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.
Cant wait for businesses to have websites again.
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
There is a certain type of people that absolutely hate public transit, because its the evilbad socialism.
So they do everything in their power to sabotage it and make it as awful as possible, with the ultimate goal of selling it off to one of their pals and privatize.
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.
Republican playbook.
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
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).
When you don’t understand how full accounting works.
Fraud and tax evasion, right?
I’m not defending anything but math. Thanks, though.
Too bad Zuckerberg will walk off stinking rich with his Hawaii bunker.
Let Pele take him.
Company: grows 5% in a year instead of predicted 5.5%
Corporate media: It’s dead.
How
the FUCK
can a single datacentre cost
TWENTY SEVEN BILLION
dollars?
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
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.
Re bubble: look at Lemmy.ml… just criticize China and you’ll be banned. They just keep telling each other that China is the best country on earth and no one will challenge that anymore, as everyone gets banned. It’s an extreme example but a pretty good one.
Re sickness: we’re a social species. That means interacting in real life. In real life you won’t have that many peers communicating with you all at once and you can gauge what your peers think by watching their body language. Online communication is all over the place and unfiltered. Humans haven’t evolved to process all of that information while still critically evaluating said Information. This leads to mental burnout, depression etc.
For the record, I am capable of limiting my exposure to this, because I grew up and witnessed the evolution of tech (born in 82). I’m also somewhat intelligent. I hold a Master’s in engineering, which requires a bit of intelligence. Many people only ever get basic education, if even that (not trying to sound condescending. Education is a privilege!). These people can’t handle this type of communication. That’s also the reason why they’re so easily manipulated by the right extremists.
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
Yesterday I read an article by an economist why airlines fail to be a sustainable business model and social media ticks the same boxes.
FB is hitting the issue the “growth at any cost” business philosophy hits, they’ve run out of subscribers. Like any system or organism(s) they hit the resource wall, in this case people. There really aren’t more people to sign up, they’ve pretty much squeezed what they can from advertisers. Now they are left with hairbrained schemes to push out into unrelated areas at the cost of accumulating debt. Buying up other businesses has a very mixed track record.
Wall St hates stable, steady, companies. They want endless growth when it ultimately isn’t possible. Without expansion the only way to grow profits is to cut costs. Shareholders and boards demand more. You lay off people, you cut benefits, you make the service poorer quality, cram in more junk ads, more scammers and fraud due to a lack of human monitoring, no customer service for aggrieved users, profits go up for a moment from the cuts but people start to leave so you cut more. The MBAs take the reigns, disconnected from the founders and no loyalty to the business. Execs get their bonuses for each cut and layoff and flee the sinking ship. Hedge funds profit off of the falling stock as they short it. Ads become click bait, toe fungus and ear wax ads. Down it goes…
Oh it also owns WhatsApp, one of the best messaging platforms for scammers. FB’s reels feature is mostly AI generated scammy crap. I’ve noticed a dramatic upsurge in blatantly fraudulent accounts on FB recently. I report them all but I doubt anything is done. I have never received any feedback.
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.
