The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 43 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Feed Is Only the Third Most Important Instagram Surface for Teens
“If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed. Yet people think of Instagram as a feed, and it's the third most important Surfers at best. M…”
Instagram Prioritizes Young People and Creators Above All Other Segments
“And for us, we care about young people, and we care about creators most.”
Adam Mosseri Claims Instagram Is Growing Faster Than Any Major Competitor
“We're growing really fast. I think we're growing the fastest of the big players.”
TikTok Is the Most Well-Executing Competitor Meta Has Ever Faced
“They're, I think they still are the most well-executing competitor I think we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but they're, I think, at the top of that.”
Meta Adopts Competitor-Pioneered Formats When They Become Industry Standards
“I think we're very good at optimizing things, and I think that we are willing to, when somebody pioneers a new format, to go and adopt that format if we think it's going to become an industry standard.”
Video Is Good for Time Spent but Bad for Revenue
“Yeah, and so the thing that I think people don't always realize is video, by its nature as a format, is actually really challenging for all the old social networks. It puts a lot of downward pressure on the ads business, because if you watch one video for 10 s…”
Threads Launch Targeted Fashion, Music, and Sports Over News or Tech
“We weren't going after tech, we weren't going after news, we weren't going after politics. We were focused on musicians. We're focused on fashion. We're focused on athletes. We're focused on beauty”
Directly Paying Every Creator Destroys a Social Platform's Business Model
“You can't just pay everybody who's a creator, because if there's tens of millions of creators, that just adds up to money that's going to just completely destroy your business model. So you have to figure out ways to give them tools to make money, in my opinio…”
TikTok Creator Payouts Are Unpredictable Lottery Checks Compared to YouTube
“If you're kind of getting these lottery-type checks, I think it gets much more harder to plan. I think that's a common complaint I've heard about how TikTok's payments compare to YouTube's payments, for instance, which are much more predictable.”
BeReal Has Struggled to Expand Beyond Initial Viral Attention
“I think it's a really powerful mechanic. I think it's it was an amazing moment. I think it was, like, incredibly culturally relevant. I think when that, when you have that explosive growth like that, that you just focus a hundred percent on just keeping the li…”
Mosseri Reallocated Instagram's Entire Stories Team to Messaging
“Actually, at one point, a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging.”
Instagram Users Share More Media in DMs Than Feed or Stories
“If you take out all the text, there are more photos and videos shared in DMs than there are shared in stories. And there's way more shared in stories than there is in feed.”
Only One in Eight Meta Employees Reads Leadership's Internal Posts
“We make a post Internally, and one out of eight employees reads it, and we move on with our lives, and we're surprised when the whole company doesn't move along with us”
Market Success Drives Team Morale More Than Internal Communication
“Over the long run, the thing that's going to get people the most rallied, the most excited, the most motivated, the most effective is doing good work and being successful.”
Facebook's Safety Team Was Larger Than Instagram's Total Headcount
“The safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams. I think there were more engineers that worked on safety and integrity at the company at the time that then w…”
Instagram's Five-Year Growth Was Driven Entirely by Stories and DMs
“All of the growth has been in, in stories and in DMs over the last five years or so. And to the degree there is growth in feed, it's all in video, it's not in photos in a lot of ways.”
Instagram Notes Drove Significant Teen Engagement Despite Low Adult Adoption
“Notes are, you know, basically aim status, but better looking at the top of the inbox. Anybody above 20, like, doesn't use them very much. Unbelievable how much they've moved Instagram engagement overall, app level engagement for teens.”
Simplicity in Product Design Is Not Always the Best Choice
“But I think to say it's always better is a mistake. I think of simplicity as a means to an end, and you have to be clear about what that end is. Maybe it's usability, maybe it's broad appeal, but I think that it's possible. There are instances where a more com…”
Adam Mosseri Admits the Instagram App Is Currently Too Complicated
“The app is too complicated. I mean, let's be serious. They are, the, I think it's gotten more simple over the last 12 months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives, removed some of the tabs, but we still have more to do.”
Reels Is Approaching 50% of Total Time Spent on Instagram
“Reels is, I don't know, maybe pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point. Not quite there.”
