HYDERABAD: Facebook was recently in the news when its stock price crashed because for the first time in its history, it had lesser growth than the last quarter. While many investors were shocked because 20 per cent of their money had vanished, I was shocked for a completely different reason.
As someone who joined Facebook in 2009, I feel like I’ve seen this child grow. I remember leaving my cool life on Orkut with its ‘testimonials’ and ‘scraps’, packing up my things and moving to Facebook in 2009 to become a farmer on Farmville. Unlike real farmers, Farmville farmers always had money and rains didn’t affect them, power cuts did.
So naturally, my farm grew and I used all my money to start gambling. Zynga used to be Facebook’s Las Vegas and I lost all my imaginary wealth there before settling down as a middle-class person who just tells the world ‘what’s on their mind?’ and shares random facts and videos. About five years ago, the era of Snapchat and Instagram dawned on us.
The number of people I could see online from my 2,500-strong friends list reduced by 50 per cent every week until a point where the only updates I saw on Facebook were of news portals, meme pages and a distant uncle who only shared stuff that would ‘bring him bad luck for 10 years’ on not sharing.
After Tiktok, an eerie silence took over Facebook, just like the one after Titanic sank and both Rose and Jack passed out in the water. The place became so quiet that when I posted a status update, I could hear an echo bounce back (I know, I just went ‘meta’).
Instagram, Snapchat and Tiktok did to Facebook what Whatsapp did to the SMS feature. Even though I have an Instagram account, I held on to Facebook because Insta is the city and Facebook is my village. I have land there. In fact, when I get tired of the hustle and bustle of social media, I log on to Facebook and meditate. It’s my quiet place.
When Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s numbers had gone down for the first time ever, it came as big news to me. I always assumed that it was just ‘me and three others’ using the platform. I was surprised to know that the numbers had actually been going up. How could their share value be 1,000 times higher than the average share a post gets on Facebook?
This can only mean one thing, either Zuckerburg is lying or most people on my friends list have blocked me. Knowing the kind of stuff I share, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.
(Bhavneet is a stand-up comedian and this may be his new material)