‘Make Mark Happy:’ Facebook Employees Mock Zuckerberg’s ‘Metaverse’ Project

Employees of Facebook (now known as Meta) mockingly refer to some of the company’s metaverse projects as “make Mark happy” — referring to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his shifting priorities.

Facebook employees are complaining about high turnover and the frequent moving around of employees as Zuckerberg shifts his priorities, according to a report by the New York Times.

The report added that two employees said staff jokingly refers to key metaverse projects as M.M.H., which stands for “make Mark happy.”

“Being a cynic about new and innovative technology is easy,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the New York Times. “Actually building it is a lot harder — but that’s what we’re doing because we believe the metaverse is the future of computing.”

Last year, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta, and become a “metaverse company.”

The metaverse refers to a virtual reality in which users can present themselves as avatars inside a computer-generated habitat and interact with other users.

But the company’s rebranding has had a shaky start, as Facebook’s virtual reality social network, Horizon Worlds, is plagued with quality issues despite the tech giant spending billions of dollars and assigning thousands of employees to bring Zuckerberg’s concepts to life.

Moreover, the Facebppl employees tasked with building the “metaverse” app are barely using it, an executive says.

Recently, Facebook’s Vice President of Metaverse Vishal Shah said in a memo to employees that the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”

In a follow-up memo 15 days later Shah complained that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, and said that a plan was being developed to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week.

“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds,” Shah insisted. “You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.