Does anyone think facebook is stupid

The metaverse offers Zuckerberg a substantially new, maximalist direction to move toward. Now it needs to get to work. Below is a transcript of my full interview with Zuckerberg. It has been edited for length and clarity:. Mark Zuckerberg: At a high level, we did this segment reporting change on Monday as part of earnings. One for the social apps and one for future platforms basically.

It goes across all of this. The metaverse is going to be both future platforms and social experiences. The higher-level piece is that Facebook is the iconic social media brand. We think that makes us different from the other companies because everyone else is trying to work on how people interact with technology, where as we we build technologies so that people can interact with each other.

On a more functional and technical basis, I think that there was just a lot of confusion and awkwardness about having the company brand be also the brand of one of the social media apps. When people wanted to go sign into their Quest, we wanted them to sign in with their Facebook account because we wanted to have a single identity or account system for the company. Google has that, Apple has that. Microsoft has it. So from a functional perspective, I thought it was very important to have that.

I think just having a different identify for that is important. I formally kicked off the project earlier this year. It was a little over more than six months ago. Is there a restructuring component of this functionally with how the organizations report to people as well? Or is it more just the brand? There is the brand. There will be the account system. You said you started this formally about six months ago. Is it at all a reaction to the brand baggage and the brand tax you guys sometimes refer to internally that Facebook has, and just wanting to distance from that?

Or is it really more just looking ahead? We started well before the current cycle [of bad news]. I think the current cycle clearly had nothing to bear on this. I think sometimes you just have to keep pushing forward. And these are conversations that we sort of had inside the company I think going back to, like , ever since Instagram and WhatsApp joined and we became a family of apps.

Feedback from Meta's Oculus virtual reality headset users was that the technology, which was improving all the time, could be "incredibly fun". Mr Cox told Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of news publication Insider, that his own dabbling in the metaverse included hosting meetings and entertainment for staff. He said he and his wife had watched a comedy show with Facebook employees in which everyone appeared as avatars: "Twenty of us in the room, co-workers, all laughing together.

That same technology was a good alternative to video calls, he argued. You don't know who is looking at who, everyone is constantly interrupting each other. Meetings in the metaverse would be far better, he said, with Meta working on how to improve "spatial audio and body language" in virtual reality.

When asked why anyone would want to meet in virtual reality, he said: "It will not replace real life - nothing should - and I don't want to design something that does. He acknowledged that no one company, such as Meta, would own the metaverse, pointing to Roblox as an example. Chief executive David Baszucki has for several years been outlining his vision of it as a digital place where people play, work or learn with millions of 3D experiences. We're excited that more people are coming it to validate that notion.

No single shareholder exerts more control over any publicly traded company than Zuckerberg does at Facebook. Facebook is exactly as Mark Zuckerberg wants it to be. That leads to an important lesson: Everything rises and falls on leadership. Organizations take on the character and values of their leaders. Never has that been more the case than at Facebook.

Zuckerberg sees Facebook as some altruistic force for good in the world and thinks that its net benefits far outweigh any problems it creates. Of course, if you were building something like Facebook, you'd have to believe that. There's no way you could get up and go to work every day if you think that the thing you were building was destroying individual lives and undermining democracy. Facebook likes to point out that the problem isn't with Facebook, but with the internet -- that it is people who share that content, and the company is working hard to combat misinformation, hate, and fake news.

Except everything Facebook does is to increase engagement, and it turns out, that's the content that gets the most of it. While he may have succeeded in convincing himself of this, many others—within the company, in Washington, and beyond—appear less persuaded, especially as ongoing issues with the platform come to be seen as features rather than bugs. But the plan was part of a broader strategy on the part of the company to more forcefully defend itself against critics and distance Zuckerberg, its founder, from the scandals that have battered the brand.

Oddly, Zuckerberg responded to the Times piece by focusing on a brief mention of him riding an electronic surfboard.