Big Technology Podcast - Inside Facebook's Plan To Fend Off TikTok — With Tom Alison

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

Tom Alison is the head of the Facebook app at Meta. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion about the company's plan to compete with TikTok and appeal to younger users. Join us for a conversation about the Facebook product, one that veers into questions of its identity as a service that helps you keep in touch with friends and family while introducing you to content relevant to your interests. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Meta's plans to whether the bear and market and focus on its core while still experimenting.

LinkedIn Presents. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We are joined today by Tom Allison. He is the head of Facebook. You might think Mark Zuckerberg is the head of Facebook. Nope. Tom Allison is the head of Facebook, and we have so much to talk about because the Facebook app, which is our subject for today, is really in an interesting moment.

And, you know, there'll be no source, no lack of interesting information. Talk about it. So Tom, welcome to the show. Alex, thank you for the exalted introduction. I'm super happy to be here. Looking forward to spending some time today. Of course. You know, it's interesting that you're the head of Facebook, head of the Facebook app. It's a pretty storied position, I would say. what does it feel like to be running basically, you know, the thing that, you know, effectively was the entire company up until, you know, well, I guess you guys did the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, but, you know, Facebook. It was Facebook. So what does it feel like to be the head of that thing? Yeah. I mean, it's, well, first of all, it's a privilege. And it's also a little bit surreal. You know, I started at Facebook 12 years ago. I was an engineer.

And I've had an opportunity to work on a lot of different products and areas within the company. And so the fact that I now get to really work on kind of putting it all together, putting all these product lines together, of which many I worked on over the years, is truly an honor. We're going to talk a lot about Facebook's battle with TikTok. I think that'll be the main theme of this conversation. But I want to start with like a little bit of a weird question. So yesterday, Elon Musk agrees to buy Twitter. Is that something that you pay attention to inside?

Facebook, like, what's your reaction? I mean, the fact that you're now going to, you know, in the social networking world, social media world, be head-to-head with someone like Elon. I pay attention to it, similar to how I pay attention to any trends kind of going on in the tech industry. So, you know, Twitter is one of many competitors we look at in the space. I would say, you know, I wouldn't say that we're kind of paying too close attention to anything kind of Elon specific other than I think like anybody else in the tech industry, just kind of watching how that unfolds. and how unpredictable it's been, has been interesting to me as an individual. But no, we don't really treat Twitter any differently than we do kind of the broad ecosystem

of kind of players in the space. So, you know, I tend to take a broad view of what's going on, what the trends are, and not focus as quite as much on kind of individual companies. Okay. Are you surprised that he's going to end up doing it? I've been surprised multiple times throughout this journey. Me too. I'm almost like no longer surprised that I'm surprised, you know?

I don't know. It's getting quite meta. Yeah, even the fact that he's now agreeing, I'm like, okay, I've got to be careful. You know, people asking me, all right, is this going to be the thing for real? I'm like, listen, even if it's a 90%, 98% chance that this is going to happen, that 2% speaks pretty loudly. Okay, so why don't we get into the meat of this conversation? Right now, Facebook is being challenged pretty dramatically by TikTok. People spend more time on TikTok than they ever have per day on Facebook.

there's real challenges with youth users on Facebook. So why don't we start here? How big is the magnitude of the challenge from TikTok? And what is your plan to fend them off? Yeah, it's a great question. So the way I describe what's going on is there's two big changes happening. I think TikTok is a part of it, but I don't view them as core to the story,

is when you kind of zoom out and look at two big trends that are going on. One is Gen Z, young adults, younger audiences, their social media use and the types of products that they want to use to connect with friends, family communities is changing. They're just, they're gravitating towards different modes of sharing and expressing themselves. And I think anybody working in this space needs to contend and respond to that. And that's a big part of what's informing the direction that we're going. looking at young adults and usage for a long time. That was one of the projects I was working on before I took on kind of leadership of the Facebook app. So that's something that we're looking at

very closely. The other big trend is the power of AI and all of the innovation that's happening in the AI space right now. So I mean, we're getting some very advanced, sophisticated AI that's actually allowing us to personalize the Facebook experience across many, many different content types in ways that we haven't been able to do before. So I'd say really the confluence of those two things is informing our direction for the Facebook app. And if I had to really boil down what we're trying to do on Facebook, we always try to connect you with the people that you know and you care about. Friends and family is really our core. That's the thing that we are known for, and that's the thing that we will continue to invest in. We also help connect you

with the people that you might want to know. So, for example, over the last several years, we've had many people exploring and joining groups and actually getting to know people that maybe they don't know in real life, but that they want to know. And then I think the big, interesting kind of frontier that we're investing in now is also connecting people that you should know. So, you know, as I kind of, you know, I'm into cooking and I'm in some cooking groups. I chat with my friends and share with my cooking friends on Facebook and in messaging. But like, who are the folks in the cooking world right now that I should know? And I'm getting a lot of great recommendations now around creators and, you know, other

folks doing cooking stuff that's bringing me closer to, frankly, the cooking content and communities that I care about. So I view what we're doing as really kind of this. extension and expansion of our frankly timeless charter of like really trying to bring people together. Right. And so I'll use, I think I'm going to end up using TikTok's name a lot more in this conversation than you are, which is totally fair. No, I'm game. I can say, I can say TikTok. Here, try it out, try it out. So, so that being said, let's let's kind of focus on first, what you mentioned, the first part, which is youth, and then we can focus on the AI recommendations,

which is TikTok. So let me read you some stats from some Facebook internal documents. And I want to kind of get your reaction to them and, you know, hear your perspective on how you can address them. So this is from one where it talks about youth users. And this one point that Facebook makes internal research that they fear broadcasting. So what do you think about that? That they fear broadcasting? They fear broadcasting.

Well, I think. You know, we do a lot of research on youth, and I think the answer there is nuanced. What we find with young adults, and when we talk about, when we talk about Facebook, a lot of our focus really is on young adults. And so that's ages 18 to 29. And we're looking very closely kind of on their attitudes and their use of Facebook. So actually pretty universally, people still appreciate and value Facebook as the place to connect with pretty much anybody that you care about. So young adults are still on. Facebook. They can connect with their friends. They can connect with their relatives. And I would say that

they still use broadcast sharing to share a lot of life moments. But I will say that we see a preference for, I would say, less permanent forms of broadcast sharing, which is why we've seen such a big uptake on stories, which we started kind of investing in several years ago. And so we tend to see young adults gravitate more towards story sharing, which is still broadcast, but more ephemeral. And we see them actually overindex on sharing via messaging. So compared to an average 30 plus person on Facebook, young adults are much more likely to be kind of using messaging or sharing over messaging. And so I don't think it's like a, hey, you know, this behavior has completely changed. But I think where my generation and a lot of the folks that maybe kind of

were introduced to social media by Facebook, we're much more kind of a customer. We're much more kind of a custom to broadcast sharing, whereas I think kind of young adults are saying, no, we, we prefer more of the ephemeral sharing. We prefer connecting over messaging. And that's where a lot of our product strategy and a lot of our investments are going is to make that experience more kind of cohesive and integrated on Facebook. You know, and Facebook has had, you know, messaging, of course, this pivot to privacy that's been going on for years has been all about taking some of the sharing going on broadcast in the feed and moving it to messaging. And also stories has been around for a while.

And even still, like looking at the brand perception of Facebook, this is from your internal documents about how young adults experience Facebook. So they view it as large, older, and outdated network. They say it's irrelevant and there's negative content. There's a lack of differentiated value. And they have a wide range of negative associations with Facebook, including privacy concerns. So actually, I think maybe the first three are more relevant for this. conversation. So the fact that those products have been around, yet Facebook still continues to experience this gap with young adults, where is it not connected? There's a few

kind of changes that we're making, I think, in response and maybe kind of revisiting some things and looking at them differently than we have in the past. I guess first of all, this theme that comes up around the relevance of content or being irrelevant or Facebook being cluttered. That's really top of mind for myself and the folks inside the Facebook organization right now. One of the biggest areas that we're investing in is content relevance, is really doubling down on kind of AI so that we get people the best content, whether they're connected to it or whether they're not connected to it. And I'm sure we can talk a bunch about, you know, recommendations and how we think about connected versus unconnected content. But I think we have room to do a much better job

at delivering a relevant, personalized experience and bringing you content outside of your social graph via recommendations that is out there on Facebook but might not have been getting delivered to you before. So I do think it's true that if you're a young adult on Facebook and you are just limited to the content being produced by your social graph, you're missing out on some content that's really important to you because you want to know what's going on kind of in culture and in community and you're exploring your interests. And I think historically, because we have not, you know, we've always been investing in kind of recommendations, but not as much in the kind of core of the home experience. We haven't been able to get people some of that content that I think

was highly, highly relevant to them, but really not being kind of delivered because, A, we didn't have the advanced AI to personalize it very well. And B, we were very much working in a paradigm of like, hey, feed is mostly for connected content, whereas I think now we're kind of shifting gears and saying, no, feed and the home screen of Facebook can be a great blend of both connected content and recommended content. So that was a big kind of paradigm shift internally. But to solve the problem of relevance and bringing people relevant things that they care about. I think we really had to both open the window of what we were looking at and improve the delivery of it through these investments in AI. Right. And the connected content, just for

definitions, that's from your friends and family and recommended content and groups, I guess. That's right. So people on Facebook typically will have, you know, hundreds of connections with friends. They'll be, you know, they'll have joined many groups as well. And so your whole content experience can be defined by who you've chosen to connect with or what pages you've liked or what groups you've joined. But in reality, there's billions of pieces of content being produced on Facebook that are public by super interesting people in public groups and communities as well. And so really unlocking that entire universe of the kind of creativity and community happening on Facebook and being able to deliver that to somebody in their feed at the right time,

