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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

The mechanism is called Visionary CEO and good luck with that.

Specifically, Mark has allowed Facebooks mission to change from "giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" to "optimize ad revenue from a pre-existing group of users", and is now doing the same to Instagram. Look at the changes made to Facebook in the last five years and tell me, with a straight face, that they were all made with the original mission statement in mind.

A Visionary CEO would chase the mission and expect revenue to follow.

>"giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together"

If that was ever the case. In words of Mark Zuckerberg "dumb fucks".

The evidence for that quotation is weak. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937710#32938981.

Right, from zuck himself?

"They trust me — dumb fucks," says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages, first published by former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider, and now confirmed by Zuckerberg himself in Jose Antonio Vargas's New Yorker piece. Zuckerberg now tells Vargas, "I think I've grown and learned a lot" since those instant messages.

https://www.gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-callin...

Gawker didn't get it quite right. Here's what the New Yorker article [1] actually says:

> When I asked Zuckerberg about the IMs that have already been published online, and that I have also obtained and confirmed, he said that he “absolutely” regretted them.

It doesn't say that Zuckerberg confirmed the particular quotation that you offered.

That said, I take your point. The New Yorker author said that he had confirmed the message containing the quote, and Zuckerberg didn't deny sending the message, and he expressed regret about it.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

This is yet another reason to be apprehensive about Occulus and the "Facebook metaverse". I think it is only a matter of time before the mission for Occulus and the "Facebook metaverse" become similar to Facebook's current mission.

In this case the CEO's stated vision is to dominate the AR/VR market. So in that context it makes sense for Meta to treat legacy properties like Instagram as cash cows and maximize short-term revenue at the expense of long-term growth. That revenue can be used to finance new AR/VR products.

We'll find out in 10 years if Mark Zuckerberg was a visionary genius or an idiot.

As Google is finding out though that user trust is easy to break and can greatly impact your future products’ success.

If Meta continues destroying users’ faith in Instagram the way they have in Facebook, it will gravely hurt any attempt by Meta to build their AR/VR empires.

A good counter example is Apple, a company which actually realized how impactful this can be with their Mac business.

Apple’s Mac business is their second smallest, ahead only of the iPad (which thanks to shared development costs and components with iOS is almost certainly more profitable) and behind accessories, services and iPhone.

And yet, Apple invested significant R&D, and spent years publicly apologizing for the state of the mac, humiliatingly reversing course in some decisions and promising they would do better until they actually did better.

Because Apple recognized that their commitment to the Mac meant their customers could trust them. And the years they were ignoring it (probably in a misguided belief that the relatively small size of the segment meant it didn’t matter) led to a massive loss of trust that was clearly spilling over into their iOS products as well.

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