Threads Would Not Have Succeeded Without Instagram Graph Bootstrapping
“And I think that's, it is no way it would have been as successful if you had to bootstrap the graph from scratch.”
Prior Facebook and Instagram Video Products Hurt User Connection
“And so the fact that video, growing video has massively grown sends, which is a pure friend-to-friend interaction, even not even, even if you take out the real shares, because they start conversation, I might send you a funny, you know, football clip, and then…”
Mark Zuckerberg Pushed to Launch Threads as a Standalone App
“Like, for instance, on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should just try to build a separate app. And we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app, because it seemed like It would be much more likely to succeed, and he was by…”
Meta Built Threads With Only 50 Engineers and Three Product Managers
“The team really properly formed a little less than five months ago, or five months ago. We started working on it a little before, but the team didn't really form properly until maybe five months ago. Dozens. Fifty-something engineers. Three PMs, three designer…”
Text Feeds and Search Have the Highest Monetization Efficiency in Tech
“A text-based feed is about the highest monetization efficiency of any sort of online business I've seen. I think that and search are basically the two. Just because the number of things you consume per hour is just incredibly high because it's so light.”
Leaders Must Repeat Strategic Directives Until It Feels Excessive
“If you really want to move the team on something, you need to say it until so many times that you literally want to throw up in your mouth if you say it again, and then you need to say it again, and again, and it can be Tough, because you can feel like you're …”
Overusing Executive Veto Power Prevents Retaining Top Creative Talent
“If you do that too much, you stifle creativity, you don't create enough space, you cannot hire or retain the most creative and interesting talent, so you have to use that sparingly.”
Adam Mosseri Praises Telegram's Speed, Execution, and Ability to Pivot
“The other in the video space, yeah, the other folk who are really fast and really good and I respect a lot is Telegram. Telegram is just, the, that team is just really good, they build something really well, and they can pivot quickly, and when they decide to …”
The Average Consumer Installs Zero New Apps Per Month
“The median number of new apps, I read this somewhere, installed a month, is zero for the average person.”
Feed Products Like Twitter Are Heavily Dominated by Key Creators
“Feeds are very head heavy in general, and so is text. So basically that's to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have most of the content is consumed by a small number, sorry, most of the content consumed is prod…”
YouTube Is the Best Platform for Sustained Creator Revenue Payouts
“YouTube is the best at You know, doing sustained, consistent payouts with their ref share program, because long form video is, I think, a lot more conducive to that.”
Instagram Is the Most Popular Platform Among Creators Overall
“Instagram is the, it's the most popular in the creator community, as far as we can tell. So the most creators use it.”
Maintaining Platform Cultural Relevance Matters More Than Raw User Count
“I care every bit about, every bit as much about making sure that the, even, maybe even more, that the platform is culturally relevant than the, sort of, the big number of users.”
Facebook's Retention Benchmark Was 6 Friends in Japan, 106 in Indonesia
“That number for Facebook back in the day varied wildly by country. Like in Japan it was like six, and in Indonesia it was a 106 or something bonkers.”
Threads Will Focus on Creator Sharing and Retention for the Next Year
“So it'll be, the two things I'll focus on most for the next year will be the creator community, specifically, not only how many of them use the app, but how many of them share the app as a place for their creativity, and then retention for the average user.”
Adam Mosseri Uses LLMs to Summarize Performance Feedback and Edit Writing
“I write pretty detailed reviews for my reports every six months and so I don't have AI write it, but I have it take a first pass at summarizing all the feedback to make sure I didn't miss anything. I will sometimes Give it a piece. I do a lot of writing at wor…”
Mosseri Rebuilt Instagram's Leadership Team Across Nine Functions in Year One
“So my first year, I had to hire a head of design, engineering, product management, data science, research, HR, communications, marketing, and a COO.”
Less Than One Percent of Instagram Users Used the Activity Feed
“It was what, it was probably a small, it was a, it was less than one percent of the users who used it, but that's still, you know, millions of people.”
Frequent Profile Picture Updates on Early Facebook Inspired Photo Sharing
“Early Facebook days, before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture. Like every day, multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, sounds like people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that.”