that's a big bet that I think we are putting way more energy into than we have in the past. And I think it's going to make the experience better, very much so for young adults, but also I think it's going to open up a lot of kind of opportunities more broadly for everybody that uses Facebook. You're going to say one more thing before I know what to do. Well, you talked about this kind of notion of, I don't know, I guess the other, like maybe around trust and and things like that. I do think the other thing that we've learned, I think this is particularly true of young adults, but this is also more broadly true, is that people want to have a sense of agency. They want to have a sense of like, hey, this experience is about me, not about what Facebook

might want, but about what Tom wants or what Alex wants. And so actually, you know, tomorrow we're going to be announcing, you know, a suite of new controls that we're investing in and we're testing in. And so we've invested a lot in basically ways to have people be able to give feedback on the quality of the content that they see, whether it's connected content and feed or recommended content. So now we want to actually solicit people to tell us, do you want to see more of this? Do you want to see less of this? Do you want to see more content from your friends on Facebook? Or do you want to see more content from groups on Facebook? Because it's really kind of a partnership between us and the people that use Facebook in order to kind of build out the

personalization required to make this a good experience. So giving people more controls and more ability to give us feedback on the types of content they're getting is a huge part of the strategy to make Facebook more irrelevant. And the more young adults give us feedback on what content is resonating with them and what content isn't, the more we're able to do a good job of actually personalizing the experience and showing them more relevant things. Okay. And you think that's going to help improve the trust gap by getting people to be able to share what's resonating them and what's not? Or is it just the relevance issue? Yeah, I think there's two, there's a few elements when it comes down to this. Some people, in fact, when we kind of bring them into, you know, a research study or like I talked to a bunch of young adults and about how they use Facebook on a pretty regular basis, sometimes they're concerns. actually vector more towards, hey, I'm seeing this content in feed, but it doesn't seem

relevant to me. Or I'm seeing this content, you know, in a notification, but it doesn't seem relevant to me. And in a sense, they're losing trust that Facebook was built for them because they're not seeing content that resonates with them. So a lot of these kind of like, I trust that Facebook is actually going to be valuable to me comes from relevance. Now, there's a whole other set of work around, hey, do I feel safe on Facebook? Do I feel like if I add, you know, like comment on something, am I going to get, you know, harassed or is that going to be a negative experience? That is another thing that we need to continue to solve and continue to invest in. Right. So I want to talk, yeah, yeah. That I think, I think the privacy, the, the, um, the trust and

safety stuff has talked about to death, but let's, let's kind of jump in about about, about, not that it's not important, but let's just jump in and talk a little bit about this, you know, idea of, you know, have people recommending stuff or, or tuning their recommendations. Yeah. Before, before we dive in, you know, I think that, that you said, you said, people feel like Facebook wasn't built for them. And that's interesting because it's kind of, Facebook has evolved over the past 20 years into, you know, into a completely different experience than it started with in the beginning,

right? It was, you know, friends and family. Now, you're growing recommended content in there. And it's less about, like, connecting with the people that you know on the internet and more about, like, what Facebook recommends. Now, like, the question is, you know, it was the initial way that we would get content online through our friends, an accident of history, meaning that, like, we had this moment where we built all these, you know, interesting social connections.

Facebook was the place we did that. We thought, okay, it could be a fun place to also share links and photos and videos. But it seems like the Internet has moved beyond that to this stage of recommendations via AI. And so I wonder how much risk there is for Facebook to just be sitting in the middle and sort of not, you know, have an identity at all because it's trying to get a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. How much does that concern? Yeah, I think about this a lot. And maybe I'll kind of answer this in two parts. I do think when Facebook started, the concept of socializing or having the Internet or an app as a social mediator was relatively new.

A lot of people didn't have an online presence or a real identity for their online presence. And so I think like most things, when they kind of are Internet enabled, we took a lot of what was existing in the real world. And we figured out what's the best way to port it to the Internet right now, right? So I have my identity, I have my name, I have my picture, I can share content with friends. That was like a very clear like, hey, this is a way I can take those real world physical connections and stay up to date with them. What I've seen or what we're seeing is that that is still very important. Like I said, that is very much like what Facebook is about and something that we're always going to want to preserve. the way that this is going to happen is going to change. I think, you know, some people might be

not posting their photos as much to feed, but they'll post it to a story or they'll see a post by a friend and maybe instead of commenting on it, they'll start a messaging interaction with them. I do still think there is a huge need for ways to connect with the people that are your friends and that you care about through social media. And Facebook is always going to be kind of working on building solutions for that. But I think the other thing we've seen, and this was especially true during the pandemic, I think people are realizing that you can have relationships

or develop relationships with people you don't know through the internet because of a combination of things. One is through higher fidelity social media experiences. You know, I'm sure you have this experience through, you know, podcasting where you listen to folks on a podcast. and you really feel like, oh, I'm starting to get to know these people. I can relate to them.

