> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub.
Former meta wanker here.
Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse.
First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced.
Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation.
This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence.
Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool.
This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be.
Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time)
This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%.
Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one"
There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough?
TLDR:
Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas