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
The FB app owns the concept of friending, so if there were a way to freshen this up and make it a more relevant part of life in the 2020s then this could be a good path. That said, I don’t yet have any ideas that I’m highly confident would work to do this.
One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again. This obviously carries the risk that if we did that then a lot of people just wouldn’t rebuild their graphs or would become less engaged, so if we wanted to consider this we’d have to build out an experiment and test it in a smaller country to make sure it led to a positive result. I think we’d need to do something relatively extreme like this to move the needle though and I don’t think small things like spring cleaning flows would move the needle.
The hypothesis here is that beyond day-to-day feed consumption, the part of FB that is about reaffirming connections with people is quite valuable. When you’re ramping up your account for the first time, adding people as friends and building your network is one of the most enjoyable parts of the FB experience. If we could recreate that feeling for lots of people, it could reinvigorate the app and also make friending a part of mainstream popular culture again. We could establish a day each year when everyone’s graph gets wiped and everyone needs to start over together. We could also test different versions where this is staggered if wiping everyone at once led too many people to drop off the network.
This could be a bad idea and I’m not confident yet that it would work. If we spent a bunch of time on the idea we might come up with a version of it we’re more confident in though, so it feels worth discussing. If we want to double down on the notion of friending though, I think we’d need to do something that’s related to the core friending mechanism though and not just iterate on friend sharing a bit more (although I’d do that too).
Option 2: Double down on Groups
We haven’t found a way to make groups the main primitive on the service and it’s not clear there is a way to do this. But perhaps with our new focus on community messaging there is a way to make communities much more central to the app. I don’t have any new concrete ideas for how to do this aside from making community messaging work, bringing messaging back into the FB app, implementing the communities nav panel, and reversing the recent decisions to remove feed distribution subsidies that emphasized groups content and GYSJ. Maybe someone else has a different idea here though.
I’m optimistic about community messaging, but after running at groups in FB for several years I’m not sure how much further we’ll be able to push this. It’s possible groups will just never be as big as friending/following, and that a lot of group behavior is moving to messaging anyway. Because of this, I think some variant of option 1 (friending) may be more likely to work, but in case that doesn’t work and other ideas don’t work then it’s worth keeping this in mind as well.
Option 3: Switch to Following
Every other modern social network is built on following rather than friending, so its seems possible that the FB app is just outdated because it never adopted this fundamental innovation. The way to rectify this would be to fully adopt following. If we wanted to do this, I don’t think that simply supporting following for public accounts would be sufficient -- I think we’d have to switch from friending to following on private accounts as well (even though this would work similarly for those accounts) and we’d probably want to get rid of the concept of liking pages as well.
If we don’t want to double down on friending, I think we may want to seriously consider this direction along with a big push to get more creator/influencer discussions on FB. Adopting a following model would make FB more viable for people who wanted to use social media in a more professional way but still feel awkward about setting up a page for themselves rather than a normal account (which has always felt weird to me as well).
Since IG is already very strong in visual creation and FB has more strength in conversations, I think the natural place to focus on cultural relevance would be around public discussions. The FB app should work on Reels creators as well, but text and discussions seems like a more unique area for the family that we could play for cultural relevance, competing with Twitter.
There are offensive and defensive reasons to consider moving in this direction now. A lot of people are apprehensive about the direction Elon might take Twitter, so this might be a unique moment where many public figures or aspiring creators would be more open to moving. Defensively, there’s also a chance that Elon unlocks product iteration velocity and that Twitter could grow a lot as a competitor to us. Twitter has always underperformed as a business compared to its importance, but there’s no rule saying that will always be the case. It’s possible that a product focused on public discussions could be a lot bigger than Twitter is, and it’s possible that either we or Elon could build this.
If we wanted to take this on as our direction for cultural relevance, we’d need to commit to it for several years. We seem to often spin up these efforts and then deprioritize them a year later, and we obviously won’t succeed if we keep doing that. But there may be a good path forward that is converting friends activity to a more modern follow model (keeping a lot of the same friend social behavior plus taking away a lot of the social friction of keeping your graph clean by adding / removing people) while gaining cultural relevance by making a much bigger play for public figures, aspiring creators and public discussions.