I can actually feel like they're speaking to me in a way. I think we saw that with young adults during the pandemic and creators where you have this highly visual and expressive short form video format and this very personality kind of driven, maybe somewhat more vulnerable way of creator sharing. And people felt like, wow, that person is really speaking to me. I still feel like that is relatively new, but it makes sense that you would still have a lot of social connections from the physical world that provide value for you on Facebook and other social media sites. And then you're going to increasingly develop kind of digital first relationships with people. We see that with online communities. We see that with creators. And so, you know,

the second part of my answer beyond, hey, I think it's natural to start developing more kind of online-first relationships as technology evolves. This is why also we're investing so much in the Metaverse, because that's just the continuation of this trend. But stepping back from that, I think if you look at TikTok, a lot of people kind of zoom in and say, oh, yeah, this is short-form video and this is recommendations. But I actually think you need to kind of zoom out and realize that the bigger kind of game or the bigger picture going on here is about social discovery. And so if I look at what TikTok is investing in, it's not just short form video. In fact, they're asking me to connect with my Facebook friends.

They're telling me TikTok is going to be a better place with friends. They're asking me to share stories. They're asking me to like, they're putting PYMK people you may know in my feed and asking me to follow them. And I don't think TikTok or bite dance is dumb. I think they're doing this because they realize that the most interesting. kind of discovery experiences are going to be a combination of algorithm recommendations and socially mediated discovery. And I think where we're really vectoring on Facebook is how do we use those kind of recommendations or content from creator as a jumping off point so that you can

then go discuss and share it with friends. And you can go into the groups that you're a part of and share content there. And it's actually like this important flywheel that helps you kind of discover more about what you're interested in, but then be connected with the communities that you care about, whether it's your friends or groups. Tom, what is vectoring? Can we use a different word? Vectoring. Did I use the word vectoring?

Twice. What does that mean? Well, it's, what I mean by this is that you're seeing a lot of companies try to get at this core idea from different angles. Yeah. And so I think really where they're going is how do we build a great social discovery system, one that can bring you closer to the things that are interesting to you, and through that one that can also bring you closer to the people that you care about.

Now, this is actually why I'm quite optimistic about Facebook, because we've been doing this for years. We've integrated different formats. You know, you have, you've built. the, you know, a version of TikTok on your site, I mean, I think that this, this idea of connecting with people, you know, through these videos is nice in theory, but you have the data in front of you. What percentage of people are actually creating these things versus consuming, consuming that? Because, you know, from my understanding, it's like, I would imagine it's maybe 5% people

are creating and 95% are consuming. So, well, in theory, it's like, yeah, let's create, let's follow our friends. We know, you know, if friend content was enough, then the newsfeed would be vibrant. It's not. So what's going on? So the kind of public content creation, whether it's reels, video in general, can be more head-heavy in the sense that, yes, a smaller number of people are creating. Now, what we do find is it's more participatory. So we find that this is a video format, at least short form video, as opposed to some of the longer form video that we've invested in, that tends to be more participating in the participatory. So the barrier entry to creating is lower. People want to try a new trends. There's ways to kind of have this feeling of

social participation. You know, we've seen things like the ad yours stickers or ways to make it interactive. I agree that right now it's not as participatory as friend sharing. The participation rate and friend sharing is higher than, you know, creating a reel. But the thing that's quite interesting is there is a very, very clear and strong kind of resharing and conversations will aspect to this. Like there's a ton of reels that are reshared into Instagram direct that are the launching point for tons of conversations with friends. We're seeing some of the same traction on Facebook. And I do think that part of what we're really trying to, to do is spark a conversation. And whether it's like, hey, is a post where somebody shares

more valuable than a pretty in-depth discussion with a friend on a messaging thread, I'm not so sure that that kind of calculation kind of makes sense. I think people want to connect in a variety of ways. I was going to ask you about passive consumption. So I feel like you're setting me up for this one. But Facebook has made a lot of comments about, you know, passive consumption and talking about how it's bad for mental health is from a Facebook blog post. In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information, reading but not interacting with people, they're feeling worse afterward. There's Mark Zuckerberg.

Video done well can bring people together, but too often a day, watching a video is just a passive experience. So it doesn't this, it does seem like you had this big push toward meaningful social interactions, which was trying to get people to talk to each other. Something about that, you know, it doesn't seem like something about that work because you're, you know, now going through this big pivot again. And isn't the risk then that you end up creating so much more passive interaction?

