It's pretty successful at decreasing the happiness of people who use it. And pretty successful as a targeted propaganda delivery network. Also pretty successful at pushing people towards briefer, shittier, and less-nuanced discussions of things that matter, though not as successful at that as Twitter. And pretty successful at wedging ads into every possible corner of the portion of the public discussion commons that it has taken over.
All of these things have made Facebook a lot of money but there is definitely an argument to be made that Facebook has decreased the Gross National Happiness[1] of both the US and the world in general.
I'm sure the happiness of people decreased over the last 10 years, but I believe that it's because of the bigger division between rich and poor people.
Personally I'm not a fan of Facebook, as I saw my home city (Budapest) becoming from a nice livable city to a tourist destination / loud party / get drunk fast city between 2008 and 2010 (and it hasn't gone back), and I believe Facebook took part in that (of course later AirBnB helped, but AirBnB was much smaller in that point).
As for other effects, like making people less connected in real life, and more through computers, it has good and bad side effects, I'm torn whether things got better or worse. (Also I don't post too often to Facebook, so I'm not a good person to judge it).
I agree with everything else, but have people shown causation for
>It's pretty successful at decreasing the happiness of people who use it.
this? Because unhappiness and facebook use is obviously going to correlate for reasons that have nothing to do with facebook being bad, and I think Facebook is a valuable enough tool for maintaining relationships that I'm skeptical it would outright decrease happiness (on the individual level. Society as a whole I find much more plausible).
All of these things have made Facebook a lot of money but there is definitely an argument to be made that Facebook has decreased the Gross National Happiness[1] of both the US and the world in general.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness