With the primary week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, paperwork shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) provided extra perception into Meta’s inner struggles to maintain Facebook related. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled totally different visions for Facebook’s future to spice up its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was lowering.
Fast-forward to 2025, and Meta continues to be grappling with this problem. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned through the firm’s This autumn earnings name in January that the corporate desires to revive Facebook’s cultural relevance this 12 months with a return to “OG Facebook.” Part of its resolution for this drawback is the current launch of a revamped Friends tab.
In a collection of messages from April 2022, which have been shared as proof through the trial, Zuckerberg mentioned issues about Facebook’s “Friends” construction and format being outdated as each different main platform targeted on “Following.”
He thought-about ditching the Friends format and even steered deleting everybody’s Facebook mates and having them begin once more.
Some of the highlights from Mark Zuckerberg’s emails are under.
Concerns round Facebook shedding cultural relevance
- “I need to make sure that now we have a novel imaginative and prescient for the FB app that may result in sustainable development over time. Even although the FB app’s engagement is regular in lots of locations, it looks like its cultural relevance is lowering rapidly and I fear that this can be a number one indicator of future well being points. Even if IG and WA do effectively, I don’t see a path for our firm to achieve the way in which we’d like 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 depart one service selecting up the scraps the opposite service leaves behind or having both service artificially or unreasonably constrain itself. Right now IG is doing effectively on cultural relevance and FB isn’t, so I’m extra targeted on determining an inexpensive path for FB long term.”
Worrying that Facebook’s “friending” construction is outdated
- “The FB app owns the idea of friending, so if there have been a strategy to freshen this up and make it a extra related a part of life within the 2020s then this might be a great path.”
- “Friending feels out of vogue proper now for no less than just a few causes. First, lots of people’s pal graphs are stale and never stuffed 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 exhausting to rectify the primary problem. Most of the time once I meet somebody or change into excited 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 companies.”
- “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, Groups/Reddit-style communities, and so on.”
Proposed options
- “Every different trendy social community is constructed on following slightly than friending, so its appears doable that the FB app is simply outdated as a result of it by no means adopted this basic innovation. The strategy to rectify this is able to be to completely undertake following. If we needed to do that, I don’t suppose that merely supporting following for public accounts can be ample. I feel we’d have to modify from friending to following on personal accounts as effectively (though this is able to work equally for these accounts) and we’d in all probability need to eliminate the idea of liking pages as effectively.”
- “One doubtlessly loopy thought 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 change into much less engaged, so if we needed to contemplate this we’d must construct out an experiment and take a look at it in a smaller nation to verify it led to a optimistic end result. 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.”
