21 ms·

Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

417 points by theBashShell 6y ago

mothsonasloth 6y ago
Has anyone noticed the emergence of axios.com articles trending on HackerNews in the last week? Is this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios?
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  I'm not sure what the cause is, but I could imagine that the interview kind of exploded their visibility, especially in the US.
- exdsq 6y ago
  Random spot check and they all seem to be shared by users with high karma, so I think the site is just more popular? And it’s not some sort of marketing push by them.
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    They’ve been around for a few years with really solid (in my opinion) daily email news digests, and the in depth reporting they’ve done seems solid too, so I generally trust what they publish.
    - adsjhdashkj 6y ago
      How would you rate them to APNews or Economist?
      - munchbunny 6y ago
        Do you mean trustworthiness? APNews is only good for the fact that something happened, not for any degree of interpretation, and you have to be on your guard for what isn't being said and what facts haven't been mentioned. The Economist is different because they talk about only a few things and usually add a whole lot of opinion, but when I do dig deeper I find that they generally take defensible stances even if there are problems with their arguments. And if Hacker News is any indication, you'll never be able to assert anything with confidence, however well researched, without someone else asserting the exact opposite with more confidence. My experience with Axios is that they generally avoid taking editorial positions that are obviously partisan, though they are clearly left of center on the American political spectrum (then again, I think America's current political spectrum has moved so much that the bounds of reality are now mostly left of center). When I dig deeper, I usually find that they aren't guilty of selectively presenting information. Their business model is still ad driven, so they are not immune to the classic problems of money influencing news, so I still view Axios with default skepticism.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - bredren 6y ago
        Too early to tell, though the brand feels more modern and digital.
    - bredren 6y ago
      Yep. They’ve been publishing seriously for a while now but it is hard to break through. I wondered if it was a conservative publication at the start. But they did the Swan / Trump interview and now I think the brand is on the map.
  - zo1 6y ago
    It is a bit odd from my perspective because I have not seen/heard of "Axios" until this "Trump Interview" thing happened. So I understand the OP's bafflement at it's prominence all of a sudden. Even the fact that they got an interview with the US president seems out of place to me.
    - rurp 6y ago
      I've been reading the site regularly for a few years and seen them (often Swan) break a lot of Inside Baseball type stories on the White House, which I take to mean that they have some pretty high level sources. They also do occasional stories that look like obvious beat-sweateners[0], likely to keep that access flowing. Overall I'd say it's a pretty good source for non-partisan news. [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beat%20sweetener https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beat%20sweet...
  - adventured 6y ago
    Axios has no paywall, which considerably bolsters the shareability as it pertains to HN. Reuters stories also fill that role now, as eg Bloomberg and many other prominent news sources have clamped down hard on their non-paywalled content.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  > Is this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios? Are these the only two possible reasons to choose from?
  - rvz 6y ago
    There's a Trump-related medical condition which always surfaces when a person is fuelled with conspiracy and suspicion towards him in everyday life. I can't think of its name.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Using HN's search with the term axios.com, I see lots of articles from months and years ago, some with massive point totals. I don't think this week is much different from the past.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  I think you're actually just experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
circa 6y ago
Ahhh yes. More cringeworthy content for us all!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xvector 6y ago
  Meh, comments like this are cringeworthy. Let people enjoy what they enjoy.
saos 6y ago
Ugh
dmitriid 6y ago
> The new product will be embedded within Instagram Oh god. It means that, like Instagram TV or whatever it was called, it will be forcibly shoved down your throat for the next half a year with nagging reminders for another year.
- catalogia 6y ago
  To easily solve this problem, uninstall all Facebook-owned applications. I know this probably seems absurd and impossible. I promise you that facebook may seem necessary when you're addicted to it but after you break that addiction you'll be left wondering what the hell you were ever thinking in the first place.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  I check Instagram most days and I had never heard of Instagram TV before this post. They can't possibly have been shoving it down everyone's throats that aggressively.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    You didn't use Instagram when they rolled out IGTV then. There were multiple inline promotions, aggressive hints for the dedicated IGTV button, then they made this dedicated button red (in an otherwise gray-and-white interface) for several months. It still failed, of course, and got relegated to a small button inside the explore tab, but it the push was aggressive nonetheless. Expect the same for "Facebook's TikTok".
OzzyB 6y ago
Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time: " Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps. " Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 [1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Spot on. I do get how Reels could eventually be rolled into replacing Discover or even the home feed but the IGTV thing is just bizarre. Yeah let's enter a mode where you start by consuming content 3 seconds long and then suddenly some of it is an hour and you have to hold your phone awkwardly not to touch the screen while you watch it. Really feels like it belongs more in the feed part than the stories part but I guess no one would watch it then.
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    IGTV content does show up in the feed also, which kinda proves your point that no one would watch it there.
    - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
      I thought it did but you had to click to activate it. Only watched one once and feel like that’s where I did.
sixhobbits 6y ago
I read this as "Instagram reels [from the blast]" and was super confused about why Instagram was being hurt by products launched from its parent company.
- mc32 6y ago
  Same here I understood it as sending insta reeling from the decision.
- addicted 6y ago
  That’s exactly how I read it as well until I noticed the upper case R.
- samizdis 6y ago
  Ah, but the headline is written in sentence case, not title case - as can be seen in the words "launches", "its" and "rival", which are read before "Instagram Reels". Rookie error ;-)
DrBazza 6y ago
Never used Tiktok, or Instagram, and Facebook just now seems to be nothing more than a feed of irrelevant ads to, and any friends' or family posts are relegated to the little bell icon. I barely look at it more than once every few days now as it has lost much of its utility. Most of my friends and family are on other social networks and sites (twitter, strava, discord) now with fewer, or no ads, or even just whatsapp groups on the phone.
- wy35 6y ago
  Not exactly sure how your personal experience with a company is really relevant, considering that the article is specifically discussing a new product said company is launching. But transitioning to more intimate forms of social media is a great move, so I'm glad you made the switch. A lot of people do find Facebook (for example) to be too fake, while others need it to keep in touch with their family and communities.
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    You're right my post isn't that relevant. The product they are launching, for me, isn't relevant either. We've long since reached peak Facebook, and its social network is fragmenting as they're losing people for the reasons I mentioned previously. They're effectively chasing a new audience to keep their numbers up.
whalesalad 6y ago
Instagram is the beta test environment/battleground for Facebook.
- identity0 6y ago
  Haha no. Facebook is where successful instagram features go to die.
pletsch 6y ago
My biggest wish for Instagram is to stop creating new ways to format content and give users more control over how their content is distributed. For example, I know a few people with private accounts for close friends or fitness accounts, why not create feeds of posts that people can subscribe to? They have a similar feature with stories/highlights. This is most likely to boost account #s but it's frustrating to have to follow multiple accounts for one person.
- notacoward 6y ago
  This, but not just for Instagram. I know people who have separate "pages" on Facebook to represent different interests. I know people who have multiple Twitter accounts for the same reason, and even more that I wish would. For all of its weaknesses, Google Plus took a step in this direction with circles. I think streams would be even better. P.S. Tags could be better still, but only if they're used consistently. My experience with other places/tools that use tags is that never ever happens, so I'd go with streams.
zackhsi 6y ago
How powerful is the video editing compared to TikTok?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nikofeyn 6y ago
it's amazing to me that the same group of people that consistently whine about unfair treatment of businesses and also china are likely the same group of people applauding the administration's taking tiktok hostage, forcing a sale with the threat of ban and wildly making up claims of what's owed to the government while u.s. companies swoop in to release competing features and for a bargain buyout.
linsomniac 6y ago
Youtube also has one, I don't remember when I first started noticing it, because I scrolled past it for a long time before opening one. On my phone, in the app, towards the top of the list of videos, is a section called "Stories and short videos". So far, there is very little compelling in there.
snowwrestler 6y ago
I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry. At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service--Tik Tok--was able to rise against them. That said, I do think there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it). Then the next round of teens seek a new platform--even if the functionality is the same--just so they can have it to themselves. Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new. The business strategy in the face of this theory would be to continuously start or buy new social platforms with similar feature sets, but each time with a new brand that is totally separate from the (older) parent brand so teens don't get scared off.
- nikofeyn 6y ago
  just as a note, tiktok was not an entirely new service. they bought and then transformed musical.ly.
  - wy35 6y ago
    Technically, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is what the US Tiktok was based off of, and Douyin was launched in 2016 prior to the 2017 musical.ly acquisition. But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dilap 6y ago
  My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.
carlosdp 6y ago
> Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile. That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch. It's a big part of why it's so popular. > Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos. TikTok has had AR filters for a long time now...
- derivagral 6y ago
  Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't? do the authors not know, and neither does the audience? I get the "you know your own field better than the writer" effect, but a very large group of people use and at least sort of know how TikTok works, right?
  - chishaku 6y ago
