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Instagram Is Becoming Facebook’s Next Facebook

132 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

whywhywhywhy 10y ago
Remember when people kept claiming Facebook buying Instagram wasn't a bad thing because "they're not ruining it" "They're just leaving it as the same old Instagram".
- wmeredith 10y ago
  I do. And I also recall thinking they were/are naive. I still think that.
- IBM 10y ago
  Uh that's what they've done. The article is about Instagram becoming like Facebook in the sense that this is a massive property on the scale of the core Facebook product. 700 million users vs Facebook's 2 billion.
  - mtrpcic 10y ago
    Facebook has definitely not left it as the "same old Instagram". They've changed the home feed algorithm to basically the same as the Facebook home feed algorithm, and there's been a lot of content creators negatively impacted by it (I know this because of the industry my wife works in, which is having major issues now, where engagement has basically halved among anybody except the top maybe 5% of content creators).
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      So here's the thing: Facebook said they'd leave Instagram to be Instagram. But saying Facebook isn't holding that promise because things have changed isn't necessarily accurate. The people in charge of Instagram may have used more and more of Facebook's tools, looked at better analytics, tweaked, used lessons learned from Facebook, etc. While I agree it's unlikely that Facebook left them entirely alone I don't think it's necessarily fair to say they meddled just because things have changed. Nothing stays the same especially in the tech industry.
      - wand3r 10y ago
        I agree with this. I a sure there were changes for the better and worse do to the acquisition; but Systrom said that Instagram retained a lot of autonomy. I am not a user of FB or IG but certainly over several years the platform would change; all good tech products evolve. Contrasting this with Oculus; I think IG was given a lot less hands on MGMT.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        Not to mention that Twitter is moving in the same direction
        majewsky 10y ago
        In 5 years we have the short-message Facebook (Twitter), the image Facebook (Instagram), the news Facebook (Facebook), the video Facebook (Youtube), maybe also the source code Facebook (Github [1]). That must be the market-driven diversity that my economics teachers loved to tell me all about. [1] That one is a bit of a stretch, but you can already "follow people" and they market themselves as a social network, so...
    - RandomInteger4 10y ago
      I see all the posts of anyone I follow in the temporal order in which they post. Do you even selfie bro?
    - threeseed 10y ago
      Organising content by what is relevant or interesting to you as an individual is hardly specific to Facebook or Instagram. Many companies are doing something the same thing e.g. Pinterest, Netflix, YouTube. Even companies like banks are using individual Next Best Action models to determine what marketing decision is right specifically for you rather than something generic to your demographic.
  - abalone 10y ago
    Not at all. The article focuses on how Instagram has continually evolved itself despite the tendency of loyal users to decry change, specifically mentioning the ranked newsfeed and Snapchat-style stories. Having said that, I don't think it's "Facebook" doing this. This has probably been Instagram's approach to product from day one.
tabeth 10y ago
What exactly is the end goal of these advertising platforms, exactly? Ads in my mind are zero sum, so I'm pretty clueless on this front. One thing I find interesting is the simultaneous popularity of these newfound distractions and task/project management software. Are we solving problems that were intentionally created and calling that progress?
- immad 10y ago
  Ads over time extract profit margins from all other industries. For example at least 50% of all profits from mobile games are spent on acquiring users from ads.
  - mattbettinson 10y ago
    Do you have a source on that? I'm not challenging, I believe it, I just wanna see some proof
    - xapata 10y ago
      What's your standard of proof? Do a thought experiment and you'll find a nugget of truth to the idea. Imagine two competitors who are otherwise identical. What would their AdWords buying strategy be?
    - Denzel 10y ago
      Maybe this will do it for you: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-century-of-flat-line-growth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi.... Ad spend as a % of U.S. GDP remains relatively constant since the 1920s.
  - coralreef 10y ago
    Hmm, not sure if "extracts profit margins" is the right terminology. In mobile games, you could have a lifetime value of a user that is higher than their acquisition cost. This generates a model where you can spend money to make money. In this instance, advertising is fuelling user acquisition which fuels profit.
pmarreck 10y ago
There are things out there, great things, just struggling to be the next whatever. There should be a way to look past the eclipse of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
- jacksnipe 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure Snapchat already was the next whatever
  - pmarreck 10y ago
    And there will be something else after it. Which probably already exists, and is just unknown.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Is it still?
    - freyir 10y ago
      No, it's the previous next whatever now.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  I have to say that Duck Duck Go feels a lot more like early Google than Google does now(it feels more like querying a database than asking a machine a question). I could see them taking lots of the 'pro' search traffic, especially with their bangs and the way they still just use Stack Overflow answers/Wikipedia articles for their preferred results instead of attempting to remix them.
  - dualogy 10y ago
    DDG is my default because the majority of my searches are specifically coding-related (as in, type the name of api and class and function or some such) and fact-based stuff (wiki, scientific articles whatever). But more often than not, for the more fuzzier queries I get the most useless results and have to manually go over to Google