[REDACTED]
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Right now we’re doing some of each of these options, but I don’t think we have a clear plan to make any of them really succeed in the way we’d need to reinvigorate the app. That is, friending and friend sharing are losing steam, groups hasn’t become a primary organizing principle like we’d hoped, our profile+ / following project still seems quite muddled, and we’re iterating well on IFR / Reels but don’t have a clear path to create culture here.
It’s possible the right strategy is to push in multiple of these directions at once (eg [REDACTED] + switching to following), but we should make sure we have a clear vision of where we want to get so we don’t just iterate without ever taking big enough steps to succeed or having the pieces come together into a coherent service designed from first principles.
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 5:06 PM
To: Tom Alison, Chris Cox
Cc: Adam Mosseri
Subject: Re: FB app vision
Separately, I think today's stock price reaction is a good reminder of why making sure all of our apps remain healthy is so important. I'll get more of a read on exact investor feedback later, but at first glance one of the biggest narrative changes after today's results is that the FB app community has gone from shrinking to now growing again.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Previously: Head of Facebook app: “Building the Discovery Engine” (April 27, 2022)
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Mark Zuckerberg: We need to take Snapchat Stories seriously
On Jun 22, 2014, at 11:51 PM, Mark Zuckerberg wrote:
I’ve talked to a few of you about this directly, but I want to make sure you’re all tracking the success of Snapchat Stories.
They announced this week that more than 1 billion stories are viewed daily, and that number has doubled in the past 2-3 months. They have 50-100m daily actives, so that’s between 10-20 stories per person daily and growing quickly. They also said that now more stories are viewed daily than snaps, which means this is quickly becoming their primary product.
This is worth noting for a couple of reasons:
First, it’s a clear existence proof that ephemerality works in large semi-public feed products.
I was skeptical at first of why someone would want to broadcast something so raw to so many people at once, but between playing with Slingshot and now seeing these stats, it’s completely clear that this is a very real mainstream sharing use case.
One key insight that makes this work is that the stories expire after 24 hours rather than after you view them.
It’s quite easy to imagine how this would work in any feed product. I struggled to imagine what a feed product would look like where you viewed a post once and then it disappeared, but it’s very easy to imagine a product where posts expire and are automatically deleted after some period of time.
If I heard a stat Kevin shared the other day correctly, deleting posts after a period of time may already be a normal behavior on Instagram. So offering this as a feature would just make the behavior people want even easier while making it clear that this behavior is welcome and fits the purpose of our products.
Second, the growth of Snapchat Stories means that Snapchat is now more of a competitor for Instagram and News Feed than it ever was for messaging.
Snapchat was always in somewhat market from text messaging. But Snapchat Stories serves the exact same use cases of sharing and consuming feeds of content that News Feed and Instagram deliver.
We need to take this new dynamic seriously -- both as a competitive risk and as a product opportunity to add functionality that many people clearly love and want to use daily.
I suggest that you start thinking immediately about how to add ephemerality as an option into both Instagram and News Feed.
This could be very quick and simple -- as easy as an icon you toggle to have your post auto-delete in 24 hours. Or if you have better and simpler ideas, we can try those instead.
My guess is whatever we do first will be imperfect because we are not used to this behavior yet and people are not used to having this functionality in our products either. But I think it’s important for us to dive in and explore here. We’ll learn more by trying things quickly, and then we’ll perfect it in time.
Overall, helping people share moments however they want is our mission, so we can’t sit around as Snapchat popularizes a new type of sharing. We need to make sure our products are the best way to share contently broadly and ephemerally.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Snapchat (October 28, 2013)
Sheryl Sandberg messages Mark Zuckerberg
November 8, 2012
Sheryl Sandberg
We would love it. I want to learn settlers of catan too so we can play
Mark Zuckerberg
I can definitely teach you Settlers of Catan. It's very easy to learn.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
So if I understand correctly, IG & FB stories were added as a direct response to the Snapchat story feature?
That’s so interesting
Agree!