“Our community and business continue to grow,” said Mark Zuckerberg in his Q4 2018/FY18 earnings call on January 30, 2019. He’s not wrong. Inexplicably, the company added 1mn new daily active users (DAUs) for the US & Canada region in the last quarter of the year, rising from 185mn to 186mn. That’s 1mn new users in the worst quarter of the worst year in the company’s history.

In fairness, the September-December quarter may not have been the worst in 2018 but it did add to the growing list of scandals confronting the company. More data breaches, more user data being shared with third-parties, and your standard opposition research on George Soros to help provide cover for the Russia interference you knew about on your platform. Totally normal.

But seriously, who are these brand new one million DAU who have had their heads buried in the sand for the last few years and suddenly decided to join Facebook?

It also may not actually be one million new users. Yes, DAUs increased from 185mn to 186mn but because we don’t have any extra digits, that could hide some number finagling. In Q318, the company could have had 185,400,000 DAUs and then added 100,001 new ones in Q418 to reach 185,500,001, which the company generously rounded up to 186mn because obviously they would do this. Even so, that’s still 100,000 people who have been living under a rock. Alternatively, its people who were casual users that checked every few days, now becoming daily users because there is such high quality material produced on there every day.

I deleted my own account on December 31st 2018, and apparently I may have been one of the only ones. It was not a decision I made lightly. I’d been wanting to do it for months, if not years, but had never had the time to pull the trigger. Was this due to my outrage and sense of morality over the scandals and New York Times reporting? No, its just because its a boring platform that really offers nothing of value anymore. I rarely checked it and when I did, none of my ‘friends’ were posting anything I cared about. Even the friends-of-friends-of-friends who I’ve kept as Friends in my feed because they provide such terrible/amazing content don’t even publish anything anymore. The ones who write statuses that you immediately screenshot and send to your group of friends, those ‘Friends’.

Its most valuable function is that of a birthday calendar. So that’s what I did on New Year’s Eve, going through the calendar, writing down my friends’ birthdays with a pen and paper, saved down my photos to look through later, then deleted my account and haven’t looked back.

I expect that most other people who want to do this have put this off for the same reason. Facebook’s numbers have stayed steady throughout the rest of the year, starting 2018 with 185mn and staying at this level for the first three quarters. While #DeleteFacebook and other studies led us to believe that people were heading for the exits, it was clearly a trickle rather than a flood. Facebook still has its ‘hooks’ in people and that makes it difficult for people to leave.

But still, who are the new users? I would love to see some interviews or surveys with these people. Did they just get internet or a smartphone in the past few months and say “I’ve heard so much about Facebook, I’m going to try this new-fangled website out”? I’d also be interested to hear their initial impressions of the service. The ‘Ten Year Challenge’ is a sobering reminder that most of the developed world has been way sharing dumb opinions online for over a decade. Its like aliens arriving from space into a post-apocalyptic world and trying to figure out how things got so bad.

Welcome to hell, folks, hope you have your friend’s birthdays written down somewhere because you’re never leaving.