Zuckerberg gives up annual personal challenges, shares his goals for the next decade including a new private social platform, AR/VR, and new forms of governance
Every new year of the last decade I set a personal challenge. My goal was to grow in new ways outside my day-to-day work running Facebook.
Ending the ritual and replacing it with decade-scale goals is a signal about where his own attention goes next: a private social platform, AR/VR, and what he calls new forms of governance. After years of reactive year-end posts about problems on the existing platform, this reframes the agenda as proactive product and structure choices rather than damage control.
First-order effects
Facebook's internal priority list now visibly includes three named bets from its founder — private social, AR/VR, and governance redesign — which directs capital and senior talent toward those programs over the public-feed business that generated the 2018-era controversies.
The end of the annual challenge removes a predictable January moment when journalists and critics could grade Zuckerberg against a stated public commitment, as happened with the guest lineup in his 2019 discussion series.
Second-order effects
Rivals in private messaging and AR/VR — the spaces Zuckerberg just named as decade priorities — should expect a resourced Facebook competing there rather than only defending the news feed, raising the cost of standing still for anyone already shipping in those categories.
A shift toward private social platforms moves the moderation debate off public feeds: whatever 'new forms of governance' means in practice, it will be tested in encrypted or small-group settings where outside scrutiny is structurally harder than it was for the public posts covered in his prior year-end reviews.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, platform governance becomes something founders design into private products themselves rather than negotiate with regulators over public feeds — a structural transfer of rule-making authority from public discourse to closed systems, with regulators likely to follow once enforcement questions arise.
Decade-horizon goal-setting by a founder-controller also entrenches the pattern of one person's stated priorities functioning as strategy for a multi-product company, since the challenge posts have consistently preceded actual Facebook initiatives.
The trend: Founder-led social platforms are pivoting from scaling public feeds to building private, hardware-adjacent ecosystems where the company itself defines the governance rules.
Great thread. Incremental point: anything that slows down platforms will reduce harm. Best way to create global regs = experiment with local regs in every jurisdiction. Experiment, learn, repeat. Start now. Ignore complaints from platforms. (h/t: @jason_kint) https://twitter.com/…
lol in zuckerberg's new year message, where he mentions he wants FB to become an ecommerce platform to help small businesses, he reveals what he actually wants them to do: “buying ads to get their message out more broadly” 🤑 https://www.facebook.com/...
This is a good thread. I'll just add Facebook (and GOOG) want the issue to be about all tech and the entire internet. Mirroring germany federal cartel office decision against Facebook in US to limit its dominance and data tentacles to align with expectations would be huge step. h…
Zuck's note, like Boz', is naive. When our primary communications medium fosters a permanent dissensus (as @noupside says), it may not be possible for democracies to reach consensus to address existential, structural issues like climate change. https://www.facebook.com/... https:…
This is huge!! Facebook to enter the SME business segment with e-commerce & payment tools The SMB tech market is currently worth ~$230 billion. Given the rise in entrepreneurship, I believe it can easily grow to $1 trillion over the next decade https://www.facebook.com/...
New post by Zuck. Touches on privacy, decentralization, VR, and governance. Of particular interest to crypto: “One of the big questions for the next decade is: how should we govern the large new digital communities that the internet has enabled?” https://www.facebook.com/...
My takeaway: If Zuckerberg wants to build towards a more utopic 2030, he needs to hire cynics & skeptics to preemptively steer Fb away from dystopic consequences https://techcrunch.com/...
Mark Zuckerberg has just published a big post on his goals for himself and Facebook in the next ten years — including some big predictions for the role AR and AR glasses will play in changing society. Read here: https://www.facebook.com/...
i know it's trite to harp on this, but mark zuckerberg literally started facebook to get laid. let us not allow him to retcon facebook's deeply pathetic origin story https://www.facebook.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Zuckerberg's plans to fix 2030 involve... a lot of Facebook: -VR (Oculus) could reduce housing crises via work from anywhere -AR (Fb Glasses) -> feeling less divided by devices -Smaller social nets (Fb Groups / Chat) -> feeling less lost in the crowd https://techcrunch.com/...
Kind of strange to see the CEO of a company he completely controls preach about the value of decentralization, external governance. How Facebook is fundamentally structured seems completely at odds with those ideas. https://www.facebook.com/...
“While I expect phones to still be our primary devices through most of this decade, at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology.” - Mark Zuckerberg https://www.facebook.com/...
the goals, broadly, include: what he calls “generational change,” which appears to be representation of millennial views in government private communications (e.g. whatsapp) small biz growth VR/AR and new governance models based on how the internet works