nvalleysilico 10y ago
Google has never had to buy a competitor as its revenue, scientific and technology value is orders of magnitude greater than facebook et al. I'm looking for the next Google not the next facebook/myspace/snapchat/instagram.
- pipeep 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... Web search engines: - Outride (2001) - Kaltix (2003) - Akwan Information Technologies (2005) - Orion (2006) - Aardvark (2010) - PlinkArt (2010) - Metaweb (2010) - Like.com (2010) - Apture (2011) Granted, none of these were very high-profile, and Google hasn't acquired any other web search engines either, but to say "Google has never had to buy a competitor" is naive. They've also spent a lot of money acquiring competing companies that aren't related to their core business. YouTube competed with Google Video before they were acquired. DoubleClick competed with AdSense (and arguably, Google stole DoubleClick's model). Waze competed (and still competes) with Google Maps. Acquisitions aren't a sign of weakness.
  - nvalleysilico 10y ago
    Those were never direct competitors and never a threat to Google. Unlike easy-to-duplicate and fleeting social networking companies. Keep trying and keep in mind the DNA of Google in terms of being founded based on algorithmic technology as opposed to cut, copying and pasting text entry boxes for vicariously spying on girls (while also calling users "dumb f*cks" is much different than a core algorithmic search engine. This is evident by Google's revenue and breadth in hardware (TPUs etc) and true AI. Add the fact that Google controls more popular properties and products in terms of user adoption and revenue.
  - adventured 10y ago
    Might as well add to that, that Google's entire core business model was intentionally and directly swiped from GoTo.com (which they of course settled over). $90 billion in search ad sales built on a business concept they had to go outside of their own company for. Further deflates the parent's premise.
l33tbro 10y ago
It's disappointing that tech journalists don't go a bit harder at the founders when writing pieces like these. Sure, it's interesting to find out about Instagram's internal processes and their projections, but Facebook is becoming increasingly regarded as being the main contributor to a new kind of social malaise. Therefore, if Instagram is aspiring to that level of adoption, how can questions like this not be put to the founders? Maybe it's just me, but for once I'd love to see a journalist be a bit more frank with these siloed cyber-utopionists and ask some hard questions about what social value they're actually creating - rather than chewing over sign-up metrics and scaling strategies. Anecdotally, I've never seen one interview with Zuckerberg where a journalist actually calls him out on his "we're just connecting people" poppycock.
- olewhalehunter 10y ago
  When you are interviewing the entity that can throttle visits to your articles, it's a bit more complicated than that. Coincidentally, many of the "fake news" links they knocked down were sites that also criticized Facebook.
  - teej 10y ago
    > Coincidentally, many of the "fake news" links they knocked down were sites that also criticized Facebook. Citation needed.
    - olewhalehunter 10y ago
      https://www.infowars.com/proof-facebook-is-blocking-links-to-infowars-com/ https://www.infowars.com/proof-facebook-is-blocking-links-to...
      - ArtDev 10y ago
        The gold standard of fake news. As fake as it gets.
        10y ago
techaddict009 10y ago
off topic but Instagram's pre-production servers are getting indexed by google: https://preprod.instagram.com/vivek.be/ https://preprod.instagram.com/vivek.be/
- kamphey 10y ago
  What does this mean exactly? What does preprod do that normal instagram doesn't do?
KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago
I don't understand how google is so incompetent and just left facebook this field entirely to themselves. Why couldn't there be a Youtube Stills app for example?
- bootload 10y ago
  "I don't understand how google is so incompetent and just left Facebook this field entirely to themselves." @kaorduaoishiho, at it's core, google has never understood ^social^.
- scholia 10y ago
  Google had its own social network: Orkut. It was launched at the same time as Facebook and was initially much more popular. (Facebook membership was restricted to a few US universities.) Google also produced a knock-off of Facebook -- Google Plus -- which is still going but ultimately failed. In both cases, Google got the technology wrong. However, getting the technology right is still no guarantee of success. There's more to it than that....
olivermarks 10y ago
I immediately thought of this Stratechery post when reading the NYT piece. https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/ https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopo... At least the NYT photo of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger is hilarious, the rest of piece as others have noted the usual softballs to our technology overlords...
victorvation 10y ago
> More precisely, it feels the way Facebook did from 2009 to 2012, when it silently crossed over from one of those tech things that some people sometimes did to one of those tech things that everyone you know does every day. Ubiquity is an interesting thought - there are very few apps that an average person uses on a daily basis that _aren't_ owned by Facebook. Four of the most used apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) are owned by the same parent company. In China, we see an analogous example - to an even greater extent - WeChat is practically the de facto mobile OS. Where do we go from here? Hardware? WeChat seems most likely to do this, from my perspective. What happens when Tencent acquires Xiaomi and creates WeChatOS phones? What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly?
- adventured 10y ago