Because I'll say, like, you know, people who I'm constantly getting reels, you know, in my inbox, no doubt about that. But is, you know, the experience of somebody on this product largely, you know, talking to people about it or passively consuming my bet would be passive consumption. What I'm seeing is a little bit different than where we were in 2016 and 2017. In 2016, the video ecosystem and the passive consumption was mostly longer-form video. And in fact, what you saw was, frankly, like just financial incentives to make videos longer and longer and longer. Because the long-form video producers are essentially kind of monetizing via in-stream ads.

And so, you know, you typically get three-minute-plus, 10-minute-plus videos. And as the result, what we've seen is that longer-form videos, while I think they still have an important place in the ecosystem, they tend to get, like, less likes, less comments, less shares, they're less participatory. As you make those videos shorter, we actually see the interaction rates increase, we see more commenting, we see more resharing. And also I just think the kind of personality-driven creators' videos speak to people in a different way than I've seen in the past. I'll tell you the one thing that we always kind of struggled with with MSI in terms of measuring it and understanding we were fulfilling its kind of core value proposition, was that we always knew that there was content that you might not explicitly interact with on Facebook, but you went off and you like talked to your partner about.

it, you know, that evening or you mentioned it to your friends over dinner or you saw an event on Facebook and you showed up there, you know, three weeks later. And so there were very much like limits to like what we could kind of understand about how meaningful something was or how meaningful of a social interaction that it was creating. So of course we looked at things like likes and comments and shares as a proxy for it. But we always looked at things like are there surveys? Are there other things that we can do to get at this? That's actually why I'm excited about the work that we're doing on see more or see less, because it decouples your valuing of the content from whether you liked it or reacted to it. It allows you to tell us, like, I want to see

more or I want to see less of this. So oftentimes I have content that I see on Facebook that I'll go and I'll like share with my wife in a conversation. And for whatever reason, I might not like it or I might not share it, but I'll tell Facebook I want to see more of it. And 100% that content is creating a meaningful social interaction for me, even if it's not explicitly captured by our system. So that's where that user feedback comes in. And I think that's been a big kind of part of our journey as well. How do we get more of that? It's pretty counterintuitive because all of the conventional wisdom today is just let the AI, you know, take as many signals as it can and optimize towards what people want.

That's obviously what TikTok is doing today. So what in the testing has showed you that something like this is going to be better? What have you learned from your testing? What do you mean by something like this? Well, letting users help gauge their feed what they're going to see in their feed by giving Facebook signals,

which are coming out today about, you know, what they want to see. Well, we're early on in it, but we typically see, you know, we look at a lot of ways to kind of, measure whether these systems and the personalization that we apply is successful. So, you know, we look at certain things like, are people coming to Facebook more? Are they interacting more?

Are they telling us via survey mechanisms that they find the content more relevant or that it's worth their time? And so we have a lot of ways to kind of triangulate. Are we delivering the experience that people want? I would say that early on in some of our testing of this, We're seeing that it is helping to deliver people more relevant content, and it's actually helping them to reduce, you know, content that they think is not really worth their time, whether it's lower quality, whether it's borderline content. We see that the C-less signals correspond a lot to other kind of aspects of content quality that we've tried to get at in other ways. So, you know, I think it's still pretty early, but we're definitely seeing that this kind of feedback loop with people gives us a different dimension of the problem than we get through some of the other ways that we try to understand if content is relevant to you.

Tom Allison is with us. He is the head of Facebook. We're talking to him about Facebook's recent innovations, trying to allow you to tune your feet a little bit more. On the other side of this break, we'll talk a little bit more about its battle. with TikTok, we'll talk about the balance you have to make between trying to grow and taking shortcuts to make people spend more time with your app and then maybe a little bit about the economy with Tom's willing to play ball on that front. So stick with us. We'll be back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and

tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast, the Tom Allison. He is the head of Facebook, no longer Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Allison, is running with it. want to say. So let's talk Tom a little bit about sort of your theory in the first half. Let's talk about what it looks like in practice to users. And here in the start to start the

second. I understand everything you're saying and it all sounds good. But I think to most users, it just looks like, hey, Facebook is trying to have its old feed and then also put TikTok on top of it and it's confusing. So is there something that leads you to believe that that's going to be a normal experience for people, you know, over time? Or do you think that there is a risk of, you know, the identity again and the experience of Facebook getting muddy over time? I would say that, like, we haven't completely figured out the right way to integrate short form video. It's still a big kind of journey for us. And we've been evolving how we kind of show reels and stories at the top of fiend. We're actually doing quite a lot more work on making sure that

the in-feed experience is quite good as well. And it's kind of hard for us to tell because we're kind of early in this journey what the right kind of way that people are going to want to interact with this is. Are they going to want to jump right into short form video and right into reels and spend more of their time there? Or are they going to want to see this as part of a blended feed experience that also includes, you know, the best content from their friends, their groups content, other recommendations? I would say like kind of what you're seeing right now is us in that kind of learning period where we're kind of working through what's the best way to integrate this format and make it feel like very much part of Facebook.

