Facebook's "cultural relevance is decreasing quickly"
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Mark Zuckerberg: The Facebook app's "cultural relevance is decreasing quickly"
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Date: Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 10:40 PM
To: Chris Cox, Tom Alison
Subject: FB app vision
We’ve spent a lot of time recently on shifting resources from non-Reels/NF FB features to Reels and now to other apps as well -- all moves that I agree with. But as we’re doing this, I want to make sure we have a unique vision for the FB app that can lead to sustainable growth over time. Even though the FB app’s engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly and I worry that this may be a leading indicator of future health issues. Even if IG and WA do well, I don’t see a path for our company to succeed in the way we need if FB falters, so we need to get this right. It’s the biggest gap in our FOA strategy that I see now.
It feels to me like the FB app’s position in cultural relevance is deeply tied to the friend graph structure as opposed to other organizing principles -- for example, IG/Twitter-style follow graphs, TikTok-style pure algorithmic approach, Groups/Reddit-style communities, etc.
Friending feels out of vogue right now for at least a few reasons. First, a lot of people’s friend graphs are stale and not filled with the people they want to hear from or connect with. Second, it feels heavyweight to request someone new as a friend, which makes it hard to rectify the first issue. Most of the time when I meet someone or become interested in someone I just want to follow them first but not ask anything of them. Third, and related, since FB doesn’t feel as culturally relevant, that adds further weight to adding some on FB vs other services. Do you want to be seen as someone adding friends on FB, or would you rather be seen adding the person on IG? Finally, many of the people I want to follow at this point are people who use social media somewhat professionally and therefore gravitate to IG and Twitter where it’s more natural to build follower bases (eg all the surfers and MMA fighters I follow).
I think this graph architecture of the service is fundamental to its cultural resonance or lack therefore. Our answer for a while was to shift more towards communities -- which still feels lighter weight and more exciting / acceptable to join on FB -- but for a combination of reasons this has not been able to become anywhere near the primary structure on FB, so the service is still primarily organized around friends. More recently, we’re pivoting to more unconnected Reels/IFR, but while this will be good for surfacing more interesting content, it reduces the social sense of feeling connected to the person creating the content as long as that creation and social interaction isn’t happening on FB -- and right now we seem very far from having much Reels creation originate on FB.
My theory is that we need to refresh the graph structure of FB in order for it to regain cultural relevance and a better long term path. There are a few possible ways to do this, but I don’t think we’ve yet committed to a path. I’ll lay out a few ideas here and then we can discuss over email and also get together to discuss live as well.
Possible graph structures:
Option 1: Double down on Friending