    The average Axios reader does not use TikTok and the average Axios reporter probably doesn't either.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't? Do you mean the superficial author of the piece or the author of the PR material they are regurgitating? My guess is someone involved with the latter function knows what is going on in the market and is deliberately being deceptive (but probably not outright lying, the release itself probably doesn't claim that TikTok lacks the described features though it is probably written in a way which gives that impression), the former may or may not know, but probably doesn't care; the better a stenographer they are the more access they get.
- Traster 6y ago
  The AR claim is a claim that was made by instragram's head of product (who is quoted in other articles). The author presumably just wrote up the article and didn't bother to check that what Instagram are claiming is actually true.
surround 6y ago
Facebook launched Lasso as its own app two years ago. I’m not sure if there were any differences between it and TikTok, but either way, it failed miserably. https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...
- jug 6y ago
  FB also has a Stories feature as Instagram, in turn from Snapchat, but I barely see anyone use it while everyone and their cat (literally) use Instagram Stories. Also, FB took a more advanced friend list concept from Google+ but few use or know how it works. (Like how “Acquintances” are your friends but they are pushed down by the algorithm) It is apparent that it’s hard to just shoehorn different usage patterns due to different social cultures evolving on the respective networks. Let’s see how they do this time...
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    people use it in my country. it's quite popular. But here facebook = internet.
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    For me, I know majority of my younger friends use IG stories and have abandoned snapchat.
  - vitorgrs 6y ago
    In Brazil, Instagram Stories basically killed Snapchat.
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  slightly unrelated but does anyone else find TechCrunch navigation to be absolutely unbearable? Also hijacking the back button on my browser.
mrkramer 6y ago
They should've chosen better name.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Instagram is gonna be constantly surprised and reeling from successive announcements.
euix 6y ago
I find myself never actually using social media. Good friends belong to the same Signal group chats. I have several of these which consists of cliques I have built up over the years in school and at work and that's how I stay in touch. For those that are further out of reach there is email and linkedin if I really need to dig someone up from the past.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new". I wish I could get a handful of my friends to use something like Signal. Best even something not requiring a phone number. It's stupid that Signal wants a phone number. What has my phone number to do with chatting via Internet? Any advice how to get your friends to switch, when they do not care much about their privacy and have a defeatism attitude with regard to guarding their privacy or simply do not understand, that their actions affect their friends?
  - euix 6y ago
    I find good friends often share similar technological viewpoints right down to the basic level. The people I have on signal are pretty much all cut from the same cloth in that regard. I.E. they tend to avoid big internet corps whenever possible and hack their own solutions. For people I consider casual acquaintances or just outside of the "inner circle" so to speak, I just use SMS.
    - baby 6y ago
      Are you saying you have no diversity in your friends? They’re all technical and they all have the same privacy view as you?
  - throwgeorge 6y ago
    >You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new". you're saying this about someone that claims all of their friends use only one app. the fact that that app is signal does that not make them more flexible or better informed than someone who was born into some religion and decided it was coincidentally the most true.
samcheng 6y ago
Comedian Jeff Wright had a great commentary recently on how Instagram has a history of copying upstart social networks (Vine, Snapchat, and now TikTok). https://twitter.com/JeffRightNoww/status/1287842365126914048 https://twitter.com/JeffRightNoww/status/1287842365126914048 (Coincidentally, I think Jeff Wright had his breakthrough TikTok...)
Firebrand 6y ago
Reels’ inclusion in Instagram makes the UI confusing for me. Right now it only feeds me three or four videos that are peppered in my discover feed when I scroll down so I have to swipe up to refresh for more videos: https://imgur.com/a/jDtYbVP https://imgur.com/a/jDtYbVP Why not have a separate section dedicated to Reels content instead of having it interspersed with photos and regular video posts?
- bigpumpkin 6y ago
  Yeah, I was trying it out too and found it confusing as well. I think they are trying to make old users suddenly discover reels while flipping through photos, but it feels very messy.
- reggieband 6y ago
  I took me doing a Google search to find the original Instagram PR release that had instructions on where even to find Reels. But once you are in any Reel it acts just like TikTok, you swipe up for a never-ending feed of content. So in a sense, any Reel is a portal into "a separate section dedicated to Reels content".
heyheyhey 6y ago
Official announcement: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-instagram-reels-announcement/ https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-i...
ffggvv 6y ago
why does everyone think they can beat tik tok just taking their existing content and changing the navigation to clone tik tok? people use it for the content, not the navigation style
- baby 6y ago
  That’s what they said about Snapchat
  - staycoolboy 6y ago
    What is the status of snapchat? Does it still exist? Does anyone use it? How do they split time between TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and the other half-dozen platforms?
    - Rompect 6y ago
      As a young(er) gen Z dude, I have no clue.
    - snazz 6y ago
