Seriously who uses Facebook anymore?

How is that website making money?

I must confess whenever I see Mark Zuckerberg at a Senate subcommittee hearing or doing the keynote at a conference or something, I really do ask myself: “How does this guy still have a job?” How is he still a relevant player in the tech world? His sole claim to fame for two decades now has been Facebook, and I do not know anyone who uses that website in any meaningful way anymore. I mean nobody. The most I ever hear of anyone using it is the Marketplace feature, which to be sure is a pretty good online marketplace. But Facebook’s market cap is nearly $2 trillion. You aren’t getting to $2 trillion because people are buying old Farberware kettles off your digital marketplace. Somebody has to be using Facebook’s social media function—but who?

This is a serious question. As a cultural artifact, Facebook has not been cool for probably about 13 or 14 years or so. It stopped being cool when—look, I’m just going to say it—when older people started getting on it en masse. I think Facebook was always doomed to become incredibly lame, and it was already getting there, but really, Baby Boomers killed Facebook.

I’m sorry if my Baby Boomer readers are bothered by that but it’s true. Boomers got on Facebook and that was the end of it. They had no idea how to use it, for one. You’d post a picture of yourself doing shots with your bros at the riverfront, or maybe a picture of you and your buddies going nuts at the Skinz-Bucks game, and your mom would comment on the picture: “I saw your 3rd grade teacher the other day! She said hello. Have you seen my sweater? Love, mom.” Instant social media death. They seemed to have no real sense of how the service worked, what its functional parameters were; they’d say things like, “I got a personal Facebook message from Bill Clinton the other day—is that normal?” You’d post a fart meme or share a YouTube video and they’d comment: “I don’t understand this.” Facebook quickly became a place where you had to sort of teach your parents and grandparents how to use and understand the Internet. Nobody wanted to do that so we all left.

But that whole thing was only accelerating what was at that point foreordained. Whatever fun novelty Facebook had in its earliest days—weekend photo dumps, funny notes, poke wars, a rant or two—had evaporated by the time the Boomers found it. By 2012 it was just a place where people went to yell angrily at each other. Successive platform updates and endless algorithm tweaks have rendered Facebook’s social media service essentially unusable. Half of the posts you see are from people you don’t know; half of the people you know you aren’t actually friends with on Facebook; 90% of the posts are from last week or last month; the search function has become incomprehensible and unusable, so you can barely even find anyone you might want to be friends with, if they’re even still on the service, which most of them aren’t; your feed is clogged with advertisements and posts from groups you never joined and have no interest in joining. Facebook was once the marvel of the digital age, a global connector of people and things and ideas; it is now just a really stupid, lame website, useless except as a slightly more functional Craigslist.

Part of the problem, of course, is that social media itself has sort of collapsed. I am not sure that “social media” is itself even a distinct phenomenon anymore, any more than “multimedia” is still a recognizable genre of computer software (or for that matter that “computer software” is still really a thing). Or put another way: It feels like 85% of the Internet is just “social media” in one form or another, which is another way of saying that what was once new and interesting has become ossified and boring. Freddie de Boer asked rhetorically this week: “Does ‘the next Facebook’ sound like a remotely sexy investment to you?” Who wants to be the next Facebook, or the next Instagram? Gross. I think we are all pretty tired of this—the ping-ponging between dull echo chambers and snarling, half-literate post wars, the same bloated conglomerates somehow dominating our public discourse and so much of our commerce even as they seem less relevant than ever. It is hard to overstate how remarkably lithe and limitless the Internet seemed at the turn of the century, and how sharply it has decayed into this cluttered, fossilized husk of itself. That doesn’t mean people aren’t on the Internet, of course; people are constantly on the Internet, constantly on their phones, endlessly scrolling without thought or interest, perpetually unsatisfied but never letting up and always looking down. But people certainly seem to just not use Facebook anymore, insofar as it serves as a useful and prominent example of just how bad the Internet has gotten. People still have their dignity!

So I ask again: Who is still on Facebook? Who is using Facebook in a way that propels its market cap to among the top 10 richest companies on Earth? Who are these people? At last count the site had “3.07 billion monthly active users.” How is this possible? I do not think I know a single one of those three billion people. Is it just the entire populations of Europe, India and China? I suppose part of this hinges on what constitutes a “monthly active user.” I certainly use Marketplace on a regular basis, and Facebook’s SEC definition of “active user” is generous enough that I qualify as one. But even so the amount I use the website cannot, in the aggregate, possibly contribute to the company’s capital structure in any meaningful way. And I just don’t think I know anyone else who is using the site in any sort of appreciable way. Facebook these days feels like a 24-hour Walmart around 2am—there’s a few people around but mostly it just feels overbright and empty in an eerie, depressing sort of way.

Which, you know, is pretty normal. Everything has its time. It’s not like you go to eBaum’s World or Formspring anymore. Some websites—most of them—die. They die because people stop going to them. And for all appearances it feels like people more or less stopped going to Facebook when Barack Obama was still president. So how is this company still printing utter fistfuls of money? How does Mark Zuckerberg still have something to do? Who among us is still posting on that awful site, and why?