Are you someone who’s tired of Facebook over the years, losing interest? And then your friends lost interest because you lost interest, so on and so on until no one you know is an active Facebook user? If so, you may be part of the “cure” to the “disease” that is Facebook. According to Princeton researchers, that cascading effect of “recovery” is what will cause Facebook to lose 80% of its users by 2017.

While “Facebook is dead” theories have been bandied about the internet more or less since Facebook exploded, this one is different in that it uses disease models to predict the site’s rapid expanse and equally rapid subsequent extinction. The researchers compared the Susceptible, Infected, Recovered (SIR) epidemiological model to search queries for “MySpace,” and they found a funny thing: When plotted on a graph, MySpace’s growth and decline matched up almost perfectly with the SIR model. A graph of Facebook search queries shows a similar pattern of expansion and decline.

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” write the researchers.

Of course, there are caveats galore. The Princeton research team does not specialize in social media dynamics, and their study has yet to be peer reviewed by scholars who do. It’s also important to note that the study deals in the past, meaning that while it may accurately describe the demise of MySpace, that doesn’t mean it can accurately predict a similar future for Facebook.

The study also deals in search queries, which are not the same as active users. In the case of MySpace, search query activity and user values happened to rise and fall together, but that may not be the case with Facebook. In fact, search queries for Facebook peaked and began to drop off well before Facebook reached its peak number of users, and that makes sense: As Facebook grew into the juggernaut we know it as today, Googling the term “Facebook” became a less and less relevant means of connecting with the site over time.

Despite those possibilities, study authors John Cannarella and Joshua D. Spechler still extrapolate that Facebook’s decline will fall more or less in line with the SIR model. Over at The Motley Fool, contributor Alex Planes forecasts that if anything, Facebook will level out once it reaches the realistic upper limit of potential users. After all, half of the world’s non-Chinese population have already joined the site that’s become synonymous with social media. Even in 2014, it’s still impossible to get blood from a turnip.

Planes suggests that MySpace didn’t die out because it behaved like a disease – it died because Facebook came along and murdered it. Until something of equal magnitude rises up to usurp Facebook, Cannarella and Spechler acknowledge that it might not be going anywhere any time soon. They admit it’s possible to extrapolate “a solution in which Facebook continues indefinitely at a constant size… determined mainly by deviation from the post-2012 data.”

Still, it’s an interesting theory, and not altogether inconceivable based on the calculations in the study. Plus, it’s always nice to be able to think of Facebook, which is as reviled by some as it’s loved by others, as a “disease.”