  > What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly? That's called jumping the shark. In this context, the point in time where people get so concerned about a powerful company, that a form of outlandish and irrational fear starts to set in. See: IBM 1970s, early 1980s; Microsoft late 1990s; Google today; Amazon soon; Facebook tomorrow. In most historical instances of monopoly or near monopoly, by the time the fear got really extreme, the company's power was already near a peak or in decline. I wish I could call it a mere exaggeration, the notion of Zuckerberg 'controlling nearly every waking moment for Americans' - but it's far beyond that.
  - jpatokal 10y ago
    That's not called jumping the shark. Jumping the shark is when something formerly cool/great (originally, Fonzie in TV sitcom Happy Days) does something so blatantly stupid (originally, jumping over a shark on water skis) that it becomes painfully obvious that they've lost all credibility. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
    - 10y ago
ronhav3 10y ago
I've been on Instagram for a year, and I still don't get it. I've gotten to a 1000 followers by regularly adding photos from my travels. I get a few hundred likes per photo and a couple of dozen of generic comments.And the occasional DM. Is this it ? Even by the standards of social media, it feels very superificial to me. Facebook 10 years ago was much more exciting.
- dmark3 10y ago
  I suppose it makes more sense if you have business to promote, or are one of those people trying to be become "influencers" and sell access to their account.
- wanderr 10y ago
  Everyone uses social media differently I guess, but in my case I almost exclusively follow and am followed by people who I know. I intentionally don't tag my posts. I love it this way. I get to see what my friends are up to, and share bits of my life with them as well. I am not happy with the non linear ordering change as it seems to prefer showing me things I've already seen above stuff I haven't, but even so Instagram is much more conducive to sharing photos and viewing them than FB ever was.
- personlurking 10y ago
  I've tried and failed (9.9x out of 10) to use the site for discovery...of anything interesting. For a site with so much content (media), it seems so void of content (significance, meaning).
- psyc 10y ago
  I don't get it either. I can only assume it's either a generational thing, or me not understanding things most people like. I've gone back, looked at, and tried to understand it several times, and I just can't see why I'd want to look at it or use it. "I want everybody to see this photo I took" "Cheers, I have seen your photo" I guess that's extremely compelling to folks.
  - ryanwaggoner 10y ago
harel 10y ago
Conversation (snippet) with my 20 year old cousin went like this: Me: are you on Facebook? Cousin: no, it's for old people. I'm on instagram.
- lapsock 10y ago
  right? It doesn't even make sense for him to say that. two completely different platforms. facebook is about people and instagram is about pictures.
  - ycombinete 10y ago
    Pictures of people, for the most part
  - lttlrck 10y ago
    A young person doesn't want I be on a platform full of "old people". That seems normal to me. Irrespective of the platforms aims.
  - MisterBastahrd 10y ago
    Facebook is (generally speaking) for people in their mid 20s and up who have become adults. Instagram is for artsy people who share photos, but is primarily used by teens - early 20s. But Facebook is a good enough platform, so why? Teens will always seek out places where they can be their usual obnoxious selves without the prying eyes of judgmental adults. Instagram isn't the destination for teens, it's just a waypoint until the Instagram users grow up, and then there'll be a new network that everyone will flock to. In the end, Facebook will still win. Ignoring the fact that Facebook owns instagram, the Instagram users will get married and have kids, and they'll want to share those moments with their parents and grandparents on Facebook. It's still the most widely used AND most robust of the social networks.
  - harel 10y ago
    Doesn't matter. They are on snapchat as well. They just find it odd to be on the same "social" platform their mum and grandma is on. - "Look how much beer I can chug in one go while half naked in the snow" -"That's nice love, are you coming for dinner? Love, Mum"
jansho 10y ago
From both consumer and designer perspectives, Instagram is my favourite social media. It strikes a beautiful balance overall: quick to post; very low commitment if I choose to; a gold mine of info, inspiration and talent if you know where to look; and even the advert model is done very well - I find myself clicking on some, while others can be easily skipped with a scroll. And here's the intriguing bit: I don't find myself "tied" to Instagram like I've experienced with other social media, and neither did it cost my social life. This is how social media should be like! Granted, I'm biased by the virtue of being more practiced in reigning in addiction :)
metehe 10y ago
Im worryed of facebook and google how much they dominate the social media. Worryed about they behavier and actions to violate privacy, modify opinions and force they way in technology. Why people follow these violators ? Why advertisers put money on this ? Sorry, facebook and google are for me big no no. I can't understand why people use these platforms. Why not to use alternatives ? I hope people would think before using these services more.
- ryanwaggoner 10y ago
  People use them because that's what everyone else uses. With a social network, that's kind of the point. And for whatever reason, most people don't care that much about the things you listed as big dangers.
a_imho 10y ago
I only have second hand experience with Instagram, but it feels they got product placement right. I regularly see people asking where they could buy the dresses/accessories/gifts featured in the photos, actively following brands instead of blocking what ads shovel in their face.
bamboozled 10y ago
I wonder how many users are actually aware that Instagram is owned by Facebook and then think about what that knowledge would do to public opinion and uptake. A portion of users enjoy using Instagram because they consider it a FB "alternative", and that they're privacy is at less risk by diversifying social media platforms.
borabora123 10y ago
Piut paut facebook ducks more than my socks! Privacy violator and sitty webclient ui.

