> one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag.

When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other selfies?"

The problem is not Facebook or Meta. The problem is the disgusting business model of targeted advertising coupled with algorithmic curation of content to increase ad impressions. Facebook happens (happened?) to play that game perfectly but it's not limited to them by any means and another player will just take its place if Meta dies.

I'll keep my bottle of champagne for the day targeted advertising is regulated away, either on privacy grounds or on "Section 230" grounds (if you're curating content to increase engagement it's fair that you should be considered an editor and thus lose Section 230 protection and start being liable for any inflammatory content you promote to increase engagement).

Its funny how little attention your post got. I consider it the most important take on this subject. This is not about Facebook. It's about a corrupt and destructive business model that reflects the insane world we live in today. When that model goes away, it will reflect on other models that revolve around deceptive business practices. So more to the point, when ethics becomes an integral point of doing business, Then I will celebrate the real achievement of our time.

> when ethics becomes an integral point of doing business, Then I will celebrate the real achievement of our time.

This has rarely been a priority in capitalism.

That's not how Section 230 works: it's explicitly designed so that some editing does not open you to full liability for user provided content (but it's common to think it does the opposite). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... explains.

Why do you signal out “targeted” advertising? Would it be a different story if they advertising was not targeted? I think it would probably be an even worse junk land.

Social Media is not going away anytime soon. It'll just take a different form. Just look at TikTok

Why do you consider TikTok to be social media? Isn't it just videos shot in a smartphone aspect ratio + comments and a clever discovery algorithm? Is YouTube also social media?

> Why do you consider TikTok to be social media

A reasonable definition of social media is that it refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. "

In other words, roughly: a medium in which media created and consumed by the crowds vs. institutions.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media for a longer description.

> Is YouTube also social media?

Yes. "YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

Yes? Of course? I don't think there is a solid argument against HN being social media either. Same goes with Discord, Telegram, and Signal.

They are all media that you interact with and also interact with others via. The distinction is made with television/radio, where interaction is purely one-way, and is therefore not social media.

> dominating the cultural communications of billions of people

I think it is much worse than dominating. Let me try: as a FB user, your "communication" with your network is not only mediated by FB, but actively manipulated to such a degree that you're no longer communicating directly with individuals in your network. When we give up the ability or the pattern of communicating directly with each other, bad shit happens.

Well, should really look into the history of communication technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television, the telegram, and radio were all dominated by private cos that crushed open competition at every opportunity. Do you ever give that any thought? I recommend The Master Switch by Tim Wu if not!

We have tiktok now which is even worse

There is no reason to celebrate

The day meta is declared dead will be the day some other corporation has released an alternative to Facebook/Instagram/etc, probably worse. Hardly anything to celebrate. The cat is out of the bag.

I'm really curious to know what you think that "cat" is ?

Are you thinking that digital technology is irrevocably corrupted and hereafter can only be employed toward abusive and manipulative ends?

Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?

Or are you alluding to something within the collective psyche, making a social-anthropology statement of sorts, that people, having tasted the ruin of apathy, nihilism and decadence will not recover in spirit and build a more positive technological world?

Or something else?

I'm genuinely curious what you imagine is the powerful force that underwrites malevolent entities in the digital realm?

I've said it before and I'll say it again - social media is not the root of the problem here. I believe that there could be a great social media platform that respects its users and their privacy. But the minute you let marketing and sales into the room the game changes. They are the ones that see their users as the advert dollars, not the people building the platform. The highly paid executives whose only goal is to squeeze every last penny out for their own personal gain are the issue. This is a systemic problem in technology today: when the goal is profit first, the end user is lost as the target market.

