The Facebook Story and Why It’s Having a Slow Death

Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Andrew McCollum (exclusively for Harvard students), Facebook was created, marking the beginning of current-day social media. At the time, it was nothing like the current version; it had some basic features like friend requests, a profile picture, and metadata (mostly birthdays, dorm numbers, phone numbers, and courses). This was a huge success, with nearly half the Harvard undergraduate population signing up. Soon, the idea expanded to other elite universities like Columbia. In 2005, there was a little rebrand that went a long way in establishing Facebook's popularity. It was the photo tagging feature that became enormously popular, giving people the ability to post photos with friends and family. September 2006 led to the website's global outreach, where any person above the age of 13 with a valid email address was allowed to hop on the trail. People soon started getting hooked to their 'News feed', a live, algorithmic stream of finding what friends are doing in real time. 

By 2008, Apple had launched the App Store, and the mobile web browsing world boomed! Facebook was moving from being a website to being a mobile app. Two years later, a Stanford graduate, Kevin Systrom, along with Mike Krieger as co-founder, worked on creating an app that gained strong responses from users for its photo-sharing aspect. They had given birth to the 'like' and 'comment' features. They named this app 'Instagram' [instant camera, telegram]. The Facebook team realised how impactful Instagram would be for solving major issues that people had with smartphones at that time: blurry photos, slow photo uploading, and slow sharing speeds. By April 2012, the app was available to Android users and garnered over 30 million users. Instagram was bought for $1 billion in cash and stock just days later by Facebook.

Facebook bought Instagram just days before its IPO launch; this move was made to keep a strong hold on the social network market and to not be threatened by competition. Experts suggest the Facebook team feared that despite the first mover advantage, people would completely replace Facebook. Zuckerberg's desperation was clear when he offered an astronomical amount of money to a 13-person company with 0 revenue(there was even a formal bid from Twitter's founders). Facebook feared losing a younger demographic; even back in the day, Facebook had started to be viewed as an application for aunties and uncles to keep in touch. Instagram was new, fresh, artistic, and cool. 

Now, while the title talks about a slow death, it's more about the cultural significance dying than the financial aspect. Facebook still generates $120 billion in advertising revenue annually. It has over 3.07 billion monthly active users. But the point is that a quarter of its users are over 55. Millennials and Gen Z view the app largely as a local marketplace transaction app. It's far from being considered someone's social or digital identification metric. There is a drastic AI-generated content exposure on the app, making it boring and disconnected from recent pop culture. Millions of users Google anything with the word ‘Reddit’ attached to the end of the question, in hopes of getting rid of the AI overview answers and instead getting real human advice. Twitter largely continues to be the first to break the election results of an earthquake, protest, riot, or a celebrity wedding. Unlike Reddit and Twitter, apps that continue to coexist easily with Instagram and have found a niche, Facebook struggles.

Words by Dhvani Sandlas, she/her