doing that in my city right now. It’s a classic!
Nothing is too big to fail. Some things are simply too big to fail gracefully or quietly.
Meta-nay-Facebook is one of those things.
Is “dying” the right word? They’re struggling, but I won’t be surprised if this administration or the next bails Meta out, since fb and insta are essentially public services for a lot of people, as much as I hate that. The smart thing for the fed government to do is to nationalize Meta’s platforms.
They’re not public services. They’re hostile psy-ops around the world, helping destabilise other governments.
It’s high time other countries just outright blocked that cesspool, and Twitter while they’re at it.
Right, so “public services”, as the filthy rich would sarcastically put it. Facebook is one of the major set of chains that bind, and direct us, none of them want to lose that.
Problem is, it’s been overrun by rage bait for clicks and vocal extremists.
It’s weird watching people think their opinion is popular because a handful of people are shouting it everywhere on Facebook.
It’s no longer fun, and there is no way to force only posts by people you know. So all the racist garbage gets lots of engagement and is also added to your feed
3.58 to 3.56 billion isn’t really significant because in the long term these sort of mega corporations can easily recover that many users.
But I like they’re getting covered in debt, though idk how far it is from collapse as these numbers don’t make much sense to me.
Honestly, I think it’s massively significant. For a start off, that’s 20 million people, the population of Chile, in one quarter. That’s a lot of people regardless of how you slice it.
But more to the point, Meta services - Facebook especially - have reached a point of cultural impact where anyone who doesn’t have them can’t be talked into getting them anyway. Plus, they’re useful messaging services too, because everyone else uses them. Their popularity has become self-fulfilling. The idea of Meta losing more users than it’s gaining at all has been frankly unthinkable until recently.
It’s a lot of people but big tech can easily get back those numbers.
Let’s see how the tendency unrolls over the long-term.
Might be boomers dying off, and young people won’t use Facebook because it’s not cool to have an account there?
the pessimism in me suspects they’ll just get a cushy bailout from the government later. SOCIALIST CAPITALISM - when the government only cares about corporations and not people
That’s just capitalism. But yeah, they can just bailout since the concept of separate legal entities means that individual investors aren’t held responsible for corporate losses.
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.
That’s about 3 billion people too many.
How
the FUCK
can a single datacentre cost
TWENTY SEVEN BILLION
dollars?
Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter – the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc – and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you’re not familiar with Huey Long: he’s been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn’t changed a bit.
It’s exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there’s a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there’s also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.
“But,” you may ask, and rightly so, “why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?” and the answer to that is, “Yes.”
One of the sure signs you’re in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.
Funny how you use the term “banana republic” to mean “corruption that wasn’t in the US” when the situation that coined the term was created by American imperialism in the first place.
Edit: not disagreeing with you btw, just found that specific use of words ironic, given the background.
No, you’re quite right. To be fair, from slavery to robber barons, I don’t think we have ever been free of corruption. But now we’re speedrunning into the level of corruption of having to bring extra cash for the bribes when renewing a drivers license.
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RGB :3
Gimme the money I’m going on a world home building and feeding tour. I’m mansa musa 2.0
RAM prices bruh.
/s
They have been keeping track of every website you visit for at last two decades
OpenAI has entered the chat
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Exactly. It is just a brand in a larger homogeneous surveillance capitalist social media landscape. If they “fail,” the brand just gets absorbed into one of the others. If they “win,” they absorb brands (like instagram).
I’m still mad at them for buying Instagram and turning it into a copy of Snapchat and TikTok.
It might not completely go away, but it will slide further and ever quicker into irrelevance. Just like Xwitter has done.
I’m still waiting for that company to actually die. From what I can tell, Yi Long Ma has spun it into one of his other companies and spun that company into SpaceX. And he’s milked the AI thing. I used to laugh wondering where he’d get the 40 billion to pay off Ellison and the rest of the funders who actually paid for Twitter. The sad truth is he can find 40 billion in his couch cushions, but won’t even have to because he’ll book-cook his way out of it.
some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going
Those Knickerbocker(?) twins and that four-eyes wanting to get even at Zuck.
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.
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.
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
spending too much time on it
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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 🥂
You can down vote such bullshit headlines too. It is clear that it is nonsense.
When you don’t understand how full accounting works.
Fraud and tax evasion, right?
Not dying fast enough. A list of good reasons to quit social media: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/quit_facebook.html.
This is a nytimes article about meta reaching lemmy all frontpage. It’s up to you whatever meta dies or not, stop upvoting their shit.
There’s only about eight billion humans in existence. 3.56B daily active users is as close to saturated as you can get.
Don’t forget that a lot of them are bots
Yes, for example I have 6 bots (i.e. fake users) that are scraping some things every day. They look and behave like real users, so they must count as DAU for them. And I’m just a nobody, so I wonder how many more bots are there.
Is Meta even active in China or are they blocked by the CCP? If so you can remove 1.4 billion people from the list of potential users, meaning an even crazier market saturation
Left Meta (incl whatsapp) more then a year ago. Haven’t missed it for a bit. Quite liberating actually, especially leaving whatsapp was great