A story I like to tell. 

When I was a kid I had a penpal from Scotland. 

One day I got a letter from him that said, right in the middle of a sentence, "sometimes my mother writes these for me."

I think that's what's happened with Facebook. After the election it came out that a lot of the contrarians on Facebook were bots. From then on, when someone I didn't know dropped an idea in the middle of a thread that didn't seem to fit in, I just deleted it. I've developed a nose for these things after all these years of online life. And err on the side of deleting bot-like messages, even if you think there's a chance a real human posted it. Because a human behaving like a bot isn't all that different from a bot.

I stopped using Windows when I realized I could easily switch to a Mac and leave all the malware behind. Kind of the same idea.

Facebook may be in a death spiral, like they talk about for the insurance industry. Facebook needs people to be interesting. We are the product. If we stop using it, well that might be why it feels so empty now. And the ecosystem spins down.

Another idea. How hard would it be for Facebook to simulate a person? Post the things they would post about current events. Make new friends. Even long after they're dead. It could be that Facebook is the context in which The Singularity happens. 

That might be how they overcome the empty feeling that's there now. They can invent new people.