By now, you may be sick of reading hot takes on Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s formal fact-checking activities, loosen its properties’ restrictions on hate speech, and retool itself for the Trump 2.0 era. So I promise I’m not going to burden you with yet another one.
Instead, I’m going to write about people who rarely get their due: the unpaid moderators who manage Facebook’s millions of groups. Unlike Zuckerberg, they’re not trying to set ground rules for 3 billion-plus users of multiple internet properties—an effort that’s probably doomed to be deeply flawed, whether done by whim or with deep consideration. Group moderators wrangle vastly smaller populations of thousands, hundreds, or dozens of people who share an interest. You know, communities.
I still get value out of my own Facebook feed—more proof that my friends and family are wonderful people!—but mostly, it’s groups that keep me coming back. The ones where I’m active are congenial places full of people who treat each other well. That’s not because Facebook is inherently civil. It’s because their moderators set the right tone, deal with conflict when it arises, and generally take their work seriously. They’re like small-town mayors: consistently affable, but with spines of steel.
To be fair to Facebook, it gives moderators wide latitude to run their groups as they see fit. It outfits them with various tools to do the job, from options for screening prospective members to an “AI Assist” feature that can help with approving (or not approving) posts. The service doesn’t seem to be trying to impose any sort of consistency on how groups operate, and while that may be at least in part because it’s shirking that responsibility, it’s still a good thing.
Among Meta’s recent kerfuffles is the widespread angst over the company’s plans to inject even more AI by adding bots that “have bios and profile pictures and [can] generate and share content powered by AI on the platform,” according to one executive. I’m happy to reserve judgment until such synthetic members show up. But recently, the moderator of one of my favorite groups, on comics and cartoons, made an announcement of his own. After a fair amount of earnest discussion among the members, he banned postings that included AI-generated artwork, on the grounds that the group was about human creativity. I cheered the engagement with the needs of his particular community that led to this decision, even though I’d shared AI art myself in the past. (I stopped when I saw how unhappy it made some of my online friends.)
Meta’s own revised philosophy on what its platforms should offer emphasizes free speech—”all the good, bad, and ugly.” But moderators who see their role as facilitating the good while tamping down the bad and the ugly make Facebook work. And it’s hard to be a successful dissent-crushing tyrant on the service since members who feel overmanaged can easily split off and form their own competing group—and often do.
At the moment, my Facebook feed is awash in goodbye notes from friends who are dismayed by recent developments at Meta, in Washington, D.C., and the intersection thereof. If the moderators of my favorite groups abandon ship, the place will really fall apart. One of the biggest mistakes Meta could make would be to drive people such as Tom, Cyndi, and Gary away—but I’d happily follow them anywhere.
Nintendo knows what it wants to be
Nintendo announced its next console last week. Its very name, the Switch 2, emphasizes that it’s not a radical departure from the almost eight-year-old smash hit that preceded it. (The company is withholding some details until at least April 2, presumably including a surprise or two.)
Tech pundits’ gut reaction to new stuff that’s low on change for change’s sake is often negative, even when the old stuff didn’t cry out for reimagining. But even though every report on the Switch 2 points out it doesn’t seem to be that different from the Switch, the response has been largely positive. Trust that Nintendo knows what it’s doing runs high.
Back in 2021, I talked to Nintendo global president Shuntaro Furukawa for a Fast Company story. We discussed the Japanese gaming giant’s strategy—then expanding to encompass new frontiers such as movies and Super Nintendo World areas at Universal Studios theme parks—and unbending devotion to keeping its games and beloved franchises at the center of everything it did. Four years later, things seem to be going according to plan, and the Switch 2 is evidence that the company remains committed to staying on track.
Self-confidence of that type is in shorter supply among the U.S.’s largest tech companies, most of which seem terrified that the generative AI revolution might pass them by. The results have sometimes left me wondering if outfits such as Google have lost the plot on why we value their products in the first place.
Even Apple—easily the most Nintendo-esque U.S. tech giant, and usually happy to go its own way—seems rattled. Its new Apple Intelligence summaries of notifications kept wildly misrepresenting news items, and it took the company weeks to temporarily disable the feature for news apps while it worked on fixing it. An Apple that was unfailingly committed to being the best Apple it could be might never have seen fit to summarize already pithy news alerts in the first place.
Cultural forces may help explain why Nintendo doesn’t fall into such traps. Japan has a knack for producing businesses that just keep keeping on: It’s home to the five most venerable institutions listed in Wikipedia’s fascinating article on the world’s oldest companies. (Those five are all more than 1,250 years old.) Wikipedia also mentions a 2008 survey that found that 56% of all companies that have existed for 200 years or more are Japanese. This BBC article on why all this is true is also a good read.
The best way for a company to stay relevant is to have a strong sense of itself, which doesn’t get in the way of exploring old values in new ways. Nintendo has that in spades. And I can’t help but wonder if the company—which famously got its start making playing cards and has already been around for 135 years—stands a better chance than any American tech company of being with us a century or two from now.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.
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