With the primary week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, paperwork shared by the U.S Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) provided extra perception into Meta’s inner struggles to maintain Fb related. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled totally different visions for Fb’s future to spice up its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was reducing.
Quick-forward to 2025, and Meta continues to be grappling with this problem. Mark Zuckerberg stated through the firm’s This fall earnings name in January that the corporate needs to restore Fb’s cultural relevance this 12 months with a return to “OG Fb.” A part of its answer for this drawback is the current launch of a revamped Mates tab.
In a sequence of messages from April 2022, which had been shared as proof through the trial, Zuckerberg mentioned issues about Fb’s “Mates” construction and format being outdated as each different main platform centered on “Following.”
He thought-about ditching the Mates format and even prompt deleting everybody’s Fb associates and having them begin once more.
A few of the highlights from Mark Zuckerberg’s emails are under.
Considerations round Fb shedding cultural relevance
- “I need to ensure that now we have a novel imaginative and prescient for the FB app that may result in sustainable progress over time. Though the FB app’s engagement is regular in lots of locations, it seems like its cultural relevance is reducing rapidly and I fear that this can be a number one indicator of future well being points. Even when IG and WA do properly, I don’t see a path for our firm to reach the best way we want if FB falters, so we have to get this proper.”
- “My principle is that we have to refresh the graph construction of FB to ensure that it to achieve cultural relevance and a greater long run path.”
- “I feel we have to discover a technique that doesn’t go away one service choosing up the scraps the opposite service leaves behind or having both service artificially or unreasonably constrain itself. Proper now IG is doing properly on cultural relevance and FB isn’t, so I’m extra centered on determining an affordable path for FB long run.”
Worrying that Fb’s “friending” construction is outdated
- “The FB app owns the idea of friending, so if there have been a method to freshen this up and make it a extra related a part of life within the 2020s then this might be path.”
- “Friending feels out of vogue proper now for not less than a couple of causes. First, lots of people’s pal graphs are stale and never crammed with the folks they need to hear from or join with. Second, it feels heavyweight to request somebody new as a pal, which makes it arduous to rectify the primary problem. More often than not once I meet somebody or turn into inquisitive about somebody I simply need to observe them first however not ask something of them. Third, and associated, since FB doesn’t really feel as culturally related, that provides additional weight to including some on FB vs different providers.”
- “It feels to me just like the FB app’s place in cultural relevance is deeply tied to the pal graph construction versus different organizing ideas — for instance, IG/Twitter-style observe graphs, TikTok-style pure algorithmic method, Teams/Reddit-style communities, and so on.”
Proposed options
- “Each different fashionable social community is constructed on following quite than friending, so its appears attainable that the FB app is simply outdated as a result of it by no means adopted this basic innovation. The best way to rectify this may be to completely undertake following. If we wished to do that, I don’t suppose that merely supporting following for public accounts can be enough. I feel we’d have to modify from friending to following on non-public accounts as properly (despite the fact that this may work equally for these accounts) and we’d in all probability need to eliminate the idea of liking pages as properly.”
- “One doubtlessly loopy concept is to contemplate wiping everybody’s graphs and having them begin once more. This clearly carries the chance that if we did that then lots of people simply wouldn’t rebuild their graphs or would turn into much less engaged, so if we wished to contemplate this we’d need to construct out an experiment and take a look at it in a smaller nation to verify it led to a constructive consequence. I feel we’d have to do one thing comparatively excessive like this to maneuver the needle although and I don’t suppose small issues like spring cleansing flows would transfer the needle.”
