Mark Zuckerberg once suggested wiping all Facebook friends lists to boost usage
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a “potentially crazy idea” in 2022 to get people using Facebook more: deleting everyone’s friends’ lists. The possibility was discussed on Monday via internal emails shown by the FTC as Zuckerberg testified during Meta’s antitrust trial.
Zuckerberg floated the idea of considering “wiping everyone’s graphs” — their friends lists — “and having them start again,” possibly once a year, noted The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, who observed the testimony inside the courtroom. Meta’s CEO said he was concerned that Facebook’s “cultural relevance is decreasing quickly.” Zuckerberg proposed a staggered approach, like starting with an experiment in a smaller country, in case too many people quit Facebook in response to the move. “Even if [Instagram] and [WhatsApp] do well,” he said, “I don’t see a way for our company to succeed in the way we need if FB falters, so we need to get this right.” […]
Meta has taken a different approach to revitalizing the Facebook experience lately, with the recent introduction of a revamped friends tab that doesn’t show algorithmic content to users. In January, Zuckerberg said that a big focus for the company this year would be to “get back to some OG Facebook.”
I can’t speak for anyone else, but “OG Facebook” for me was about finding other people I knew and interacting with them, not the other way round. This sounds like a plan to force people to engage with content by people they don’t know and don’t want to interact with (and forcing them to do so more than once to boot). Look at how well that works on Twitter and Threads. This would KILL Facebook and he knew it, as his “staggered approach” idea indicates. Was Zuck on Edolf’s stash when he came up with this?
