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"Daily Active People is A Bigger Concern Right Now Than User Experience" - How Mark Zuckerberg and his allies made Facebook harder and more dangerous to use in the pursuit of perpetual growth

Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people

While this may have seemed a noble, even ideal situation for a founder in these early days, this single move has allowed Zuckerberg to wield complete power over Facebook, and was the first step along a road that has made him impossible to fire, ultimately dooming the company to whatever miserable death march Harvard’s most quirked-up white boy would deem fit. Palihapitiya wanted their team — which also included early Facebook data scientist Danny Ferrante and Blake Ross, who previously co-created the Firefox Web Browser — to become “the Growth Circle,” what Levy refers to as “a power center in the company with special status and a distinctive subculture.” And the rot begins at the top, with these horrifying choices perpetuated by Mark Zuckerberg, with his enforcer Naomi Gleit making demands of engineers desperate to appease the almighty Zuck, having to (to quote Horwitz) “be careful to not frame decisions in terms of right and wrong.”

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