A Service-Planner's View on Why Meta's (Facebook's) Stock Crashed

Meta (Facebook) had a historic 26% stock drop.
There are probably many factors, but I think the biggest one
is that, for the first time since founding, quarterly DAU (daily active users) went down — that's the cause, I suspect.

Honestly, for me personally, the fact that DAU dropped for the first time was more shocking than the 26% stock drop.

There were various diagnoses from analysts about the DAU decline. One of the most common was: of the roughly 4.7 billion people online worldwide, 3.59 billion already use Meta's family of apps, so new-user inflow inevitably slows, which raises fears of low growth or even negative growth..

From a business-planning perspective, securing new-member inflow is crucial to DAU.
And from a service-planning perspective, how often and how deeply existing members use the product also matters for DAU.

So my personal conclusion is that Facebook is about to walk a path it has never walked before.
Acquiring additional users is no longer a big growth lever. The question isn't "how many more users can we get" but "how much more of their time can we capture."
Of course, this is a worry that only the number-one player — or effectively a monopolist — can afford to have.

So things have to change. Because.. I also hold Meta stock ㅜㅜ — and of course no one at Meta will ever read this — but let me jot down a few of my own guesses..

From a service-planning point of view, I think the Meta family's DAU decline comes down to a decline in uncertainty.

Uncertainty, which triggers user curiosity and habitual motivation, is the key keyword of gamification. Psychology calls it 'variable reward.'
An obvious, predictable service is ultimately no different from the repetitive daily life we face in the real world. People use Facebook to escape that repetition.. but Meta's family content has already become too predictable.
Each person's everyday life differs from the next. So just sharing each person's ordinary daily life, thoughts, and info used to feel fresh to other users. But as those individual experiences repeat, and as personalization algorithms — AI? — have crossed a certain accuracy threshold, the content on the online social network has become indistinguishable from the content of the offline network.
For reasons like that, I think I'm seeing a lot of cases where users who used the app every day delete it, stay off it for a while, reinstall one day, use it for a stretch, then delete it again — taking these voluntary pauses.
(I'm already oversharing.. but to overshare more.. it kind of has a life-cycle similar to quitting smoking..)

The biggest cause of the decline in uncertainty is, I suspect, overfitting of personalization and AI performance.

Of course, YouTube has the overfitting issue too. Just, unlike social-network-based Facebook content, YouTube has a different category structure, so the rate at which overfitting is felt differs — but YouTube will soon face the same overfitting issue as Facebook, I predict. Personally I'm already pretty fatigued.

Maybe that's why Zuck is trying, via the metaverse, to grow the size of the pie (the entropy) of the market itself.
That said, since the metaverse-related market is still unfamiliar to the general public, I wonder if it might be worth tackling overfitting issues together with that shift, first.