I'm working for a small company currently and am watching the same thing play out on a much smaller scale. The company was growing organically at a good clip. We've had zero customer churn in 6+ years and service some of the largest companies in their respective verticals. Company fires the current CEO based on board recommendations, hires a CRO who was in sales at Oracle for 7 years, CRO brings in his overpriced underlings to "manage", CRO starts refocusing all concerns around the sales process (starting with making everyone spend an inordinate amount of time learning/relearning MEDDPICC) and tying up hours of the work week in unproductive oversight meetings. Now I haven't been here long but I've seen this play out before. CRO will sit here for 2+ years and milk it into the ground blaming everyone for every failure but himself. He'll even throw his guys under the bus if needed (which is why they're there in the first place - ownership buffer). We're starting to see product issues because of the focal shift internally and the distraction this guy is creating. It's so unfortunate - I've yet to hear the CRO talk about a customer outside of the subject matter of revenue. It's sick and twisted. These types of "executives" are narcissists through and through and they are the toxic seed that kills great companies.

You forgot the part where after 2 years they are shown the door but with a huge payout and glowing references ostensibly because "We don't want to ruin their careers" but actually: We don't want the market to know we hired this idiot and it took us 2 years to work it out and we don't want to be sued by their high-priced lawyers.

Then they take their "success" to the next company and the cycle repeats.

I suppose the technological implementation of a sort of “bad faith” ethos is the cat, here. And as tends to happen with that sort of degradation of values, other organizations pick up the technique since the bar is lowered. That’s my 2 cents anyway.

> technological implementation of a sort of "bad faith" ethos

Indeed, that's what the parent commenter said.

What I do is look at all those historical "slippery slopes of bad faith" that didn't survive, and ask "Why not?". What changed in society and stopped that?

Child labour was set to explode in the industrial revolution. Kids as young as 7 or 8 worked in factories. At the time it would have been reasonable to extrapolate that in a few decades all children would need to be employed in mills and mines. And we can talk about slavery, and disenfranchisement of women, and many more things in the same way.

To take a counter-example, the proliferation of cars on the roads is something we have not been able to stem through reason alone. I think this sets up a sense of "technological exceptionalism" in which theories of determinism currently dominate. In my opinion this is a very immature (Level 1 civilisation) view of things.

But when we look at all the malevolent trajectories that were corrected, it always begins when we name it. Naming a problem (acknowledging it as undesirable) sets in motion the progress towards overcoming it.

I think we are living through precisely that age with digital technology. We are in a process of naming, qualifying and understanding new harms. We are starting to apply the same progressive models we have for race, gender and public health, to technology. The course is set. It might seem time is not be on our side, but the industrialists of today are no more powerful than those of yesterday against the tides of society.

You are looking at the last 200 to 300 years and extrapolating. I think however that if you expand the horizon to several thousand years what you see is a very different cycle. A cycle where progress is made over a few hundred years and then is all lost. Every time progress is made everyone thinks, this time is different and then they are wrong.

There are substantive differences to this time around. We had a technological explosion for one which meant in terms of technology we jumped much farther forward than we had before. However the same cultural and civil failings are still there and still proceeding in much the same cycle.

I don't think Social Media is evil per-se. I do think that it is an extremely effective Mob amplifier. We used to have mobs form at a local level and their effects rarely managed to expand to a national level. Now we get global mobs via social media. Mob's have been around forever in human society.

They are rarely rational. Even when they are motivated by real problems they often tear down or destroy as much or more of the good as they do the bad. They tend to be indiscriminate and I don't think we are really prepared for the types of Mobs that Social Media enables. Maybe we'll be able to name this for what it is and find a counter to it. But I haven't seen any effective attempts to name the phenomena for what is. Instead I just see yet another Mob forming with a complaint about how companies are getting away with exploiting people. In this case I think it's less exploitation and more just amplification, intended or otherwise.

How do you limit the amplification without limiting free speech?

> Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States? Absolutely yes.

It’s not that profound. Humans have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media, and then watching what other people have shared. Most people no longer have time to themselves since they feel like if they don’t share what they are doing they aren’t doing anything. And if they aren’t doing anything they have to keep up with others (FOMO). Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.

> People have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media

So, pretty much "option 3". A social shift.

> Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.

I agree that there has been a profound change in "western" culture, and about a third of all the world are in this space (a staggering three billion people!). But I disagree that is an irreversible state of affairs and therefore a downward spiral towards worse and worse technology.