      As someone roughly in the target age and location audience for all of the things you mentioned, here's my take: - TikTok is somewhat mindless entertainment. Keep scrolling, watch funny or informative videos, and the algorithm will tailor more content to your tastes. It's fun and an absolute time-suck, but not any kind of critical communication. I don't personally know anyone who makes TikTok content, but most people I know watch it at least occasionally. - Instagram is used for sharing a more public view of your life. While most people I know have private accounts, they usually follow and are followed by between a few hundred and a thousand or so other accounts (think classmates and friends of friends). Instagram is where you post photos of yourself in the best possible light, not just silly and random things. People use Stories to share news and post sillier and less permanent content. Not everyone just scrolls endlessly on Instagram; I only follow people I know in real life but many people follow celebrities and meme accounts as well. - Snapchat is more like a communication platform than a social media platform. People send disappearing photos (usually quick selfies or photos of what they're doing at the moment) to their friends. If you exchange a photo or video with someone for any number of consecutive days, you'll start a streak with that person, which further incentivizes you to continue sending photos to them. Snapchat also has stories, but these are usually intended to be even less permanent. Candid selfies with friends or videos of people doing silly things are the main use, at least within my extended group of friends. It's gotten no less popular recently. - YouTube continues to be popular. Hopefully this should be self-explanatory. Gaming content is popular. - Facebook is basically unused by anyone my age other than for specific groups that haven't migrated elsewhere. - GroupMe is popular for college class group chats and whatnot, but not as a place to hang out and talk about other stuff. - Twitter is still occasionally used for content consumption, but not as much as Instagram. - FaceTime, Snapchat's video-calling functionality, and Houseparty (sometimes) are the usual ways to communicate via video chat between friends. - Discord is expanding outside of gaming circles for text and voice chat. - Reddit is mildly popular for meme content.
plibither8 6y ago
This is it's worldwide launch. Reels was already launched in India a few weeks ago when the Indian government imposed a ban on TikTok.
sidcool 6y ago
This seems like a perfect opportunity since TikTok is banned in India. Most influencers will migrate to Instagram reels. I don't like facebook's business model, but seems they know how to make money.
kashyapc 6y ago
For a moment, I read the word "reels" in the headline as a verb (meaning: "lose one's balance and stagger"), instead of a noun (film reel). But my mind quickly readjusted: "that doesn't make sense, because FB owns Instagram."
- joemi 6y ago
  I read it the same way initially, thinking a different FB team made the tiktok competitor and the Instagram team didn't know about it and was taken aback.
- drusepth 6y ago
  I know how it's supposed to be read (and I've even seen real reels at old movie theaters!), but I still just think about fishing reels every time I see it.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    > but I still just think about fishing reels every time I see it. The goal is to hook you after all...
- ClikeX 6y ago
  Instagram "Reel our users back in from Tik-Tok" didn't really roll from the tongue, I assume.
staycoolboy 6y ago
How can there be room for so many social media apps? One option is that all of them carve up the social media demographic in such a way that they have enough users to be profitable, but no majority. Another outcome is that teens are fickle, but if the platforms move from content creators to individuals, then it is no longer a social media platform and just the new MTV(s). I have no idea how this is going to shake out and I am fascinated by it, despite HN being the only social media platform I use.
- kart23 6y ago
  I think influences, celebrities and other people that teens look up to have a massive effect on these platforms. Look at clothes, streetwear brands that celebrities wear instantly become popular and sell out. The purpose of social media is to interact with your friends but also see celebrities and their pages. Even if a platform is better or cooler than another, nobodys going to switch because none of your friends are on it and there's no point. But if your favorite artist and a couple of popular youtubers get on, you might make an account to see their content. And then you see that some of your friends have it, and start using it more. After a while, maybe people stopped posting on the old social media app and you delete it because the people you follow aren't active on it anymore.
praveen9920 6y ago
>..popular karaoke app TikTok.. Never heard it that way.
- parliament32 6y ago
  The entire article is filled with things that are flat-out wrong, I'm not sure how this made it past an editor. > Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile TikTok is all about showing you content tailored to you. Compare your TikTok feed to any of your friends' and it'll be super different. > Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos TikTok's had this forever.
nilkn 6y ago
Reels isn’t going to compete with TikTok in any real way for a few simple reasons. First and foremost, as a non-Instagram user, I flat-out can’t use it. A while back, when I was curious about TikTok, I downloaded it and was instantly swiping through a video feed that was already getting customized for me. I downloaded Instagram this morning and was presented with a wall to create an account. Nope. Second, TikTok is new. Instagram is old. Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated.
- parliament32 6y ago
  People also want to use the apps that corporations haven't infiltrated yet. Notice how there's very little advertising / sponsored posts / product placement on TikTok. See: IG is basically the Home Shopping Network now, with an ad between every third post and sponsored products in every mainstream account's feed.
  - powerapple 6y ago
    Lol. I use IG mainly for advertisings from local restaurants and hotels. It worked pretty well for me so far. I have discovered so many businesses.
- rattray 6y ago
  > Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated. There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW. I definitely agree that TikTok's no-login-wall NUX was wonderful. You can even watch on a laptop without logging in.
  - rsa25519 6y ago
    > There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW. And the beauty of TikTok is that's okay. People over 30 can join the app without disrupting my feed of age-relevant content. This is unlike a lot of other social networks (e.g. Reddit) where content is shows from outside my social graph
Apocryphon 6y ago
The Congressional antitrust hearings were a week ago.
- RedditKon 6y ago
  Which is probably why Zuk is doubling down on Reels instead of trying to buy TikTok - he know it'd never get approved.
rsynnott 6y ago
How to appeal to Gen Z; name the thing after a form of video playback that was totally obsolete before any of them were born.
- daenz 6y ago
  People seem to underestimate how important a name can be. "Instagram Reels", "Reels", "IG Reels"... they have no buzz, they're clunky to say, and like you said, it already implies ancient uncool tech. The marketing people must have been phoning it in when they named this.
  - ttamslam 6y ago
    I obviously don't speak a generation but I'm in the target demo and I like the name. "Did you see X's reel the other day?" to me feels better than "Did you see X's tiktok the other day?"
    - kyawzazaw 6y ago
      reel sounds like a word that has another meaning. tiktok doesn't. i feel better saying tiktok
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Such as, fishing reel. I'd actually forgotten it was the word for the thing film went on.
    - fr2null 6y ago
      I am also in the target demo, do not like the product, but the name sounds pretty good. Like "Have you seen her story?" "Did you see her last reel?" just sounds nice.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  The people who launched Reels are probably in their 30s and 40s and working against serious organizational biases that prevent them from innovating. So not surprised that they named this Reels.
tqwhite 6y ago
I wonder if Zuck included the Suppress Biden Tags feature? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/instagram-related-hashtags-favoring-trump-over-biden https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/instagram-relat...
chessmango 6y ago
"Instagram Reels" in this headline reads like present simple tense. But then you realize that Instagram isn't a competitor to Facebook, and well...
ogre_codes 6y ago
It seems like Instagram is Facebook's anti-competitive tool. Whenever some new social network crops up, Facebook bolts on a clone to Instagram. Eventually it's going to be such a bloated mess it's going to cease being useful to anyone.
- holler 6y ago
  Might simply be due to IG's popularity vs Blue app... If there's ever an exodus from IG I don't know what they'll do (probably try to buy the other company).
- ClikeX 6y ago
  Is going to be? Instagram already lost me a while ago. It started to hamfist Snapchat stories in there. I also believe they tried to force in Facebook Messenger features at some point. It also totally ruined any proper disoverability. You like one Comic Book post and suddenly you only get stupid text only posts about superhero facts. With no way to manually configure your interests. And to make things worse, my personal feed got messed up because they thought it was best to no longer show the feed chronologically. Because hiding new posts lower in the feed, and keep showing me week-old posts on top was obviously a good idea. All I want is sharing pictures I took with my friends, while also looking at photography from random people.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > All I want is sharing pictures I took with my friends, while also looking at photography from random people. Sharing pics & stories with friends/ family was why I started using FB years ago. I think Instagram became popular because FB had become a polluted mess before young people even had a chance to try it. Older people just stuck around out of habit. I never liked IG because generally my FB posts and images are hosted on my blog first and crossposted, something you can't do on IG. Fully agree that IG is already a mess. But people haven't really abandoned it yet in numbers. They just stopped attracting new people.
    - ClikeX 6y ago
Touche 6y ago
These types of articles are so frustrating and show why media is failing so badly. This is an article about a product launch that: * Barely talks about the product at all. * No demos of what the product does. * Not even a single picture of what the product looks like. * Does not link to the actual product's page. * Very few links at all, and mostly to their own pages. * Is 50% about the competitor's legal/political issues. * IS 50% about the parent company's strategy in launching the product. I don't understand why there can't be 2 articles here: * Information about the product launch. * An opinion article about Facebook strategy vs. Microsoft TikTok Trump. I'm pretty sure everyone just skims these articles because they are so uninformative. Can I be the only person who feels this way?
- chris_va 6y ago
  This reads to me like it was written by Facebook PR (indirectly) via a press packet. A lot of "news" articles are just PR departments lobbying journalists. The journalist tweaks stuff slightly, then dumps it over the wall. This sort of thing is very cheap to produce. And, to be fair, it isn't actually new. The more useful/novel/investigative content has slowly declined, so this is all that's left. There just isn't any money in writing news. Newspapers were never paid for news content, but rather delivering ads to everyone's doorstep daily. E.g. subscription revenue was much less than ad revenue, to the point that it was never clear to me why subscription prices were non-zero (though they were usually separate departments with their own P&L, so it's probably just historical). There are better ways to find classifieds, job listings, and brand advertising these days... So now we have this junk. If one could find a way of financially or otherwise incentivizing real journalism, you'd be a folk hero.
  - Touche 6y ago
    I'm not expecting investigative journalism here. I just expect the article about a product launch to be mostly about the product being launched. Like pull out your phone install the app and take a screenshot or two. List what it does and how it works. Save the corporate strategery and political intrigue stuff for another article.
tus88 6y ago
That's a reel bad name.
beepboopbeep 6y ago
I can't help but feel that zuckerberg has unduly influenced the president to ban tiktok in order for them to further corner the social media market. This feels wrong.
jimmaswell 6y ago
Not a catchy name at all. I'd forecast failure on that alone.
cboornaz17 6y ago
