The “world” seems to be exclusively about things that happened in the USA according to this author…
Yep, exactly. Here everyone and their grandma still uses Facebook without even batting an eye or caring about them as a company.
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Meanwhile the Rohingya turned on Facebook much earlier than just the last year.
What I like about this article how the name Facebook is used, no Meta. It gives the company’s attempt at distraction through a name change less power.
I wouldn’t give the author that much credit.
I imagine the biggest problem for fb is that young people are abandoning it in droves now. One of the dumbest things they did was to force people to tie their real identity to their account. Nobody wants to post fun things they do in their spare time and then have that pop up in a professional setting.
Another thing fb gets used for often is organizing events or keeping up with friends, but this sort of stuff is just as convenient to do using pretty much any instant messaging platform. And you don’t need a platform like fb for that at all since that typically involves a fairly small group of friends you know personally.
The whole meta rebranding is very clearly rushed and it has no legs because VR tech just isn’t there yet. It’s fun to play a VR game for a couple of hours at most. The headsets are heavy, resolution is not great, and lots of people get nausea when trying to move around in VR. Having to buy additional hardware for this is another factor that will limit the appeal. This is a novelty experience, and fb is delusional if they expect people to start spending comparable amount of time that they spend on their site in their metaverse.
Ultimately, it’s no different from previous style MMO efforts like second life. There is nothing fundamentally new or different that fb is doing here, and so there’s no reason to expect it to get significantly more traction.
Their model is also competing with stuff like Tiktok that’s been eating their lunch lately. Meta will have to offer something that’s enticing enough to pull people away from other platforms.
I don’t see the meta thing as a rebranding. They are doing the same thing Google did into Alphabet a while ago. Because that company does more than just Google and Meta does more than Facebook. But everyone still knows these companies by their most successful product.
And even if young people hate Facebook, they still use Instagram for sure. I don’t think I could bring myself to delete Facebook, even when I never use it. There’s a lot of pictures tagging my account I would no longer be able to aggregate. And on Instagram, with some people, that’s my only point of contact. I don’t know their number or how else to reach them.