Let's not suppose the worst of people. Can they not change. Do all sick people and addicts remain sick and addicted forever? Or do they recover?

I wrote a chapter in Digital Vegan that presses a striking metaphor.

The chapter is "Hatland" [1]

It's based on a funny discussion I have with students in lectures about a photo from the 1940s. Every single person in a crowd of hundreds of people is wearing a hat! Trilbys, bowlers, caps... men the women too. In the 40's you just didn't go out without a hat in polite society. (It's also parodied in Python's "The Meaning of Life")

What people didn't realise is how parochial and fleeting that moment was. At the time people would have said "The hat is out of the bag!" A photo from 20 years later has nobody waring hats, but everyone with long hair and tie-dyes.

By your reasoning we would all be wearing 10ft high top-hats by now, because "someone else will create an even more engaging and therefore malignant head wear" :)

It's only when you look at culture as a historian/anthropologist that you break out of parochialism see the bigger truths.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

I don't know that fashion or cultural norms (e.g. hat wearing) are of the same fleetingness as deeper human behaviors like FOMO, narcissism, vanity, etc. These seem so deeply ingrained and transcending hundreds of years that I think it does likely point us in a certain direction.

One might label it a flaw in human evolution (even though it might have had positive selection pressure), something that can be "cured". Perhaps.

> Do all sick people and addicts remain sick and addicted forever? Or do they recover?

I don't know that any significant number of addicts, let alone many or most, ever "recover". But I also don't know that they don't. My money is on the former until we deeply understand addiction and can cure it.

I really appreciate your optimistic perspective — thank you for posting it. I think it's very easy to be cynical and just assume that things will get worse than they are now, and when you do that, you get to be a wise, world-weary and jaded commentator.

It's actually a lot more work to imagine a better society, because that requires actual ideas for what could be different and how we might get there. Saying, "things will be the same but worse" is a lot easier than saying, "things could be different and better, and here's how". (Full disclosure: I'm stealing this idea from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, which I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying.)

Notwithstanding its potential to become (or current reality as) a propaganda tool of the Chinese government, based on my very limited experience with it, TikTok actually feels both healthier and stupider (in a vapid entertainment sense) than Facebook and Twitter. I have yet to be outraged by anything I've encountered on TikTok, whereas if I so much as glance at a tweet on Twitter on its web interface, while not logged in, I'm almost guaranteed to be presented with other tweets from people who infuriate or disgust me. Discord also feels healthier than either of those platforms, it's really just a much better version of IRC. As such, perhaps we are already seeing a more healthy ecosystem emerge.

But setting aside the platform side of things, this discussion [1] on the Ezra Klein show calls the current disruptive era "transitory" in the same way that the dawn of other communication media were disruptive and transitory. Eventually, people adjust. Perhaps we are on our way to becoming immune to attention hijacking, outrage politics and FOMO. Speaking for myself, I've certainly become far better at resisting the pull of those phenomena.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

> Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Maybe this will end a different way.

For n=me, I've used facebook when I was younger but stopped using it (and all other social networks for their stated purpose - sharing and connecting) when the algos replaced the chronological order and tried to shove odorless excrement in my eyes non-stop. I'm not looking for a new one.

What I do now? I have a couple of private Signal groups where I and my friends shoot the shit. That's where I get most social value out of the Internet. I use Twitter for news. I use Reddit a bit for trash-browsing. That's it.

Now, this might be a function of me getting older and grumpier and preferring meeting people I already know, sure. I wouldn't however assume that this all will end in a more and more terrible "social" networks. Then again, I might be totally off base because I see that TikTok is eating facebook's lunch and it's not any better for humanity I think.

You think the whole world will sign up for something like facebook, knowing all we know now, again?

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers.

You're confusing users with customers. The customers are advertisers. The users overwhelmingly aren't.

Well, the only active users I see anymore are engaged in advertising even if not necessarily for profit. (Self) Promotion always was one of the draws of fb.

Really? I have not used FB in like 5 years. One of the things it had for it compared to Instagram and Twitter is how it was not celeb or micro-celeb oriented.