132 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

Remember when people kept claiming Facebook buying Instagram wasn't a bad thing because "they're not ruining it" "They're just leaving it as the same old Instagram".

wmeredith 10y ago
I do. And I also recall thinking they were/are naive. I still think that.
IBM 10y ago
Uh that's what they've done. The article is about Instagram becoming like Facebook in the sense that this is a massive property on the scale of the core Facebook product. 700 million users vs Facebook's 2 billion.
- mtrpcic 10y ago
  Facebook has definitely not left it as the "same old Instagram". They've changed the home feed algorithm to basically the same as the Facebook home feed algorithm, and there's been a lot of content creators negatively impacted by it (I know this because of the industry my wife works in, which is having major issues now, where engagement has basically halved among anybody except the top maybe 5% of content creators).
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    So here's the thing: Facebook said they'd leave Instagram to be Instagram. But saying Facebook isn't holding that promise because things have changed isn't necessarily accurate. The people in charge of Instagram may have used more and more of Facebook's tools, looked at better analytics, tweaked, used lessons learned from Facebook, etc. While I agree it's unlikely that Facebook left them entirely alone I don't think it's necessarily fair to say they meddled just because things have changed. Nothing stays the same especially in the tech industry.
    - wand3r 10y ago
      I agree with this. I a sure there were changes for the better and worse do to the acquisition; but Systrom said that Instagram retained a lot of autonomy. I am not a user of FB or IG but certainly over several years the platform would change; all good tech products evolve. Contrasting this with Oculus; I think IG was given a lot less hands on MGMT.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      Not to mention that Twitter is moving in the same direction
      - majewsky 10y ago
        In 5 years we have the short-message Facebook (Twitter), the image Facebook (Instagram), the news Facebook (Facebook), the video Facebook (Youtube), maybe also the source code Facebook (Github [1]). That must be the market-driven diversity that my economics teachers loved to tell me all about. [1] That one is a bit of a stretch, but you can already "follow people" and they market themselves as a social network, so...
  - RandomInteger4 10y ago
    I see all the posts of anyone I follow in the temporal order in which they post. Do you even selfie bro?
  - threeseed 10y ago
    Organising content by what is relevant or interesting to you as an individual is hardly specific to Facebook or Instagram. Many companies are doing something the same thing e.g. Pinterest, Netflix, YouTube. Even companies like banks are using individual Next Best Action models to determine what marketing decision is right specifically for you rather than something generic to your demographic.
- abalone 10y ago
  Not at all. The article focuses on how Instagram has continually evolved itself despite the tendency of loyal users to decry change, specifically mentioning the ranked newsfeed and Snapchat-style stories. Having said that, I don't think it's "Facebook" doing this. This has probably been Instagram's approach to product from day one.

