The Decline Of Facebook (Meta)

Every time a company tries to optimize profits over providing a good service or product a price is paid.

To sum it up, capitalism is what destroys firms.

Japanese business philosophy (and that seems echoed for now in much of Asia, not just Japan) by contrast is “Customers come first in importance; employees come second; and shareholders come third”. Focusing on delighting your customers with the excellence of your product or service is how to make oneself embarrassingly rich. This is how Toyota replaced GM as the world’s biggest automobile manufacturer.

In the US, this can only hold true insofar as an individual or group with a vision of what a firm should be doing stays in charge. Once it goes public and the stupid, short-sighted, greedy shareholders take over by proxy their demands for higher profits *each and every quarter* will drive a company into the ditch (and yes, as much as I despise Jack Welch he was just doing what shareholders wanted; I think it highly ironic that it’s the capitalist class more than any other (and far more than thew workers) that represents Ayn Rand’s greedy, short-sighted “herd” with no brains or talents or vision). This is because the easiest and often the only way to produce those higher short-term quarterly profits is to sacrifice the future of the firm—cut R&D, cut spending on keeping infrastructure modern, take risks on safety, and lay off talented and experienced workers who can’t be easily replaced (no matter how much corporate boards delude themselves into thinking equivalent workers can be found anywhere off the street). All my adult life I’ve been watching the US transform real, tangible wealth (the ability to actually achieve and do things) for paper wealth, biggest numbers on sheets of paper. This ain’t going to end well.
As long as Asians can keep their business model intact and uncorrupted , they will own the future.

Insofar as Facebook is/was concerned, it was always inferior to me, even two decades ago. Most of its competitors I thought did a technically better job and presented users with a better experience. I still can’t fathom how it won out in the first place; when I tried it like 15 years ago its interface was worse and moreover I felt ‘overwhelmed by the stupid’. Stupid in that connections sent me things like browser extensions to install that even they probably didn’t know what they actually did (in addition to what they were advertised to do; most of which were cutesy and silly). Also, even then I was seeing the beginnings of information crap leak out of FB, when people started forwarding me “didyaknow?s” easily refuted by a a simple search of Snopes.

I was part of the initial trial of college students back in the day but deleted my account when it was announced it would be expanded beyond us.

One way it’s still being used is groups, in the self-pub genres I run in. An author will hire a PA to run their fb group, and you get (apparently) fun community building there, and it’s said to help with sales. I’m still a bit bewildered there’s that many people lingering on Fb, but what do I know!

People are saying that “capitalism” causes this. But then they note that this does not happen so much in Japan, maybe even not very much at all.

But aren’t these companies in Japan private companies? Don’t some of them even have “shareholders”? In other words, doesn’t Japan have “capitalism”? And if it isn’t “capitalism” that Japan has, what does Japan have? What name should we give to whatever Japan has?

And in America, which “shareholders” drive this greed process? The 99% of captive pension-fund shareholders who collectively own 1% of the shares? Or the 1% of free-to-choose shareholders who own 99% of the shares?

I hope we can get more precise terms into usage than “capitalism” and “shareholders”. Maybe at least some modifiers for the “capitalism” we have now as against the “capitalism” we had from the FDR through the Eisenhauer periods.
Something like “ordered capitalism under law” as against ” calvinball capitalism under lawless anarchy”.

GE didn’t destroy itself. Jack Welch did it specifically and personally on behalf of the social classload of people he worked for. As did Roger Smith at GM. As did Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap at Sunbeam.

(Of course they were all operating in a Forcey FreeTrade regime which would have punished them for doing differently. But then again, they and their social class comrades worked to achieve that Free Trade regime. And Clinton was their eager tool in getting Free Trade achieved. Only a Democrat could pull a Nixon-goes-to-China on Free Trade and Clinton wanted to be the Great Historic Democrat who “Nixon-went-to-China” on Free Trade.)

And some companies, even under successor leaderships, have avoided Leader-led destruction even in this Cannibal Crapitalism environment they have to do business in.
Whatever company it is that makes WD 40 comes to mind. And maybe a few others.
People who know more about Ford Motor Company can say whether Ford Motor Company is one of those self-non-destroying companies or not. Maybe Chicago Cutlery is one of those companies.

When Presidents began supporting pro-Trust and began opposing anti-Trust, they also set companies free to achieve total monopoly by buying up or exterminating all competing choices which might have kept those companies honest and useful. That is also part of the problem and the process.

We would need several decades of unbroken New Deal Revival policy enforcement and imposition and also several unbroken decades of unforgiving and overzealous anti-Trust enforcement and action to restore a social legal habitat in which decent leaderships might be able to create decent companies and get successorships to keep them decent.

People who don’t think achieving that is likely should prepare to survive in a future “America” which delaminates into a number of Successor Christian Fascist States, Christian Warlord Barbarian Kingdoms, some Free Towns and Cities here and there, and a vast wasteland of Somalia-type anarchy between them all.

Maybe some Indian Nations can re-arise and re-take power over some areas.

Who gets the H-bombs?

For some years now, I’ve avoid using google where possible, because power corrupts basically, so I hate to feed the biggest giants. But still, when I really needed to find something, I’d use google, because it was still the best search.

But in the last year or so, I’ve found that google often comes back with poorer results than it used to. Like I’ll search for a site, but instead of coming back with the main site link, it gives me some sub-page, or a semi-related page. Now I find that other engines (e.g. Qwant) give me the same or better results for many searches.

As for facebook, it does seem like they are on a long way down. I log in to my very old account once a year or so just to look around. It used to be so intuitive but now the site seems so cluttered and dysfunctional, impossible to find what you are looking for or do simple things. I guess they still have piles of cash and the ability to buy up would be competitors, but it is hard to see a real turn-around happening.