Has that changed?

In my experience, the people doing self-promotion on FB are generally not trying to be famous, they are trying to drum up customers for their own or their friend's business.

So no one is really trying to get you to "follow" them, they just hang around neighborhood groups to see if they can find someone who needs a caterer or a contractor.

Speak for yourself, i know loads of people who use it to keep in touch with family and friends and posting updates every once in a while.

There’s a lot of stuff wrong with FB but it’s fundamentally a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)

> a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)

It has also basically eaten Craigslist where I live (Baltimore)

My wife and I were not Facebook users five years ago, but our neighborhood organizations are on Facebook, and so are the best places to find secondhand stuff. So we're Facebook users.

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers

Anyone who's tried to use their advertiser tools is unlikely to agree with this. Hard to remember any software I've used with a worse user interface in recent memory.

Google ads is pretty bad too but facebook's business portal / ad manager / whatever they call it this week almost seems to be designed to be a nightmare to use on purpose. I sincerely hope a player comes along to disrupt this market with a product that is actually nice to use and offers decent customer support - these shouldn't be unrealistic wishes!

Haha, they AB tested on there "customers" to get them to overspend and dark patterned even the imperators salon. This is hellarious.

Actually I think this could be the reason. Given the sufficient number of A/B testing, it may turn out the more complex the interface is, the more likely the customer is likely to (make the mistake of) spending more.

There's no way to disrupt that market without first owning the audience. Facebook and Google can afford to build awful ad management software, because that's the only way advertisers can reach their audiences.

Perhaps it's the classical case of enterprise software - the people who make the call to spend on Facebook ads mostly don't have to work with the advertiser UI themselves - they have underlings for that.

I need to explain the user interface of Facebook to one of my clients but it would be a lot easier if the interface didn’t change every week and it didn’t had 4 points of contact for settings all in different places. I guess design by committee is at work here.

My guess is that (just like other big players) they have a team for each part/page/section of their platform. There is no cohesive product vision and no product principles (promises) to the users.

Experimented with it recently to see if we could advertise to people with an interest in our audio plugins. Ended up with a bunch of likes from mostly single mothers in Mexico who didn't seem at all interested in spectral audio processing :'(

Remember teaching people how to navigate and use that is a whole industry for them too.

Pretty sure you can do courses and get certified in it.

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers.

> You and I aren't Facebook's users

A user is someone who uses a product, by any reasonable definition.

Advertisers are certainly (commercial) customers, but the average person IS a user of Facebook.

> we are the ore Facebook has been mining

This I do agree with, my own metaphor has been harvesting rather than mining (like in the Matrix or in Jupiter Ascending). But being something mined/harvested does not preclude also being a user.

"Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers."

The elephant in the room is advertising tracking. Nothing to facebook matters. If I as an advertiser can't see what I am paying for, I am leaving. Advertisers DO NOT want to pay for impressions - they want to pay for conversions (clicks/installs/etc). Without a way to see if a particular ad spend converted - all ad spend ends. Facebook could now be doomed. Apple has changed its policies [1] to help its users to remove advertiser tracking. Mobile has taken over almost all impressions.

"They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks." They are beyond fucked here. Whatever they create, apple is blocking tracking. So new products/features do NOT matter. They need a way to figure out tracking - I don't have a solution (besides leaving and just using apple store iads).

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracki...

> nobody under 30 uses FB any more.

well, aren't older eyeballs more valuable anyway? Like more disposable income, maybe more free time for those retired? The mine might be empty some day in the future, but it doesn't seem to be the case right now

I'm no advertising expert but IIRC marketers tend to like the younger demographic because even though older folks have more money they also are wise enough not to spend it on stupid shit they don't need.

Unless you're selling a new kind of golf putter or a very expensive prescription medicine for high blood pressure. Then you want the oldsters.

Wasn't there statistics indicating the group with the most amount of expendable money are women in their forties?

I mean, the big bucks in advertising are coing from established companies anyway right?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad from an established company on Facebook. It’s always fly by night junk or scams.