So what is what is Facebook supposed to be for people? I mean you have this amazing line and this memo that you sent out saying that a lot of times people just go to go to Facebook not quite sure. Oh, here we go. While people frequently open our app to connect with friends, family, and communities. They also often open our app without any explicit or without an explicit intention. So what is Facebook supposed to be for people? You know, a directory, entertainment. I mean, having that North Star, I think, is just sort of crucial, right? Facebook is ultimately about connection. And it's about connection with other people. I think that's why the friends and family piece has resonated for so long, because people do open the app to see

what's going on with their friends and family. But I think what we've recognized for a long time at Facebook is there's also this social curiosity that motivates people to open the app. We did a lot of research a few years ago. And we have this great research team. And they interviewed people all around the world. And they said, why do you use Facebook? And really trying to distill it down to its essence. And what that research came back with was that people use Facebook. The term that we ended up kind of aligning around to describe this was socially powered possibility. Like, sometimes people know what they want and they use Facebook to be very explicit about like, I want to connect with my friends. I'm going to open it to list something on Marketplace. I'm going

to go check in with a group that I really care about. But there's this broader thing of like, people feel like, gosh, I'm going to open the app. I know that there's millions or billions of people on Facebook. I know that there's a lot of different ways that I can explore my life and what I care about. And I want to see what happens. I want to see what Facebook and this huge set of people have for me. And what we find is that there's certain people that are really able to activate this sense of possibility. There's people that create a community. And it grows from 200 people to 200,000 people in a year and they're like, oh my God, I never knew that this was possible or they become a seller on marketplace or they find, you know, a relative that they had

never, like we see this activation of this social power, socially powered possibility in very different ways. But that's the essence of it of really connecting with other people and of really understanding what kind of the possibilities in your life through the power of other people. A lot of it through keeping in touch with your friends and family. But I think for the longest time, we've shown that Facebook can expand beyond that, whether it's groups, whether it's pages, whether it's businesses that you can follow. So that's the essence of what we want and think people use Facebook for. Although there has been some regret for moving too much into public content,

which eventually led to this prioritization of friends and family. Yeah, well, I mean, what happened too in that phase is I do think that, that we, when you move that far into public content, especially that 2016 video content, again, the social dynamics were not there that are there in social, in short form social video today. The creator kind of personality driven, the connection. You don't think the personality driven media was there in 2016? I think it was there, but not nearly as accessible as it is today, and not nearly as widespread. And I think if you think about it, like, how many people could pick up the phone and, like, try to shoot a five-minute-long video that told an interesting story versus what people can do today where they have to shoot a 30-second video of doing a dance move or sharing a recipe?

Like, it's a much, much more accessible and participatory form of video because the barrier to creating good content is much lower, both because of the creative tools, as well as the, like, it's a lot easier to film a 30-second video. and it is a five-minute one. Yeah, well, we were, you know, Vine had already lived and died, I think, before 2016. Yeah, that's true. It wasn't the first person. But I think you're right, there wasn't widespread ability to do this stuff. And maybe there is some form of creative revolution. Though I would love to hear a percentage in terms of creators versus consumers on the Reels product.

Are you able to give that? Well, it's pretty interesting because inside of meta, we look at kind of different creator segments. So, you know, we have folks that are aspiring creators, kind of low following, but they are posting publicly, and they clearly have an intent to be a creator one day. And then obviously we have kind of superstar creators as well. So the spectrum is like pretty broad. Right, but you won't give a percentage of people who are creating versus consuming the loan on risk. No, I won't. But I will tell you that definitely people that have intent.

to be creators, whether they're kind of early stage or whether they're established, they do participate and create more reels than I would say the average person who's not trying to post publicly. But what I will say is that we actually see kind of these effects that creators and formats that invite participation do create a stronger halo of kind of participation. So, So a lot of it is both the, what is the content about, how much does it invite you in, how good of a job do we do providing creative tools that allow you to say, oh, that's cool, that person used this filter, I want to try using it too, or that person used this music clip. I love that song.

I'm going to do kind of a take on that. So I would say that, like, yes, at present moment, you know, participation rate is much stronger for creators. But I've also watched stories. Stories started at a very low creative participation. I remember in 2016, people were writing like, oh, Facebook Stories is a ghost town. Nobody's using it. And then a year later, they were like, whoa, Facebook Stories is killing it.

So some of this just takes time. Yeah. Okay. Now, in terms of the way to get from here to there, you have a lot of room behind TikTok. So here's from, I think, a Wall Street Journal story. Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching real. That's less than one-tenth of the 196. 7.8 million hours, TikTok users spend each day on that platform thing. That's a lot of time.

Facebook has been, you know, in its history known to put growth as the North Star on any performance review. Maybe that's changed a little bit. How do you, it, you know, it's kind of interesting for me because on one hand, you know, I'll criticize Facebook for being so growth obsessed, but also criticized Facebook for being so far behind TikTok. And so, you know, there's a little bit of, you know, being two minds about it. So, but I think the truth is that, you know, there should be ways to grow these products without taking shortcuts. So how do you do that? Well, a couple of things to unpack there. I can understand why people make the direct comparisons with TikTok and time, but I don't think it's the right comparison.

