Paul
Facebook sucks now. I don't know how else to put it.
Every time I open it, which is becoming increasingly rarer, it's full of AI slop. Fake photos, fake stories, and ragebait built to look like news and get people to engage. Somebody posts a "fact" that's completely made up, it gets shared ten thousand times, and half the comments are people fighting about fake news. There are whole accounts that exist only to post provocative stories, and they don't care if you like them or hate them as long as you comment they're making money from Facebook's creator program. I went into why that slop exists back in June which complained about that too.
Where are my friends? I scroll and scroll and I can't find a single post from anyone I actually know. Did they all leave Facebook too, or is the algorithm just burying them under the provocative junk?
Doing some research, Meta's own numbers show how bad it is. In the FTC's antitrust case against Meta, evidence showed that in January 2025 Facebook users spent just 17% of their time on connected content, while Instagram users spent 7%. Connected content is the stuff from friends and accounts you actually follow and most of the rest is recommended content from elsewhere.
So my friends may not have disappeared from Facebook but when I went to lookup some of my friend's profiles, I see that many of them who used to post frequently haven't posted anything new in years… so they did disappear too. Ironically, a lot of them are posting a lot more on Instagram.
I'm the same way, I barely use Facebook anymore. The only reason I still log in is to post links and some content to the pages for my portfolio sites like Censuseasy or Scratchcheck, since some people still find things there. But even that may be going away which I'll talk about more below.
I used to be a fan
It wasn't always like this for me. I used to be a fan and used Facebook every day for years. I liked it enough that I bought the stock at around $20 a share, not long after the 2012 IPO. For disclosure, I sold it about five years ago at around $300, and I don't own any Facebook stock now. The whole reason I sold was how I'd come to feel about the company, and it came down to two things.
The first was how they used publishers and dumped them. Back when I was running allkpop, the K-pop news site I co-founded and have since sold my stake, Facebook was mutually beneficial. At our peak our page according to the Insights at the time reached close to 100 million people a week, and we spent $0 on advertising to get there. Viral posts pulled in hundreds of thousands to millions of reactions, comments, and shares, and some reached 10 million people on their own. This helped us, while also helping Facebook get a bunch of engagement and people to sign up to participate in said engagement.
Then it went away. Shortly before COVID, it felt like Facebook started suppressing news links, and our page reach dropped by something like 70 percent, with engagement falling right along with it. I can't tell you which change did it. Facebook had warned publishers but I thought to myself that it probably won't matter to us. In a January 2018 post, the head of News Feed said the feed would show "less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses," and that "Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease." They did and that happened. What I took from it was that Facebook didn't care much about the publishers who'd helped fill its feed and helped the company grow.
The second reason was that Facebook stopped looking like an innovator to me and more like a copycat/follower. I'd see a cool new feature on Snapchat or some other app, and before long Facebook or Instagram had its own copy doing the same thing. Instagram Stories was a clone of Snapchat Stories, and Instagram's own CEO at the time, Kevin Systrom, told TechCrunch that Snapchat deserves the credit: "They deserve all the credit." Reels showed up after TikTok took off. That put a light bulb in my head: ah, these guys aren't the ones thinking up the bright ideas, they just figure out how to take them and use them.
I see the same pattern with AI now too. Everyone in tech is racing into AI, so Meta is following along, and it's hurting the actual product. The feed is full of AI-generated junk, and even the new subscription is sold partly on AI. Meta describes Meta One as offering "more specialized capabilities and expanded AI usage that go beyond what a free experience built for billions can offer." Meanwhile the free experience built for billions can't show me things I actually want to see.
And now they want $50 a month for that
This week I went to post a link on one of my pages and got a popup instead. Here's what it said:
"You used your 2 posts with links this month. With Meta One, keep sharing links in your posts and comments, plus other subscriber benefits."
I just get two posts with links a month for a website that has thousands of pages and several new blog posts daily.
Meta One is the new subscription Meta announced on September 15. The creator and business plans are Essential starting at $14.99 a month, Advanced at $49.99, Expert at $149, and Max at $499. According to AfterDawn's breakdown, the cheapest plan doesn't add any extra links for you at all. Advanced allows "eight posts or comments with a link each month," Expert raises that to 20, and unlimited links require the $499 Max plan. The free allowance resets on the first of each month, unused links do not carry over, and the limit applies to pages rather than personal profiles.
That means if I want to post more than two links a month from a page, the next step is roughly $50 a month for eight links. That's about $6 per link just to send people to my own site, on a feed where organic reach is already limited and recommended content takes up most of the space.
And look at what's exempt. The popup itself says it: "Links to supported affiliates, Creator Storefront, and Meta technologies remain unlimited." Link to Instagram or Threads all you want. Link to your own website and you're capped. Meta wants you to stay inside Meta and that line of thinking is when I saw Facebook sucking and that line of thought hasn't changed.
Enshittification 101
This is enshittification 101, Facebook is about as clean an example as you'll find. First the platform is good to users, so everyone joins. Then it squeezes users to be good to businesses, so pages and advertisers pile in. Then it squeezes the businesses, and keeps everything for itself.
Facebook has done the trifecta. It got us in by showing us our friends. It swapped our friends out for whatever keeps us scrolling, including a flood of AI garbage it pays people to make. And now it charges the pages that stuck around for the right to link anywhere outside Facebook.
I've written about Google doing its own version of this, and about why the internet feels so boring now. Facebook needs a leadership change and some actual creative people running things otherwise it's going to be one of those stories of a company that seemed too big to fail, failing.
Sources
Meta Newsroom: Introducing Meta One - The September 15, 2026 announcement of Meta One, with creator and business plans Essential from $14.99, Advanced from $49.99, Expert from $149, and Max from $499 a month, described as offering more specialized capabilities and expanded AI usage beyond the free experience.
AfterDawn: Now sharing links to Facebook costs money - Petteri Pyyny's September 22, 2026 report on the two-link monthly limit for Facebook pages, the link allowance for each Meta One plan, the monthly reset with no rollover, the exemption for personal profiles, and unlimited links to Meta-owned properties.
Meta Newsroom: News Feed FYI, Bringing People Closer Together - Adam Mosseri's January 11, 2018 announcement that News Feed would show less public content from publishers and businesses and that Pages may see reach, video watch time, and referral traffic decrease.
TechCrunch: Instagram CEO on Stories, Snapchat deserves all the credit - Kevin Systrom's August 2, 2016 acknowledgment that Snapchat deserves the credit for the Stories format.
Reason: Federal Trade Commission fails to convince judge that Meta monopolizes social media - Max Gulker's November 21, 2025 analysis citing the finding that in January 2025 Facebook users spent 17 percent of their time viewing connected content, and Instagram users 7 percent.