tabeth 10y ago

What exactly is the end goal of these advertising platforms, exactly? Ads in my mind are zero sum, so I'm pretty clueless on this front. One thing I find interesting is the simultaneous popularity of these newfound distractions and task/project management software. Are we solving problems that were intentionally created and calling that progress?

immad 10y ago
Ads over time extract profit margins from all other industries. For example at least 50% of all profits from mobile games are spent on acquiring users from ads.
- mattbettinson 10y ago
  Do you have a source on that? I'm not challenging, I believe it, I just wanna see some proof
  - xapata 10y ago
    What's your standard of proof? Do a thought experiment and you'll find a nugget of truth to the idea. Imagine two competitors who are otherwise identical. What would their AdWords buying strategy be?
  - Denzel 10y ago
    Maybe this will do it for you: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-century-of-flat-line-growth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi.... Ad spend as a % of U.S. GDP remains relatively constant since the 1920s.
- coralreef 10y ago
  Hmm, not sure if "extracts profit margins" is the right terminology. In mobile games, you could have a lifetime value of a user that is higher than their acquisition cost. This generates a model where you can spend money to make money. In this instance, advertising is fuelling user acquisition which fuels profit.

pmarreck 10y ago

There are things out there, great things, just struggling to be the next whatever. There should be a way to look past the eclipse of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

jacksnipe 10y ago
I'm pretty sure Snapchat already was the next whatever
- pmarreck 10y ago
  And there will be something else after it. Which probably already exists, and is just unknown.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Is it still?
  - freyir 10y ago
    No, it's the previous next whatever now.
H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
I have to say that Duck Duck Go feels a lot more like early Google than Google does now(it feels more like querying a database than asking a machine a question). I could see them taking lots of the 'pro' search traffic, especially with their bangs and the way they still just use Stack Overflow answers/Wikipedia articles for their preferred results instead of attempting to remix them.
- dualogy 10y ago
  DDG is my default because the majority of my searches are specifically coding-related (as in, type the name of api and class and function or some such) and fact-based stuff (wiki, scientific articles whatever). But more often than not, for the more fuzzier queries I get the most useless results and have to manually go over to Google

nvalleysilico 10y ago

Google has never had to buy a competitor as its revenue, scientific and technology value is orders of magnitude greater than facebook et al. I'm looking for the next Google not the next facebook/myspace/snapchat/instagram.

pipeep 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... Web search engines: - Outride (2001) - Kaltix (2003) - Akwan Information Technologies (2005) - Orion (2006) - Aardvark (2010) - PlinkArt (2010) - Metaweb (2010) - Like.com (2010) - Apture (2011) Granted, none of these were very high-profile, and Google hasn't acquired any other web search engines either, but to say "Google has never had to buy a competitor" is naive. They've also spent a lot of money acquiring competing companies that aren't related to their core business. YouTube competed with Google Video before they were acquired. DoubleClick competed with AdSense (and arguably, Google stole DoubleClick's model). Waze competed (and still competes) with Google Maps. Acquisitions aren't a sign of weakness.
- nvalleysilico 10y ago
  Those were never direct competitors and never a threat to Google. Unlike easy-to-duplicate and fleeting social networking companies. Keep trying and keep in mind the DNA of Google in terms of being founded based on algorithmic technology as opposed to cut, copying and pasting text entry boxes for vicariously spying on girls (while also calling users "dumb f*cks" is much different than a core algorithmic search engine. This is evident by Google's revenue and breadth in hardware (TPUs etc) and true AI. Add the fact that Google controls more popular properties and products in terms of user adoption and revenue.
- adventured 10y ago
  Might as well add to that, that Google's entire core business model was intentionally and directly swiped from GoTo.com (which they of course settled over). $90 billion in search ad sales built on a business concept they had to go outside of their own company for. Further deflates the parent's premise.

l33tbro 10y ago

It's disappointing that tech journalists don't go a bit harder at the founders when writing pieces like these. Sure, it's interesting to find out about Instagram's internal processes and their projections, but Facebook is becoming increasingly regarded as being the main contributor to a new kind of social malaise. Therefore, if Instagram is aspiring to that level of adoption, how can questions like this not be put to the founders? Maybe it's just me, but for once I'd love to see a journalist be a bit more frank with these siloed cyber-utopionists and ask some hard questions about what social value they're actually creating - rather than chewing over sign-up metrics and scaling strategies. Anecdotally, I've never seen one interview with Zuckerberg where a journalist actually calls him out on his "we're just connecting people" poppycock.

olewhalehunter 10y ago
When you are interviewing the entity that can throttle visits to your articles, it's a bit more complicated than that. Coincidentally, many of the "fake news" links they knocked down were sites that also criticized Facebook.
- teej 10y ago
  > Coincidentally, many of the "fake news" links they knocked down were sites that also criticized Facebook. Citation needed.
  - olewhalehunter 10y ago
    https://www.infowars.com/proof-facebook-is-blocking-links-to-infowars-com/ https://www.infowars.com/proof-facebook-is-blocking-links-to...
    - ArtDev 10y ago
      The gold standard of fake news. As fake as it gets.
      - 10y ago

techaddict009 10y ago

off topic but Instagram's pre-production servers are getting indexed by google: https://preprod.instagram.com/vivek.be/ https://preprod.instagram.com/vivek.be/

kamphey 10y ago
What does this mean exactly? What does preprod do that normal instagram doesn't do?

KaoruAoiShiho 10y ago

I don't understand how google is so incompetent and just left facebook this field entirely to themselves. Why couldn't there be a Youtube Stills app for example?

bootload 10y ago
"I don't understand how google is so incompetent and just left Facebook this field entirely to themselves." @kaorduaoishiho, at it's core, google has never understood ^social^.
scholia 10y ago
Google had its own social network: Orkut. It was launched at the same time as Facebook and was initially much more popular. (Facebook membership was restricted to a few US universities.) Google also produced a knock-off of Facebook -- Google Plus -- which is still going but ultimately failed. In both cases, Google got the technology wrong. However, getting the technology right is still no guarantee of success. There's more to it than that....

olivermarks 10y ago

I immediately thought of this Stratechery post when reading the NYT piece. https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/ https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopo... At least the NYT photo of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger is hilarious, the rest of piece as others have noted the usual softballs to our technology overlords...

victorvation 10y ago

> More precisely, it feels the way Facebook did from 2009 to 2012, when it silently crossed over from one of those tech things that some people sometimes did to one of those tech things that everyone you know does every day. Ubiquity is an interesting thought - there are very few apps that an average person uses on a daily basis that _aren't_ owned by Facebook. Four of the most used apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) are owned by the same parent company. In China, we see an analogous example - to an even greater extent - WeChat is practically the de facto mobile OS. Where do we go from here? Hardware? WeChat seems most likely to do this, from my perspective. What happens when Tencent acquires Xiaomi and creates WeChatOS phones? What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly?

adventured 10y ago
> What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly? That's called jumping the shark. In this context, the point in time where people get so concerned about a powerful company, that a form of outlandish and irrational fear starts to set in. See: IBM 1970s, early 1980s; Microsoft late 1990s; Google today; Amazon soon; Facebook tomorrow. In most historical instances of monopoly or near monopoly, by the time the fear got really extreme, the company's power was already near a peak or in decline. I wish I could call it a mere exaggeration, the notion of Zuckerberg 'controlling nearly every waking moment for Americans' - but it's far beyond that.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  That's not called jumping the shark. Jumping the shark is when something formerly cool/great (originally, Fonzie in TV sitcom Happy Days) does something so blatantly stupid (originally, jumping over a shark on water skis) that it becomes painfully obvious that they've lost all credibility. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
  - 10y ago

ronhav3 10y ago

I've been on Instagram for a year, and I still don't get it. I've gotten to a 1000 followers by regularly adding photos from my travels. I get a few hundred likes per photo and a couple of dozen of generic comments.And the occasional DM. Is this it ? Even by the standards of social media, it feels very superificial to me. Facebook 10 years ago was much more exciting.

