Lately, I have found myself on Facebook, mindlessly scrolling through links to listicles, clicking through bizarre photo albums of cute snail portraits and halfheartedly skimming updates from people whose names I no longer recognize with little to no recollection about how I ended up on the site or why.
Checking Facebook throughout the day is a 10-year-old habit, one that I can’t seem to shake, even though it has less and less relevance to my daily life.
For a while, I thought that it was just my news feed that had become lackluster and tedious. But after consulting a handful of friends, I found that I wasn’t the only one suffering from fatigue and boredom each time I visited the site.
And yet, it hasn’t seemed to stunt the service’s growth. Comscore, an analytics firm, said that in February, 181 million people visited Facebook’s website and applications, up approximately 4.5 percent from last February. The service is still the No. 1 smart phone application and accounts for 23 percent of all of the time people spend in apps, according to the firm.
But Facebook no longer feels like a place to share updates with friends, catalog your life events or play games with them. The service has introduced and eliminated different designs and focal points of activity so many times over the years that, to me, it is no longer clear what the main site should be used for. For me and most of my friends, it is no longer the primary place people share photos or chat with their friends, or comment on their location.
If it is none of those things, then what, exactly, is Facebook? And what will its purpose be in the future?
Mark Zuckerberg, it seems, is well aware of Facebook’s swirling existential crisis and has a plan to deal with it. In a recent interview with The Times, he outlined plans to “build a pipeline of experiences for people to have,” rather than make them expect the core application to meet all of their social networking needs.
That, he said, explains the company’s acquisition of Instagram, the photo-sharing application and WhatsApp, a SMS messaging service. It also explains why the company introduced a new version of the service called Paper, and is spinning off its text and chat features as a standalone application called Messenger.
That tiny move made sense, at least to me. Of all the Facebook apps, I use Facebook Messenger the most to keep in touch with the people in my life, and it has allowed me to delete the main app from my overly crowded iPhone home screen.
But none of these decisions address the larger problem for the core service that Facebook offers, which is that it has become less interesting with each passing day. It might be deeper-rooted than an array of newer, shinier services can fix. It might lie in the way people think about Facebook itself, and that is something that Mr. Zuckerberg may need more than a new arsenal of services to remedy.