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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[–] 99 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [+] 119 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    great. and I hope you did the same for whatsapp et instragram

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    While this is true, to be fair to them your family and friends probably stopped posting years ago.

    I wrote about the same frustration a while ago: https://jeena.net/my-facebook-feed

    In that article I also mention https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr which only shows posts of your friends which I used for some time as my bookmark for Facebook, but so few people post there that it's just not enough for me to come back regularly.

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    [–] 84 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    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
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  • [–] 56 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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).

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago*

    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 🥂

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    [–] 55 points 4 months ago

    Company: grows 5% in a year instead of predicted 5.5%

    Corporate media: It's dead.

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  • [–] 48 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    How

    the FUCK

    can a single datacentre cost

    TWENTY SEVEN BILLION

    dollars?

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  • [–] 46 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [+] 46 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)
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    [–] 42 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    When you speak of billions and trillions it's all meaningless bullshit and everything has gotten too far out of hand.

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  • [–] 39 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    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

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    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.

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    [–] 31 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    What a stupid cope.

    Meta is simply too big to fail, they can do whatever they like. Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years. Hell, even Oracle who make basically nothing of real value is doing incredibly well.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Yahoo and MySpace come to mind. Probably could count Nokia and Blackberry, although they were more phone/hardware.

    Possibly AOL, but their "death" may have been more than 20 years ago.

    And while technically some of those companies "exist" in some capacity today, I don't think we'd consider any of them except Yahoo as anything but a name/brand at this point.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years.

    None of them entirely die ... they just become hollow shells of their former selves, sold off to another company to use the IP rights. See: Yahoo.

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    [–] 29 points 4 months ago

    That’s about 3 billion people too many.

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  • [–] 28 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Not dying fast enough. A list of good reasons to quit social media: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/quit_facebook.html.

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    [–] 25 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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    [–] 24 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    There's only about eight billion humans in existence. 3.56B daily active users is as close to saturated as you can get.

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    [–] 23 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago

    Like the billionaires currently ruining the world: please die faster.

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago

    I left Facebook after 18 years. It's nothing like what I originally signed up for.

    Facebook is nothing but boomers, bots and AI generated click bait. A cesspool of our own creation.

    Burn. It. All.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago*

    I would love it if this were true, but as a member of the mag seven, they get a huge majority of the investible income of the world by default. Passive investing is 55% of the overall investing that happens now, and that means sending money to zuck more or less regardless of what he does or doesn't do. It's very hard to fuck that up. Not impossible, but they will be handed a lot of money for a long time. They will have to really fuck up badly to really die.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Yet none of this will reduce Fuckerberg's cash pile. We need to take that back.

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    [–] 16 points 4 months ago

    Left Meta (incl whatsapp) more then a year ago. Haven't missed it for a bit. Quite liberating actually, especially leaving whatsapp was great

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    At this point I wish for every mega Corp to die before they turn even more into tge cyberpunk dystopia visions of 80s movies.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    My only exposure to Meta has been Facebook. I stopped using it regularly in 2019 when I became sick of all the political warfare and tired of losing respect for those I love. I completely deleted my account in 2025 after Zuckercuck started cozying up to Trump. I can only hope folks get sick of it. My friends all mainline FB on the daily and it sucks. So many community groups are run exclusively from FB. Events where FB is the only advertisement. They have a crazy hold on the town square and that's dangerous.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    I'll open a bottle of something nice when this happens, along with doing a happy dance, but I think that cork is staying put for now.

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  • [+] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
    [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    Dont do that, dont give me hope

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