Signs of the end of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg constantly copies competitors, making 3 billion users feel increasingly boring

Inc opening the article commented that one thing that seems certain to come true is that if there is an emerging social networking application, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will find a way to copy it right away. immediately and integrate them into your applications. A good example is when the company cloned Snapchat’s Stories function for Facebook and Instagram. In 2021, the company launched Reels, a TikTok plagiarism product.

The 2 latest examples are particularly interesting. Last week, Meta announced it was launching a paid service that allows users to get green ticks. It doesn’t matter if the idea is not similar to the service that Twitter launched last year. Next, the source revealed that Meta is also copying rival BeReal with a product called Roll Call.

With the green tick service, Meta says that content posted by paying people will get “increased visibility and reach”. These accounts also receive better support from employees – which is very strange because Facebook has hardly had a customer support team for users. Even corporate clients who pay for ads on Facebook and Instagram complain that the platform is terrible at providing customer service.

There’s quite a bit to be said here. In fact, these 2 examples show the fact that Meta is at a point where they no longer seem to know what they want to be. The problem is, with 3 billion active users, the company has reached saturation point. And if at this point Meta can’t figure out who they want to be, what their goals are, it will probably be too late for them.

Inc. even said that the two examples above are good indicators that this could be the end of Facebook.

The first is a green tick paid service. According to Zuckerberg, they offer the service to “enhance verification and safety across the service.” But in fact, Facebook and Instagram already provide this service. And if verification is important to the platform, then why not make it available to everyone. Obviously, Meta is just “tricky” and wants to turn this into a new source of revenue.

Not to mention, this isn’t really Meta’s mindset. This company expects people to pay for green ticks with benefits such as increased engagement and density of posts by algorithm. This issue clearly has nothing to do with authentication or security. Meta is betting that people will be willing to pay to get their content visible to more people.

Of course, there will be people willing to do that. That’s why people pay to increase direct post engagement. Some experts even predict that the green tick service will bring in 2 billion USD a year for Meta. But the question is what is the cost of this?

The obvious answer is that Meta will lose sight of the true purpose of their platforms. Facebook is a money machine mainly because it provides connections with people they know and care about in the real world. That’s where you can join groups and stay connected. Providing a service that pays a green tick to increase engagement with a content recommendation algorithm is completely against the core of this activity.

It is understandable that Facebook is forced to find ways to make more money when advertising becomes difficult. Apple’s move to require developers’ permission before their apps can track users means that Meta won’t be able to monetize personalized ads with a large percentage of people. use iPhone. According to Inc., “grabbing a green tick seems to be the fastest way to destroy the platform and give users a reason to leave.”

The fact that Meta copied a competitor, creating a BeReal product is another example of how the company clearly doesn’t know why people use Facebook and Instagram. The company’s plan, of course, is to duplicate every interesting feature of any app to make sure no one has a reason to use another. But the problem is, when imitated too much, users will start to be skeptical, not understanding what this platform works for.

With Meta, what’s new seems to be the virtual universe. The company has spent the last year talking about building what it believes will be the next big competitive platform. They even changed the name from Facebook to Meta because of this project.

If successful, the company will need to innovate. Copying everything your competitors do is clearly not innovating. Doing so is very boring. This is clearly less attractive than building the next new thing. This is not a good thing that Meta should do.

Source: Inc