Jumped on my Instagram explore page to see what Reels actually looks like since the article doesn’t show any screenshots.. Of the first three posts I saw, two of them were cross posted from TikTok. Not that it’s new to see social media content posted to another app, but is there anything to be said for the fact that Facebook can now monetize TikToks in another fashion? Seems like even if they don’t win in terms of creators moving platforms, it would still be in a creator’s best interest to post a successful TikTok again as a Reel.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
collegeburner 6y ago
Instagram has a real shot at out-doing ticktock here. It's got much better penetration among youth and can take serious advantage of that. Ticktock is basically a subculture, used by the same people that used vsco a few years ago. Just my two cents.
rconti 6y ago
I was going to say "I can't wait to have a second row of crap across the top of my Instagram feed that I don't care about" ... and I open the IG app, and now "stories" takes up two rows. haha.
fatjokes 6y ago
> Facebook launches its TikTok clone, Instagram Reels FTFY. I'm being facetious of course. The real clone here is being done by the US gov't, who is copying the Chinese playbook: keep out a foreign company by political means, thus encouraging local competitors. I guess it's really true that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
- l33tbro 6y ago
  > keep out a foreign company by political means, thus encouraging the domestic tech oligopoly. FTFY ;)
shuringai 6y ago
wow we can finally get back to being spied on by the US as usual instead of china!
magic7s 6y ago
I have a hunch that TikTok fakes the amount of likes that users post. I’ve heard people say their first post goes viral. It’s an interesting strategy. Young person posts a TikTok, “get famous”, keeps posting.
- snazz 6y ago
  It could also be that they give more prominence to people's first or second posts to get them off the ground. That effect doesn't have to be caused by artificial like inflation.
- corford 6y ago
  I don't think it's faking. That behaviour sounds broadly inline with https://www.veed.io/grow/reverse-engineering-how-tiktok-algorithm-works/ https://www.veed.io/grow/reverse-engineering-how-tiktok-algo...
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...
nikolay 6y ago
What a huge favor to Microsoft, which now can acquire TikTok for a lot less!
verst 6y ago
Today I tried posting a Reel. This wasn't intuitive as the flow for doing this is similar to creating a Story. When selecting an existing video as a reel I do not have a way to edit it or add overlays and the total reel duration is 15 seconds vs 60 on TikTok. Discovering reels is tricky also. I have to go to search and click on the word reels within the random suggested reel at the top. What is more - I want reels to be separate from whom I follow on Instagram. I want to follow certain content creators for their reels, but do not want to see their stories or photo stream. I also don't want them to show up as people I follow on my main Instagram profile. The TikTok features for creating content, discovering it, replying to it (remix / duet etc) and just the responsiveness of the UI make it much more fun and pleasant to use. Reels does not meaningfully compete with TikTok. It will only appeal to some of the existing user base, but not attract TikTok users. FYI I'm 34. I post music, running, travel and random adventure clips to Instagram, TikTok and other places.
f1ying_1otus 6y ago
"log in with Tik Tok" will be their aim. They'll push their decentralized identity platform with this and advertise that your data is safe and you aren't being tracked.
theodric 6y ago
Cool, another piece of Millennial crap I don't need to install
- smabie 6y ago
  Millenials are getting old, zoomers are the new hot thing.
- dencodev 6y ago
  ok boomer
chris_wot 6y ago
I read this as "Instagram reels" from the fact that Facebook launched a rival...
holografix 6y ago
Instagram is what it always was for Facebook: a clear sign of the decline of Facebook’s original product into irrelevance while it slowly mutates into infinite town square forums trapped in valley of echoing stupidity and a less anonymous craigslist/gumtree. The Instagram acquisition was the first clear sign Facebook never could innovate it could only steal and perfect existing ideas. Now they decided that outright copying is cheaper than buying, so they copy Snapchat and now TikTok.
- Panini_Jones 6y ago
  Facebook came out with the Oculus Quest last year which is hugely innovative.
  - ngokevin 6y ago
    You could say that evolved out of the "buying" era as the above commenter said, as Oculus was an acquisition.
    - Panini_Jones 6y ago
      Oculus Quest was developed by Facebook, not Oculus.
  - ClikeX 6y ago
    Apart from Quest being a standalone device, it was just an iteration on the original Rift. And it was another company they bought, and I'd be more inclined to give credits to the Occulus team than to Facebook.
    - Panini_Jones 6y ago
      > Apart from Quest being a standalone device, it was just an iteration on the original Rift In that it's a VR device, yes. But it's a standalone headset with Inside Out tracking. Many people didn't think this was possible. > And it was another company they bought, and I'd be more inclined to give credits to the Occulus team than to Facebook. A significant amount of FB employees developed this headset. It is Oculus is Facebook now.
switch11 6y ago
hats off to Facebook for being absolutely shameless and zero ethics they don't even pretend to be honest (unlike Google) and it's a miracle so far they haven't had to pay damages for all the 'inspiration' they have found from other people's products
- wmeredith 6y ago
  I'm sure 'Zuck is very sorry.
  - wmeredith 6y ago
    For reference: https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...
Mupuff 6y ago
I wonder if they waited for after the congress testimony to launch this. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg was questioned[1] about this strategy. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyI3ixI1xSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyI3ixI1xSk
esotericsean 6y ago
I truly hate that Instagram is owned by Facebook. It's genuinely the best, most positive social media platform that I've been a part of. I've made genuine friends and found an amazing community in my niche. Please don't destroy it, Facebook.

