Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg fielded questions from users and businesses about the social network yesterday in the first ever community Q&A session.

Facebook users submitted questions through the Q&A With Mark Facebook page, and the thread encouraged them to vote for their favorite posts by liking them. The question thread capped out at 10,000 comments.

Zuckerberg explained that Facebook has a long tradition of holding internal Q&As, which allows employees ask any questions they have about Facebook’s products and policies. Sometimes, these questions would cause the company to reevaluate its approach to different problems.

Here are a few of the popular questions covered by Zuckerberg in the hour-long Q&A.

Why did you force us to install Facebook Messenger?

This was one of the most popular questions submitted by users, and it was the first to be tackled in the Q&A. Zuckerberg welcomed the question, saying:

Whenever at our Q&A someone asks a hard question, I’m always really grateful because that’s how it keeps us honest.

Zuckerberg recognized that it was a “big ask” to require users to install Messenger to be able to use Facebook messaging, and that the company had a lot of trust to earn with users regarding the new app.

He noted that messaging is currently one of the most common forms of communication, with roughly 10 billion messages being sent each day. Because it has become such a common task, Zuckerberg said that it was inefficient to require people to go through what he felt was a clunky, multi-step process of opening the Facebook app, navigating to the message tab, opening their messages, and so on.

Zuckerberg said that by separating messages from the news feed into its own app would improve the functionality of both.

When will organic reach be coming back?

This was common question by business owners regarding the way businesses are able to directly reach customers through the company’s Facebook page. Zuckerberg noted that some businesses were still thriving on Facebook, while others were seeing a decrease in their reach to customers.

Zuckerberg explained that the primary reason that this is the case is that Facebook has become more popular, and people are sharing more things on the site. Because of this, businesses face a far stiffer competition, not only with other businesses, but also with people’s friends and family.

Facebook’s main goal is to become a perfect personalized newspaper for all of its users, and their first priority is optimizing the site for its users, with considerations for businesses being secondary.

Zuckerberg’s advice to business looking to increase their reach with people is to “focus on publishing really good content.”

How accurate is “The Social Network?”

A less serious question, but one that still momentarily left the normally articulate Zuckerberg stumbling for words, was about the accuracy of the 2010 film “The Social Network,” which dramatized the founding of Facebook.

Zuckerberg said: “It was a very interesting experience to watch a movie that was supposedly about my life. (laughing) Yeah, supposedly.”

According to Zuckerberg, the film makers got some details right, especially with the design of the original office. But he said a movie about the actual founding of Facebook would have been very boring since it would have been two hours of him sitting at a computer writing code. Zuckerberg was critical of some of the plot points that were false, saying: “They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful.”

Some of the other questions answered in the Q&A covered Facebook programs for young business people, diversity within the company, and more.

Visit the Q&A With Mark Facebook page for the full video.