Because, again, TikTok, at least right now, is a very video-focused company. That's their primary objective. Now, if they succeed in stories and getting people to upload photos and with the kind of be-real type thing that they just did, their time spend per DAU is going to go down. It's going to go down.

But here's the point is that success for us is not, video time. Success for us is having a relevant social experience. And so what my team cares about is not necessarily just growing time. It's actually like, hey, you know what might be the most relevant thing for somebody right now? A photo from their friend or a text post from their group. It doesn't take that much time to consume that. But that's fine because that's actually what people want and expect from Facebook. And that's actually why I think that our kind of investment and recommendations are going to really deliver because we're not just looking at video. We're looking at all types of different content entities that people are going to care about.

And our North Star is not time. It's like, hey, look, are people coming back to Facebook on a daily basis and are they actually like finding things that they find highly relevant and are they finding ways to connect with other people through it? And I don't, I think TikTok has a very different probably top line goal in their organization than we have over here. So time spent is not how you're measuring your product manager's working on this stuff. No, we look at it because we look at it because I think if you do have kind of a video-based

product, that's a component of what you look at. And so I look at how much time people are spending on reels and on video. But it's not how I evaluate the success of the Facebook organization. It's just one component of what we do, but it's balanced against a bunch of other product lines. and product needs that we're trying to serve for people. This is good. This is good to hear. How involved is Mark Zuckerberg in the work that you guys do? He's really involved.

So he's not all on Metaverse? Because every five minutes, I feel like I read another story of these memes about Mark has stopped caring about Facebook. No, yeah, that is not the reality at all. I mean, Mark, as we were really trying to unpack this idea of social discovery. and in particular the advancements in AI and then how could that kind of show up in our products. So I'll tell you what kind of Mark does. Mark is very focused on technological innovation. So obviously he's spending a big part of his time in the Metaverse because there's a bunch of groundbreaking stuff happening there.

More than half? I couldn't tell you how he spends his time. I'd be the wrong person to ask. But where I spend time with him is he's been convening all of our AI experts across the company and saying, okay, well, what is state of the art right now? And then how far away are we from incorporated into our products? So we have deep dive sessions on like, here's state of the art AI. Here's where we are in terms of being able to use it to deliver better recommendations, better ads, better social experiences. Mark spends a lot of time there.

we've also done many, many, like several multi-hour deep dives on Facebook and the strategy because the thing to remember is that while Mark is focusing a lot on innovation, he's got a rich history of understanding the Facebook app, of understanding social media. So he's really able to like point at technical concepts that are emerging and saying, well, what would happen if we did this here? What would happen if we changed the experience this? And really pushing quite hard on that. And a lot of our focus on investing in AI and on kind of working towards building a better product for creators, all is directly downstream of working with Mark and him being quite focused on this.

Cool. All right. I'm going to begin Amsterdam next week with Joelle Pinole from who heads up. Yeah, Joel's been awesome. She'll tell you about the sessions with Mark, sure. All right. Now I have a question to ask. And that will probably be on the podcast feed.

I'm working with World Summit AI. If you're out in Amsterdam, shout out because. It'll be a fun week. Okay, a couple more questions for you. First of all, in terms of the economy right now, Facebook is definitely buckling down on expenses. There's hiring freezes. I think the Western Journal has reported that you're trying to do 10% cost reductions.

You know, there's other, there's important insiders saying that there's quiet layoffs, maybe 15% of the company's workforce, you know, impacted there. I want to ask you to comment on that part, but I want to ask you to, you to comment on the fundamental thing, which is that, you know, it looks like a lot of Facebook's attention is going towards Metaverse stuff. You know, Facebook is the name of what the company used to be called, not what it is called. So how does Facebook balance this need for efficiency without leaving behind, you know, some of the core products that make the company what it is? I say the big theme inside the company right now, regardless of what division you work in, is

focus and prioritization. And I think that's like super healthy. I've been pushing this with my team in the Facebook organization for a long time. It's no secret that Facebook has tried building lots of different features and kind of gone into, you know, trying a lot of areas. But we've really been trying to establish a culture of just very clear kind of prioritization on a smaller set of things. And for what it's worth, that's been the mentality that's made Facebook successful for so many years. We were, you know, many times operating from a position of being challenged by a competitor or being the underdog. And we really did our best work when we were kind of very, very focused, kind of ruthless prioritization. And what you're seeing outside of the company

