People are increasingly unhappy with their experience on Facebook and Instagram, a top Wall Street internet analysts warned after surveying thousands of users.
Over the past year, Facebook saw the most precipitous drop-off in user satisfaction, according to a research note from Mark Mahaney of Evercore ISI. Of nearly 2,000 US users polled recently, 24% said they are "extremely unsatisfied" with Facebook. Evercore also found a record low number of users to be very satisfied with the platform, coming in at 27% of those surveyed.
Facebook, operator of the world's largest social network, ranked the worst in satisfaction of all platforms included in the survey, including Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter. The latter was the next worst in satisfaction, but was still 8 percentage points ahead of Facebook.
"Facebook's satisfaction scores have trended downwards over time," Mahaney and colleagues wrote. In more recent years, Facebook's user satisfaction has skewed positive, so "this iteration marks a significant step down," the analysts added.
Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, saw a decrease in user satisfaction, too, although people overall are much happier with that platform than Facebook. While only 8% of users surveyed said they are "extremely or very unsatisfied" with Instagram and 43% said they are very satisfied, Evercore called this a "deterioration" for the platform, as it shows satisfaction at "an all-time low."
Nevertheless, Facebook and Instagram remain the two most widely used social-media platforms, with nearly 3 billion people on Facebook and roughly 1 billion on Instagram worldwide. Evercore found that both platforms look to be maintaining increased usage spurred by pandemic lockdowns last year.
As for the negative experiences people are having, Evercore did find a slight increase in people saying they plan to use both platforms less in coming months. But the brokerage firm noted that such claims never usually match an actual decline in usage.
The bank pointed to possible explanations for the decline in satisfaction with Instagram, including increased advertising on the platform and within its increasingly popular Stories feature. It did not mention note a string of recent news reports about the platform's negative implications for teen mental health and its lax enforcement of standards for high-profile account holders.
The bank didn't explain Facebook's falling user satisfaction. The platform has faced numerous public revelations and media reports about its operations in recent years, such as its central role in spreading toxic political discourse and misinformation.
