Zuckerberg’s Copy Machine

At some point Facebook became the platform where older relatives go to be angry about things—immigration, train delays, whatever the algorithm surfaced that morning to keep them scrolling. Younger people noticed and left, which was the rational response. They moved to Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok, which ByteDance built after absorbing Musical.ly—a platform where teenagers lip-synced, ran challenges that occasionally killed them, and became famous overnight. The demographics were obvious and the money followed.

Facebook’s answer to watching its core audience age out was, as usual, to buy or copy whatever was working elsewhere. They bought Instagram before it got too expensive. They cloned Snapchat Stories into Instagram Stories and in doing so effectively ended Snapchat as a serious competitor—the copy worked better than the original and lived inside an app people were already using. Cynical, effective, and a clear template. So when TikTok became the thing, they built Lasso: a standalone app that offered everything TikTok offered, minus the algorithm that actually made TikTok work, plus a Facebook account requirement that immediately removed its appeal to anyone who’d left Facebook specifically to get away from Facebook.

What the Stories playbook had going for it was convenience. Instagram users were already there; adding a tab cost them nothing. Lasso asked people to download something new, sign back into something they’d abandoned, and recreate a social graph they’d left behind—in exchange for a TikTok experience that TikTok already provided better. The original sin—making the main platform so unpleasant that people fled in the first place—was never the part they tried to fix. Lasso shut down in 2020 without ceremony, which felt about right.