dmark3 10y ago
I suppose it makes more sense if you have business to promote, or are one of those people trying to be become "influencers" and sell access to their account.
wanderr 10y ago
Everyone uses social media differently I guess, but in my case I almost exclusively follow and am followed by people who I know. I intentionally don't tag my posts. I love it this way. I get to see what my friends are up to, and share bits of my life with them as well. I am not happy with the non linear ordering change as it seems to prefer showing me things I've already seen above stuff I haven't, but even so Instagram is much more conducive to sharing photos and viewing them than FB ever was.
personlurking 10y ago
I've tried and failed (9.9x out of 10) to use the site for discovery...of anything interesting. For a site with so much content (media), it seems so void of content (significance, meaning).
psyc 10y ago
I don't get it either. I can only assume it's either a generational thing, or me not understanding things most people like. I've gone back, looked at, and tried to understand it several times, and I just can't see why I'd want to look at it or use it. "I want everybody to see this photo I took" "Cheers, I have seen your photo" I guess that's extremely compelling to folks.
- ryanwaggoner 10y ago

harel 10y ago

Conversation (snippet) with my 20 year old cousin went like this: Me: are you on Facebook? Cousin: no, it's for old people. I'm on instagram.

lapsock 10y ago
right? It doesn't even make sense for him to say that. two completely different platforms. facebook is about people and instagram is about pictures.
- ycombinete 10y ago
  Pictures of people, for the most part
- lttlrck 10y ago
  A young person doesn't want I be on a platform full of "old people". That seems normal to me. Irrespective of the platforms aims.
- MisterBastahrd 10y ago
  Facebook is (generally speaking) for people in their mid 20s and up who have become adults. Instagram is for artsy people who share photos, but is primarily used by teens - early 20s. But Facebook is a good enough platform, so why? Teens will always seek out places where they can be their usual obnoxious selves without the prying eyes of judgmental adults. Instagram isn't the destination for teens, it's just a waypoint until the Instagram users grow up, and then there'll be a new network that everyone will flock to. In the end, Facebook will still win. Ignoring the fact that Facebook owns instagram, the Instagram users will get married and have kids, and they'll want to share those moments with their parents and grandparents on Facebook. It's still the most widely used AND most robust of the social networks.
- harel 10y ago
  Doesn't matter. They are on snapchat as well. They just find it odd to be on the same "social" platform their mum and grandma is on. - "Look how much beer I can chug in one go while half naked in the snow" -"That's nice love, are you coming for dinner? Love, Mum"

jansho 10y ago

From both consumer and designer perspectives, Instagram is my favourite social media. It strikes a beautiful balance overall: quick to post; very low commitment if I choose to; a gold mine of info, inspiration and talent if you know where to look; and even the advert model is done very well - I find myself clicking on some, while others can be easily skipped with a scroll. And here's the intriguing bit: I don't find myself "tied" to Instagram like I've experienced with other social media, and neither did it cost my social life. This is how social media should be like! Granted, I'm biased by the virtue of being more practiced in reigning in addiction :)

metehe 10y ago

Im worryed of facebook and google how much they dominate the social media. Worryed about they behavier and actions to violate privacy, modify opinions and force they way in technology. Why people follow these violators ? Why advertisers put money on this ? Sorry, facebook and google are for me big no no. I can't understand why people use these platforms. Why not to use alternatives ? I hope people would think before using these services more.

ryanwaggoner 10y ago
People use them because that's what everyone else uses. With a social network, that's kind of the point. And for whatever reason, most people don't care that much about the things you listed as big dangers.

a_imho 10y ago

I only have second hand experience with Instagram, but it feels they got product placement right. I regularly see people asking where they could buy the dresses/accessories/gifts featured in the photos, actively following brands instead of blocking what ads shovel in their face.

bamboozled 10y ago

I wonder how many users are actually aware that Instagram is owned by Facebook and then think about what that knowledge would do to public opinion and uptake. A portion of users enjoy using Instagram because they consider it a FB "alternative", and that they're privacy is at less risk by diversifying social media platforms.

borabora123 10y ago

Piut paut facebook ducks more than my socks! Privacy violator and sitty webclient ui.