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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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.
When you speak of billions and trillions it’s all meaningless bullshit and everything has gotten too far out of hand.
Yeah, it’s wild. I think these numbers are really literally making people into obsessive power hoarders like smaug. All this time and humanity has not yet learned it’s not a great idea for any one person to have amassed such wealth and power.
That’s about 3 billion people too many.
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.
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?
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.
Gimme the money I’m going on a world home building and feeding tour. I’m mansa musa 2.0
RGB :3
They have been keeping track of every website you visit for at last two decades
RAM prices bruh.
/s
Not dying fast enough. A list of good reasons to quit social media: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/quit_facebook.html.
Left Meta (incl whatsapp) more then a year ago. Haven’t missed it for a bit. Quite liberating actually, especially leaving whatsapp was great
That would be nice. But it won’t happen. Even if Zuck bankrupts it, some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going. All those sheep on insta and facebook are waay to valuable to let go.
Exactly. It is just a brand in a larger homogeneous surveillance capitalist social media landscape. If they “fail,” the brand just gets absorbed into one of the others. If they “win,” they absorb brands (like instagram).
some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going
Those Knickerbocker(?) twins and that four-eyes wanting to get even at Zuck.
It might not completely go away, but it will slide further and ever quicker into irrelevance. Just like Xwitter has done.
There’s only about eight billion humans in existence. 3.56B daily active users is as close to saturated as you can get.
Is Meta even active in China or are they blocked by the CCP? If so you can remove 1.4 billion people from the list of potential users, meaning an even crazier market saturation
Don’t forget that a lot of them are bots
Like the billionaires currently ruining the world: please die faster.
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).
oh no they only have 3.5 billion users how will meta ever survive, their ability to take on debt must mean they are seen as unable to pay debts
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 🥂
You can down vote such bullshit headlines too. It is clear that it is nonsense.
When you don’t understand how full accounting works.
Fraud and tax evasion, right?
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
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
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.
interesting article from ~20 years ago (even before literally everyone was on social media) about this topic
https://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html
spending too much time on it
Did you try blogging? I think blogging can help.
my ultimate goal (wildly ambitious, i’m aware) is to not use the internet for anything except paying bills, buying things i need but can’t get locally, and getting news. and research, if i need to buy something expensive that i don’t know anything about. i think blogging could be a productive thing, but i’ve never been a “i want to write an article about my thoughts” kind of person.
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.
I know a few people who have an account, but never post, and some who don’t even have an account.
It seems to be a generational thing, younger people (twenties and younger) just don’t seem to use it much at all.
Usage also depends on where, as there are some countries whose people have turned Facebook into their own encapsulated version of the Internet, where nearly every service is already embedded and they’re using those at maximum.
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.
Yep, so they fill it with memes and cojtent that isnfrom groups or creators that you dint follow. All in the hope that there is enough content that you dint notice the lack of content from friends and family.
Community groups are where there is engagement now. Sometimes with people you may have a loose connecrion with in real life but often its strangers. Or bots.
A nice blog you have, I think I’d explore later. I found you had/have a blog in German before (long time ago, I assume). Do you blog in German / Swedish as well? Even if not public. I’m busy deploying my own blog in English, and I thought of trying other languages too. Thought precisely of German and Swedish :) but for me, it would take a very long time, I want to finish my English blog first.
Thanks, my old german blog is https://paradies.jeena.net/ but the last post there is from 2012, so I’m not posting in German anymore. I stopped when I moved to Sweden and couldn’t share my blog with anyone, that’s when I started the new blog in English so that both the Germans and Swedes could at least in theory read it. Sadly I don’t have much time for well researched blog posts, so I only seldom post even there, but once in a while I do.
Swedish I never blogged in, even though it would have been good to improve my Swedish writing skills.
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.
At this point I wish for every mega Corp to die before they turn even more into tge cyberpunk dystopia visions of 80s movies.
