Has Facebook's moment in the sun come to an end?

I found it noteworthy that in the first few minutes of this morning's perusal of news, I already came across two deep-dive pieces on how Facebook is faltering. The one at New York magazine is entitled "The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire." The one at AP is entitled "As Facebook Faces Fire, Heat Turns Up on No. 2 Sandberg."

So this is pretty undeniably a thing.

The FB trajectory is quite indicative of the way big human undertakings generally go. FB started out as a cool idea - cool enough to quickly knock My Space off its perch of social-media prevalence. It wasn't long before we could see how it was drastically changing some basic aspects of human relationships. Before FB, no one retained anything like the roster of contacts from past periods of life - junior-high girlfriends, past co-workers, remote relatives - that soon became something we took for granted. Then came the political and ideological venom, the stalking, the wielding of blocking and unfriending as weapons in post-America's simmering soft civil war.

As Max Read puts it in the New York piece,

Other tech giants have managed to escape the opprobrium directed at Facebook because they have obviously useful services. Amazon delivers things to your house. Google helps you find things online. Apple sells actual objects. Facebook … helps you get into fights? Delivers your old classmates’ political opinions to your brain?

And don't forget the cute-animal videos. And recipes. And insipid quotes meant to inspire. And foul language. And glee over favorite sports teams' victories.

It raises a discomforting question: How did a venue for unprecedented possibilities for human interaction so quickly devolve into such a waste of time?  Are we not capable of sustained elevation beyond this?