some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it’s the country it started in, but it’s not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don’t break down the age demographic by region, but I’d bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it’s similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s… meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they’ll see maybe 8% user growth and that’s pretty optimistic.

so we probably won’t actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s… the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I’m sorry to hear that for them.

i primarily use lemmy these days, but still have to use a few other things.

I still browse reddit for this like episode discussion threads for amine and other tv. lemmy will have maybe 5 responses in the threads for the 3 biggest shows of a season. it’s just not there yet.

I’m also a videographer, in our modern age that means i NEED to be on Instagram, YouTube, and tiktok because those are the platforms everyone wants me to make things for. can’t know how to make things for a platform I don’t use, sadly. especially since “just make something good” doesn’t work on any of them. in fact making something that looks good is often more of a hinderence these days and it kills me.

i hate short form video. i hate every mainstream social media platform. i just want to make pretty videos and not have to deal with tiktok trends. I learned 10 ways to attach a lav mic secure and tidy in school. I must now hold the lav mic in my fingers because that’s what’s trendy and following the trends is the ONE thing that DEFINITELY works.

I hate what has come of my profession. at this point I’m just ready for the ai to take my job so i can blow my head off in peace.

it’s it’s gotta be something very difficult that no one has ever fund before.

that’s basically the approach that all of popular culture had been taking since like 2008. like that was the attitude of the last 20 years. show these bigots that if they at least pretend to play nice we can all get along and be more prosperous for it.

they hated it. it’s the “woke mind virus” to them now. I genuinely don’t believe people like this will ever be ok in a kind and accepting world. I also don’t think that trying to get rid of them will solve this problem… i don’t know if there is a solution to some people being mentally incapable of empathy, but it certainly doesn’t help that it’s so baked into our culture now.

capitalism is highly compatible with a lack of empathy. it’s a system that inherently promotes those with no scruples. the less you feel bad about being a piece of shit for money, the more money you’ll be able to make. it’s a predatory system where those most willing and able to cannibalize everyone and everything around them for personal gain will gain the most. those that gain the most are then also in a position to manipulate both political votes and public opinion. they blatantly bribe our politicians and they own our media platforms. this is especially problematic on social media. if you were a young American on tiktok in the last u.s. election you probably saw numerous vague tiktoks about kamala starting WWIII. no quotes, no context, just “me and the boys after kamala starts wwiii” type shit. as I understand it nearly every major election around the world since then has seen tiktok flooded with “memes” like that supporting the right wing candidate. we’re certainly not going to make any progress on this issue while that’s the world we live in.

maybe a stable enough government with keen enough regulations can at least try to keep these people from completely raiding the hen house. we’ll have to see how things play out with Germany and the afd ban, but I’m not too hopeful on that playing out well in our current situation.

IDK, I’m half convinced that humanity is eternally doomed to repeat the same mistakes. with long periods of everything sucking because too few have or want too great a percentage of what humanity has claimed their own and the occasional period where things are accidentally not that bad.

we are currently leaving one of those brief periods of “not that bad”