Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what he’s doing

Mark Zuckerberg is not a tech genius. He’s a man whose one lucky hit has provided him with so much money that he’s been able to extend his influence without actually creating anything new that’s had any significant success.

Just look at Meta’s other products:

• Instagram? Bought.
• WhatsApp? Bought.
• Meta Quest? Bought — and arguably not a success. (It’s a VR headset, if you’re wondering.)
• Llama? “Me too” AI product, riding the coattails of innovators like OpenAI.

This is not a great list of tech innovations. Indeed, all he has really done is take core functionality that has existed elsewhere – Livejournal, Friendster, MySpace – and created a version of it that people liked. And then he built a ruthless, amoral data collecting business that relentlessly monetised that data.

That’s it.

Can you faceplant in the Metaverse?

His big new initiatives? Failures. Just a few years ago, the parent company of Facebook renamed itself Meta, and charged headfirst into the Metaverse. How’s that going?

Not well:

Facebook owner Meta Platforms is laying off an unspecified number of employees from its Reality Labs division amid ongoing restructuring efforts, the company said on Thursday. The job cuts affect teams within Oculus Studios, Meta's in-house game development arm for Quest virtual reality headsets. Employees working on titles such as Supernatural, a VR fitness game, are among those impacted.

Other reports put that at over 100 people, and the division is deeply loss-making. But here’s Mark back at the announcement of the name change in 2021:

"Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we're building towards," he told a virtual conference.

Yeah, well done, Mark. So visionary. Much insight. Much meta.

Facebook, the misunderstood success

John Gruber couldn’t help himself when he linked to the news:

I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse thing doesn’t come up once, not even once, even in passing.

Om Malik couldn’t let that stand:

Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the company to rebrand itself as something amazing and fresh.

Why has Facebook become so toxic? Well, for one thing, it has allowed itself to become the favoured tool of everyone from local bullies to national autocrats to spread lies, disinformation, and aggression.

But, as some level, it’s because Zuckerberg has lost all sight of what makes Facebook so compelling: friends.

Defriending Facebook

From Techspot’s reporting of the current FTC case against Facebook in the US:

The Facebook feed, once filled with posts and images from people you know, is now an algorithmic sea of sponsored content, group posts, and other recommendations from various pages and accounts. In Zuckerberg's words, the feed "has turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space."

I just scrolled through my Facebook feed. My first post from a friend, not a group, brand (often ones I’m not following) or advertiser, was the fifth piece of content. The next was the tenth. Yeah, not a space for friends any more.

Mark. Mark. The only thing that keeps me using Facebook personally is connection with my friends. The more you deprioritise that, the less value the platform has for many of us. But it’s very clear that you don’t understand that, based on other information exposed during the court process:

The hearing also revealed that Zuckerberg had a "crazy idea" in 2022 that sounds like it would have been universally hated: wiping everyone's friend connections.

He basically wanted to reset it into a more Instagram/TikTok-like model of following creators. That is, he wanted to turn the dominant social network into yet another social media app.

This is a man who doesn’t understand the core addictive proposition of his one big success.

No dogfooding at Meta

This shouldn’t be a surprise. One of the less reported insights from Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People (see posts passim) is that the vast majority of Meta’s senior staff don’t actually use Facebook. Their posts are written by comms teams — and their friendships are largely conducted in person, and in chat groups, not on Facebook. If they ever started as “normal” users of Facebook, that has long passed.

Mark is, essentially, a dictator within Facebook, thanks to the unique shareholding structure, but he has little to no understanding of how normal human relationships operate, as he’s led a profoundly unusual life since his late teens. The following extract from Careless People is illustrative…

For context, Zuckerberg is discussing with his team a way to make PR hay from his project to create an AI to run his home. He intends to make a video about it, and is thinking about one from another perspective. His team jump to the conclusion that he means his wife, Priscilla.

"I was going to say the Al's perspective, but that could be funny.
Maybe Priscilla would learn that the Al only listens to my voice. Like she's trying to command it in different places around the house and it just ignores her."
I have thoughts on "Priscilla not having her voice heard" in her own home but I know enough about expectations of women at Facebook to keep silent. Mark thinks it's hilarious.

This is not a man who understands the normal dynamics of human interaction.

The Zuckerberg Legacy

Just before that passage, Wynn-Williams says something very interesting:

Mark has become increasingly obsessed by his own legacy in recent years. Things he can be remembered for besides Facebook. This is what's occupying him so much of the time I'm around him, and fills his conversations, not new products he wants to launch or new places he wants to drive Facebook.

The best part of a decade on from that, he has still not achieved that. He once, famously, described Twitter as a “clown car that drove into a gold mine”.

Yet, if you look at the key founders of Twitter, you see a very different picture. Ev Williams had launched and sold Blogger to Google before Twitter, and went on to found Medium, which is still a significant player today (even if it has been somewhat eclipsed by Substack). Jack Dorsey also founded Square, a transactions platform. They’ve had two or more acts.

Zuckerberg? He’s the toxic Facebook guy. And, unless something dramatic changes, he always will be.

Why are you writing about Facebook again, Adam?

I spent most of the 2010s hoping for Facebook to drop off in relevance for journalism. I never liked the platform, and its decline has brought me nothing but joy. It’s clear from Wynn-Williams’ book, again, that many of the better initiatives they implemented around journalism were against Mark’s wishes. This is from the immediate aftermath of Trump’s first election:

Mark's still bothered by the Facebook post Elliot made him write about the election. He doesn't want to move the company closer to the media industry or allow it to assume more media-like functions, such as editing or fact-checking.

It’s clear that Mark’s recent, Trump-pleasing, Oversight Board-distressing announcements are just a reversion to his true feelings.

But…

A couple of guest speakers I had in this academic year mentioned that their titles were starting to see an uptick in traffic from Facebook again. Because this was disclosed in off-the-record circumstances, I kept my gob shut publicly, like a good host.

Facebook’s back, baby. It’s back.

But now Press Gazette has picked it up:

Similarweb data estimating Facebook’s share of total social referral traffic in March 2024 versus 2025 appears to confirm the change in strategy is having a positive effect on many of the biggest news websites. The share of total desktop social referral traffic coming from Facebook increased at 75% of the 68 biggest news websites in the world in March.

I’m not sure if I should praise Charlotte for bringing the story to light, so I can talk about it, or curse her for exposing one of the useful little facts I could bring into conversations with clients…

But the truth is that we should, perhaps, be looking at Facebook again. Warily, sure. We’re never going to have the same level of trust for it that we did before (if any). But nobody can afford to ignore what is still a potentially powerful source of traffic. This time, let’s do it with our eyes open, and with full knowledge of the sort of man that’s actually calling the shots at this company.

And he’s driving a high-spec clown car that fell into a gold mine.