417 points by theBashShell 6y ago

Has anyone noticed the emergence of axios.com articles trending on HackerNews in the last week? Is this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios?

themodelplumber 6y ago
I'm not sure what the cause is, but I could imagine that the interview kind of exploded their visibility, especially in the US.
exdsq 6y ago
Random spot check and they all seem to be shared by users with high karma, so I think the site is just more popular? And it’s not some sort of marketing push by them.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  They’ve been around for a few years with really solid (in my opinion) daily email news digests, and the in depth reporting they’ve done seems solid too, so I generally trust what they publish.
  - adsjhdashkj 6y ago
    How would you rate them to APNews or Economist?
    - munchbunny 6y ago
      Do you mean trustworthiness? APNews is only good for the fact that something happened, not for any degree of interpretation, and you have to be on your guard for what isn't being said and what facts haven't been mentioned. The Economist is different because they talk about only a few things and usually add a whole lot of opinion, but when I do dig deeper I find that they generally take defensible stances even if there are problems with their arguments. And if Hacker News is any indication, you'll never be able to assert anything with confidence, however well researched, without someone else asserting the exact opposite with more confidence. My experience with Axios is that they generally avoid taking editorial positions that are obviously partisan, though they are clearly left of center on the American political spectrum (then again, I think America's current political spectrum has moved so much that the bounds of reality are now mostly left of center). When I dig deeper, I usually find that they aren't guilty of selectively presenting information. Their business model is still ad driven, so they are not immune to the classic problems of money influencing news, so I still view Axios with default skepticism.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - bredren 6y ago
      Too early to tell, though the brand feels more modern and digital.
  - bredren 6y ago
    Yep. They’ve been publishing seriously for a while now but it is hard to break through. I wondered if it was a conservative publication at the start. But they did the Swan / Trump interview and now I think the brand is on the map.
- zo1 6y ago
  It is a bit odd from my perspective because I have not seen/heard of "Axios" until this "Trump Interview" thing happened. So I understand the OP's bafflement at it's prominence all of a sudden. Even the fact that they got an interview with the US president seems out of place to me.
  - rurp 6y ago
    I've been reading the site regularly for a few years and seen them (often Swan) break a lot of Inside Baseball type stories on the White House, which I take to mean that they have some pretty high level sources. They also do occasional stories that look like obvious beat-sweateners[0], likely to keep that access flowing. Overall I'd say it's a pretty good source for non-partisan news. [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beat%20sweetener https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beat%20sweet...
- adventured 6y ago
  Axios has no paywall, which considerably bolsters the shareability as it pertains to HN. Reuters stories also fill that role now, as eg Bloomberg and many other prominent news sources have clamped down hard on their non-paywalled content.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
> Is this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios? Are these the only two possible reasons to choose from?
- rvz 6y ago
  There's a Trump-related medical condition which always surfaces when a person is fuelled with conspiracy and suspicion towards him in everyday life. I can't think of its name.
epistasis 6y ago
Using HN's search with the term axios.com, I see lots of articles from months and years ago, some with massive point totals. I don't think this week is much different from the past.
Ensorceled 6y ago
I think you're actually just experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

circa 6y ago

Ahhh yes. More cringeworthy content for us all!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xvector 6y ago
Meh, comments like this are cringeworthy. Let people enjoy what they enjoy.

saos 6y ago

Ugh

dmitriid 6y ago

> The new product will be embedded within Instagram Oh god. It means that, like Instagram TV or whatever it was called, it will be forcibly shoved down your throat for the next half a year with nagging reminders for another year.

catalogia 6y ago
To easily solve this problem, uninstall all Facebook-owned applications. I know this probably seems absurd and impossible. I promise you that facebook may seem necessary when you're addicted to it but after you break that addiction you'll be left wondering what the hell you were ever thinking in the first place.
0xffff2 6y ago
I check Instagram most days and I had never heard of Instagram TV before this post. They can't possibly have been shoving it down everyone's throats that aggressively.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  You didn't use Instagram when they rolled out IGTV then. There were multiple inline promotions, aggressive hints for the dedicated IGTV button, then they made this dedicated button red (in an otherwise gray-and-white interface) for several months. It still failed, of course, and got relegated to a small button inside the explore tab, but it the push was aggressive nonetheless. Expect the same for "Facebook's TikTok".