Occasionally I find myself having lunch someplace that has daytime tv on. That’s where I see the ads for pharmaceuticals and insurance.

Younger people have a longer lifetime value than older ones

> nobody under 30 uses FB any more

As someone the wrong side of 50, I can actually tell you that practically none of my friends in my age group use FB any more either. For my non-techie friends, we're all in whatsapp groups.

The only thing that keeps me on facebook are sports clubs that I'm a member of, organise a lot of activities via facebook.

Yep, 47 here, and no one except a couple of right-wing, anti-immigration activist "friends" seem to actively use Facebook anymore, out of hundreds. In fact, that's the main reason why I and many of my friends don't use it — it's around 90 % conspiracy theory, and hatred towards government and minorities now, and it's super tiresome. Everyone else is long gone.

In my opinion it's not the UI that is the problem; it's the decision they made to allow all nutcases with their nutjob theories to run rampant, in order to make a quick buck out of peoples' outrage.

The signal-to-noise ratio gets lower and lower with every "overhaul" of FB. Without even looking (and I can't be bothered either), it feels like 1 friend post to 10 or more group or ad posts.

They don't even care about their advertisers, they knowingly perpetrate click fraud (and lying about video metrics). They don't care. Because Zuck doesn't care, he has contempt for everybody, advertisers and users alike

Even though the original product is dead, they bought WhatsApp and Instagram, which are far from dead

Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go

This is endemic to Metas culture though, they’re a metrics driven company so metrics drive their design decisions.

No one important at Instagram is fighting for the vision of what IG is. They’re just fighting to try and claw eyeballs away from emerging platforms and their success is being judged on how many people they get to push on these new formats. They don’t care if it’s at the detriment to what made their product great to begin with, because all they’re looking at is “how many reels are they watching. How many stories are they posting”.

Thing is with this strategy because there is no overall vision and no one standing up and saying “we shouldn’t add this” you get the equivalent of a burger restaurant serving sushi and tacos too but their burgers just suck now.

Crazy seeing it happen as the competing experiences encroach on screen space. IG now has Snapchat at the top and TikTok “ad breaks” in the feed. Twitter now has Clubhouse at the top. Etc.

Algorithmic feeds are the harbinger of doom for social media. They all get immediately and progressively worse when it's implemented (and it always will be because that's the business model).

Instagram isn’t dead, but it does appear to be doomed. At the moment all it does it buy them a bit of time to find a way out, which they almost certainly won’t (as they’ve had a longer period to do so already).

WhatsApp isn't dead, but it isn't really monetisable. We'll see how Telegram Premium goes - personally i have it, but i doubt many people are willing to pay for a chat app with tons of free alternatives.

I'm happy to pay for chat, just not for Telegram. I'd absolutely pay for Signal.

You can donate to Signal if you want to support them. In the settings menu there's an option to give a one-time or monthly donation.

I'm genuinely curious, what are the reasons you wouldn't pay for Telegram? Is that only a matter of preference, or does Telegram have some critical issues?

You can donate to Signal one-time or monthly. They make it very easy with Apple Pay.

I'd be very willing to pay for a good chat app.

But if Facebook turned around and would say "hey if you all start paying us we can drop the whole evil thing" then yeah they'll get my middle finger. They just have lost my trust.

In Asia, Line seems to be doing well selling stickers which I guess can be a way to monetize a chat app.

Have you ever used Line? It’s the most privacy-invasive app I’ve used after FB. Constantly asks for access to location, contact book, photos etc. Line is mostly popular in Thailand, outside its very much Telegram and WA.

> Constantly asks for access to location, contact book, photos etc.

a) Isn't that reasonable for a chat app? I mean, contact book, photos, location are all things that are likely part of the fabric of your chats with others?

b) It might ask for permission, but does it stop working if you deny permission? (I genuinely don't know since I'm not a user). If it doesn't prevent you from chatting, I don't think this is a strong argument.

Line is a Japanese company, and as such it is THE messaging app in Japan, it is absolutely everywhere here.

Instagram is moribund. People's accounts are being stolen left and right, users' feeds are full of unasked-for shit, and "stories" are an absolute mess.

Facebook and its properties are dead. Good riddance.

TikTok is next, of course. Just ask Vine.

I see that they have raised the price of the Oculous Rift.

Daft move unless it isn't sustainable or they want to phase it out.

The original product isn't dead or dying. Maybe in 20 years.

This is a good point. For a company this big, the difference between the 2nd derivative and the 1st derivative can be many years.

Ig definitely on its way out

Won’t the bag be in a virtual world though? :)

I doubt it. Facebook may have issues but they aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

Some of us are old enough to have been through Hi5 and MySpace....

And some are old enough to have read millions of predictions of death of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and FB.

and Sun, Netscape, etc. Just because some of these predictions didn't happen doesn't mean a lot of them did.

Sun Microsystems appeared solid. Apple _did_ almost die. IBM is only a shadow of their former self (IMO, the original IBM _did_ die). FB and Google are still young in comparison.

I have no stake in either, but IMO Google is more likely to survive than FB. FWIW, both have high quality staff that will bail if the growth stalls.

The old IBM really just sold itself off in little pieces.

What's left is a few pieces that have no idea what they want to be but they just keep doing what they do because the brand name assures them customers.

Some of which we were actually right about.

By the way, Apple only survived thanks to Microsoft money and being reverse acquired by NeXT.

True, but despite MySpace once being dominant, it’s peak scale was a tiny fraction of where Facebook is now.

MySpace was popular for some specific English speaking age groups mainly. Facebook is basically everywhere but China.

My parents who still refer to Google Maps as Mapquest are even on Facebook. It will take a pretty big screwup to flush out those types of users (not early adopters).

Your parents are the only ones left on Facebook. As long as that demographic can sustain it, so be it. But nobody under 70 is going to be on there much longer.

Actually, red-state cousin-humpers might still be on there a while longer. They have no place else to go, after Trump's predictably shambolic attempt at creating a competitor.

FB is still a thing among the late-30s - early 40s and older than that in some countries in Europe (I'm from Romania myself, in my early 40s), but younger than that there's almost no-one active on FB.

Anyway, good riddance, it pained me to see how most of the national politics was being carried out at a certain moment in time (~2014 - ~2019) almost exclusively on FB, a private network. That wasn't right.

Amen.

It still surprises me how perpetuating this stereotype of rural poor conservatives is A-OK.

"This" stereotype?

People who use the phrase “red-state cousin-humpers” are generally pretty stupid, but I’ll go ahead and try to explain it.

The context of this discussion was large populations that might sustain a social network. Implying that people who engage in incest in states that have a majority of Republican voters in recent elections would be a large enough population to sustain a social network is obviously laughable in the literal sense (incest rates are minuscule). So that leaves the implication that a much larger population of “cousin-humpers” does exist and the association with “red-state” implies that cousin humping correlates with political views.

Your comments reveal that YOU'RE a bigot, in addition to not even being the initial bigot.

However, when it comes to cousin-humping, I'm going to double down on the assertion that red states win the contest. And hey, it turns out that I'm not the only one: https://www.thefreemanonline.org/what-state-has-the-most-inc...

In case you're too lazy to click, here are the top 20: Kentucky, Maine, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Washington, Georgia, Oregon, Indiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, and South Dakota.

OWNED.

You’re still too confused to understand why that doesn’t imply anything about red states as a general statement and wouldn’t be relevant for keeping a social network alive (what this thread is about).

Here is an exercise for you. New Mexico is not a red state. What generalization do think was being made about “red-state cousin-humpers” that wouldn’t apply to the New Mexico cousin-humpers?

Yeah. I'm "remembers netgoth.org.uk IRC regularly having to add 'yes, livejournal is down' to /topic" years old.

Myspace was never a ~trillion dollar company.

A matter of how long it managed to stay around.

I don't know that that is a relevant rebuttal to the argument that "lots of money means more likely to survive (even thrive)".

More money means more degrees of freedom to experiment, the acquire others, etc.