Are we not going to be friends anymore?
Wait: You and I are still friends. It's just that we're talking about Facebook, and ...
Whoops. I sent two editions of the newsletter yesterday—and gosh, did they ever display the breadth of things we write about here!
The U.S. Marines in Los Angeles … with a quick detour to Harry Truman and Nagasaki … followed almost immediately by ...
Fun stuff I learned while coaching my daughter's youth soccer team.
Some of you figured out what happened: I'd written the soccer newsletter and set it for yesterday, but then the Marines in LA thing happened during the day, and so I quickly pivoted.
But I neglected to unschedule the soccer newsletter. So everybody got two!
Let's just enjoy today's newsletter -- the one I actually intended to send today. No gremlins involved!
It's all about the idea of ripping things up and starting over (but then, apparently deciding not to) brought to us courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg and the Federal Trade Commission.
What if we just started over?
At the end of April, I shared the news that Facebook, apparently having realized that almost nobody uses Facebook anymore, had launched a new feed setting -- one that lets people see only the things that their friends have posted on Facebook, in reverse chronological order.
No ads, no algorithms, no time-wasting reels, and AI-generated slop content.
It turns out that this is apparently the halfway solution to a problem that Mark Zuckerberg identified three years ago. As we'll see, his original solution is way more interesting.
But first, we have to see how he described the problem in an email to top Meta executives on April 26, 2022:
“Even though [Facebook's] engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly and I worry that this may be a leading indicator of future health issues. ...
Even if [Instagram] and [WhatsApp] do well, I don’t see a path for our company to succeed in the way we need if FB falters, so we need to get this right.”
Zuckerberg went on to identify the big difference between Facebook and other social networks:
Facebook’s “cultural relevance” was tied to users’ “friend graphs,” he wrote, meaning the relationships between Facebook users.
Other networks had different approaches, he noted: “for example, IG/Twitter-style follow graphs, TikTok-style pure algorithmic approach, Groups/Reddit-style communities, etc.”
'Do you want to be seen as someone adding friends on FB?'
Digging down and setting the stage for the potential radical solution, Zuckerberg said he saw three big reasons why Facebook “feels out of vogue.”
The fact that many Facebook users’ friend graphs are “stale,” and “not filled with the people they want to hear from or connect with.”
The idea that “friending” someone on Facebook, which required mutual agreement, now felt “heavyweight.”
A newfound chicken-and-egg problem, as people on Facebook could seem older and less modern than people who skipped social media altogether: “Do you want to be seen as someone adding friends on FB?”
With that preamble, Zuckerberg lowered the hypothetical boom.
What if we just unfriended everyone?
In short, Zuckerberg suggested: What if we just unfriended everyone on Facebook from everyone else and made them start over?
“The FB app owns the concept of friending, so if there were a way to freshen this up and make it a more relevant part of life in the 2020s then this could be a good path. ...
One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s [friend] graphs and having them start again.”
There would be massive risk involved, he wrote. People might just decide Facebook had already had its day and move on.
Instead of an audience of elder Millennials, Generation X-ers who succumbed to inertia, and Baby Boomers, the app might wind up with nobody.
Could Facebook recapture the early experience?
I get where Zuckerberg was coming from here, 100 percent.
If we go back to about 2007, when I first joined Facebook, I did so not because my friends were on it, but because I was writing a book about the West Point class of 2002, and the members of that class were all using the network at the time.
I was thrilled each time I made another connection for the book, and then thrilled even more when I reconnected via Facebook with my college girlfriend.
We wound up getting back together and getting married; now we have a daughter. (You may have heard me mention her; I coached her soccer team.)
When was the last time you were thrilled by Facebook (if you’re still even using it)?
“When you’re ramping up your account for the first time, adding people as friends and building your network is one of the most enjoyable parts of the FB experience,” Zuckerberg wrote. “If we could recreate that feeling for lots of people, it could reinvigorate the app and also make friending a part of mainstream popular culture again.”
I don’t know if this was Zuckerberg’s solution or something he borrowed from someone else, but he really let his freak flag fly with the next idea:
“We could establish a day each year when everyone’s graph gets wiped and everyone needs to start over together.”
'Bring back the joy'
Alas, it’s not clear that the idea of wiping everyone’s friend graph went beyond Zuckerberg’s email. We know about it because it was included in documents in the Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, Inc. case as recently compiled by the Internal Tech Emails newsletter.
But in late March, Facebook rolled out that “updated Friends tab” that shows only content from users’ Facebook friends.
I’m old enough to still be marginally on Facebook, checking it now and again (and using it to keep tabs on a few of the groups from my town — it’s half of where I get information on what’s going on here).
Looking at my own Facebook friends tab, however, I’m reminded of a cliche that also happens to be true:
It’s better to have something that 1,000 people love than that something that millions of people sort of tolerate.
Lesson here? Facebook still claims 3 billion monthly active users as of a few months ago, and a lot of companies would kill for those numbers. But sometimes the real way forward is to move fast and break things.
Wait, where have I heard that before?
7 other things worth knowing today
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the military will stay in Los Angeles for 60 days to combat violent "rioters, looters and thugs" during the immigration riots. Meanwhile, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass appeared to threaten the looming World Cup (set to begin in Los Angeles one year from Friday) as she begged President Trump not to deport more migrants. Bass said the city's economy will "collapse" if Trump continues, asking: "Don't you want the World Cup to be a success for you?" (Daily Mail)
Protesters or agitators: Who is driving chaos at L.A. immigration protests? LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has drawn a distinction between protesters and masked "anarchists" who, he said, were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police. (Los Angeles Times)
The Trump administration is considering cutting federal education funds to California, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking. “No taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country, and that’s what California is doing through its lunatic anti-energy, soft-on-crime, pro-child mutilation and pro-sanctuary policies,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson. (Politico)
The protests that roiled Los Angeles over the weekend were set to spread Tuesday across the country, as activists planned demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and elsewhere. NBC News counted at least 25 rallies and demonstrations coast to coast. Some of them involved only a few dozen participants, while others attracted thousands. (NBC News)
The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting. Traffic from organic search to HuffPost fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post. Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month after "extreme traffic drops outside of our control." Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025. (WSJ)
Credit scores of millions of Americans have plummeted in the first quarter of the year as a result of rising student loan delinquency rates, following the end of a years-long pause on federal payments. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, says nearly six million student loan borrowers—nearly 14 percent—were 90 or more days delinquent or in default between January and March 2025. (Newsweek)
I don't usually include a lot of stock market news here, but this was interesting: Shares of McDonald's fell yesterday after equity analysis firm Redburn Atlantic said it now believes the increasing number of Americans using GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic could lead to a $428 million revenue loss. "A 1% drag today could easily build to 10% or more over time," the firm said. (Bloomberg)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
I couldn't care less about meta...it is a spy machine to the max.
I found FB valuable for finding friends and family, but then we switched over to phone calls and texting. The unwanted ads and feeds are getting on my nerves, and it is burdensome to cancel, block, etc. So, not so much interaction anymore.
If they can give me ONLY what I want or agreed to, it might be more attractive to use