that's happening inside of the company is going back to that, like, kind of very focused, very kind of ruthless prioritization. And it's happening everywhere. Because I think, I think, honestly, the companies that are going to survive and thrive through what is going to be a really difficult period for everybody are going to be the companies that do this well. And so I'm heartened because I've seen us do this as a company in the past, and I see us really doing this right now. And so, yeah, and in terms of the focus and the resources on Facebook, I do not feel at a loss for having what I need to do my job or my teams having what they need to do their jobs. Yeah. So the interesting thing, when you have focus, you can also have like experimental projects that sort of, well, by the wayside, we know this week, Bulletin, which is Facebook's newsletter product, is toast. There's a concern, I think, that if you don't sort of keep

funding these experimental products, you might end up being mapped by a competitor. So how do you feel about that? It's certainly something that we keep top of mind. And I would say that we still have, you know, a lot of early stage products. So you mentioned Bulletin and I think really we're trying to invest a lot in creators in general. And so we try things with certain pockets of creators and we learn. And then we're still very invested in creators all in. And we have a lot of emerging bets for creators. We have stars, which is kind of our user tipping. We have, we're working on things like overlay ads, subscriptions, other tools for them. So in a space, that's very dynamic and very changing, we know that we can't just have one bet, but we also can't

have 20 bets. And so I think we're really trying to focus, you know, in areas of fast innovation. Okay, let's focus on two or three things, but not eight or nine things right now. So it's definitely top of mind for me, but I think we're getting the right balance. Facebook has also, speaking of bulletin, news-related stuff, Facebook's pulled back on news and the news feed in a big way. How's that going for you guys. Well, you know, we invested in news and I think that we're continuing, but it's always been less of a, less of a part of the Facebook experience than I think people from the outside think that it is. I think last time I looked, I think it was something like less than 6% of news feed or something that nature. And so, you know, we're really trying to

invest more where we see kind of more demands for expression, more opportunities for giving people what they want on Facebook and honestly people are when I do when we do research they're not saying hey we want more news on Facebook they want more creator content they want more interest driven content and so we kind of basically form our investments based on where we see people what we see people wanting from Facebook and so that's why we're investing more in creators and I think some of those creators are going to be very like interesting kind of public voices that do more maybe commentary and things. We learned a lot from bulletin and I think we still have relationships as well as people. We're just working through

different product mixes and solutions for them. Okay. I want to end on this. There was this popular TikTok, this guy who's walking in the street talking about how we've lost our third places in U.S. maybe globally. And the third place is a place where people hang out that's not home or work. You know, places like community centers and barbershop, you know, that place you get together. And that happens less and less, especially as we're in cars and we're home because of work from home. You know, some might see Facebook as filling that area of that third place and they might see that it's good or bad.

So do you think Facebook is a substitution for that third place? And if it is, is that a positive thing for our society? Like, what role do you see is with playing in this? I don't think it is yet. I'll say that at least what we have on Facebook right now is I think it's a great place to, at least when I think about the community aspect, we have a great groups product. We have great community products. Most of our groups right now are really large, you know, like 20,000, 50,000, 2 million people.

it allows people to share and express a lot of cool kind of interest-based content. It allows people to find support groups for things that they can't find in their communities physically. So there's a lot there. But in terms of that place where you really feel connected to more people, I think we still have work to do there. I think, you know, we're trying to do more around things like community messaging. How can one of these 50,000 person communities, how can they drop into a space with 50 people or 20 people and have a more intimate conversation? How could they start a video chat there? Eventually, how can they go into a metaverse environment from there?

So I would say, like, no, I don't think Facebook is the third place right now. Are there ways that I think we could maybe get to being there more credibly? Yes, I do. And I think that's always going to be kind of aligned with our mission is to like give people more ways to connect. connect with other people. But I think we got a lot of work to do to really kind of make that feel more intimate, which is why we're investing in things like messaging. It's why we're investing in things like calling. It's why we're investing in the metaverse. But I think we have a ways to go to take what we're seeing in terms of this new technology that's coming out and truly kind of

build it around people. But that's what we've always been trying to do as kind of the core of what our company provides. So I'm pretty optimistic. Yeah. Do you have a third place you like to go to? You know, I like to go and kind of, my guess, I don't know if this counts as a third place, but I like going out and kind of with other people that like work out or like exercise. I feel like, I feel like. The gym counts. I feel like gyms have become almost like this new place. It's like, and so yeah, that's kind of my scene when I need to just get out of my headspace on work or whatever, go to the gym, just kind of grind it out with other people.

That to me is like pretty, pretty fulfilling and cool. Tom Allison, thank you so much for joining. Great talking with you. Yeah, great talking with you too, Alex. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Tom, for joining. Thank you, Nate Guatney, for handling the audio on a quick turnaround. Thank you all.

Thank you to LinkedIn for having me as part of the podcast network. And thanks to all of you, the listeners. We'll be back next week for another episode of Big Technology podcast. Ron John Roy is coming to talk to us about the economy and about Elon Musk, potentially owning Twitter who knows what will happen between now and then. So that will do it for us here on the show. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.