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Facebook for Dead

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Facebook would one day become a digital graveyard with dead users’ profiles outnumbering those of living. People die, their Facebook profiles don’t.

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Fusion media, in their week-long series on the Future of death point out that millions of facebook users are already dead but their profiles still belong to this material world, their photos, likes, messages, all saved for posterity. Their pages have become like memorials and tombstone where friends and family can relive past memories.

But are we really to experience such a moment when dead will have a majority in Facebook Clubhouse? And if yes, how far/close is the moment?

To find out the answer, Kristen V. Brown from Fusion, reached out to nearly a dozen of statisticians. And almost all of them said that the calculations are too complicated given innumerable variables involved.  But there was one HachemSadikki, a Ph.D. candidate in statistics at the University of Massachusetts who accepted the challenge and after all the number crunching and calculations found the year 2098 to be the one when Facebook will become the house for dead.

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Though Fusion finds this date to be “fairly accurate”, it admits to the discrepancies involved in the model. Brown writes, “It assumes that everyone who dies will be memorialized, for example. And using the CDC’s U.S. death rate data for users across the world is an extremely rough way to calculate the demise of users globally. For one, Americans’ life spans differ from people in other countries. And two, the CDC categorizes age groups differently than Facebook.”

Another factor though taken into accounts by HachemSadikki but appears flawed is Facebook’s growth patterns that will see downfall sooner or later. There is no way to calculate when this happens.

Few years back, Randall Munroe of the webcomic XKCD also tried forecasting the year when Facebook would transform into a digital grave and come up with two potential numbers- 2060s, assuming Facebook growth plateaus or the 2130s if Facebook keeps growing.

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