OzzyB 6y ago

Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time: " Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps. " Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 [1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Spot on. I do get how Reels could eventually be rolled into replacing Discover or even the home feed but the IGTV thing is just bizarre. Yeah let's enter a mode where you start by consuming content 3 seconds long and then suddenly some of it is an hour and you have to hold your phone awkwardly not to touch the screen while you watch it. Really feels like it belongs more in the feed part than the stories part but I guess no one would watch it then.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  IGTV content does show up in the feed also, which kinda proves your point that no one would watch it there.
  - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    I thought it did but you had to click to activate it. Only watched one once and feel like that’s where I did.

sixhobbits 6y ago

I read this as "Instagram reels [from the blast]" and was super confused about why Instagram was being hurt by products launched from its parent company.

mc32 6y ago
Same here I understood it as sending insta reeling from the decision.
addicted 6y ago
That’s exactly how I read it as well until I noticed the upper case R.
samizdis 6y ago
Ah, but the headline is written in sentence case, not title case - as can be seen in the words "launches", "its" and "rival", which are read before "Instagram Reels". Rookie error ;-)

DrBazza 6y ago

Never used Tiktok, or Instagram, and Facebook just now seems to be nothing more than a feed of irrelevant ads to, and any friends' or family posts are relegated to the little bell icon. I barely look at it more than once every few days now as it has lost much of its utility. Most of my friends and family are on other social networks and sites (twitter, strava, discord) now with fewer, or no ads, or even just whatsapp groups on the phone.

wy35 6y ago
Not exactly sure how your personal experience with a company is really relevant, considering that the article is specifically discussing a new product said company is launching. But transitioning to more intimate forms of social media is a great move, so I'm glad you made the switch. A lot of people do find Facebook (for example) to be too fake, while others need it to keep in touch with their family and communities.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  You're right my post isn't that relevant. The product they are launching, for me, isn't relevant either. We've long since reached peak Facebook, and its social network is fragmenting as they're losing people for the reasons I mentioned previously. They're effectively chasing a new audience to keep their numbers up.

whalesalad 6y ago

Instagram is the beta test environment/battleground for Facebook.

identity0 6y ago
Haha no. Facebook is where successful instagram features go to die.

pletsch 6y ago

My biggest wish for Instagram is to stop creating new ways to format content and give users more control over how their content is distributed. For example, I know a few people with private accounts for close friends or fitness accounts, why not create feeds of posts that people can subscribe to? They have a similar feature with stories/highlights. This is most likely to boost account #s but it's frustrating to have to follow multiple accounts for one person.

notacoward 6y ago
This, but not just for Instagram. I know people who have separate "pages" on Facebook to represent different interests. I know people who have multiple Twitter accounts for the same reason, and even more that I wish would. For all of its weaknesses, Google Plus took a step in this direction with circles. I think streams would be even better. P.S. Tags could be better still, but only if they're used consistently. My experience with other places/tools that use tags is that never ever happens, so I'd go with streams.

zackhsi 6y ago

How powerful is the video editing compared to TikTok?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nikofeyn 6y ago

it's amazing to me that the same group of people that consistently whine about unfair treatment of businesses and also china are likely the same group of people applauding the administration's taking tiktok hostage, forcing a sale with the threat of ban and wildly making up claims of what's owed to the government while u.s. companies swoop in to release competing features and for a bargain buyout.

linsomniac 6y ago

Youtube also has one, I don't remember when I first started noticing it, because I scrolled past it for a long time before opening one. On my phone, in the app, towards the top of the list of videos, is a section called "Stories and short videos". So far, there is very little compelling in there.

snowwrestler 6y ago

I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry. At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service--Tik Tok--was able to rise against them. That said, I do think there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it). Then the next round of teens seek a new platform--even if the functionality is the same--just so they can have it to themselves. Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new. The business strategy in the face of this theory would be to continuously start or buy new social platforms with similar feature sets, but each time with a new brand that is totally separate from the (older) parent brand so teens don't get scared off.

nikofeyn 6y ago
just as a note, tiktok was not an entirely new service. they bought and then transformed musical.ly.
- wy35 6y ago
  Technically, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is what the US Tiktok was based off of, and Douyin was launched in 2016 prior to the 2017 musical.ly acquisition. But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dilap 6y ago
My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.

carlosdp 6y ago

> Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile. That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch. It's a big part of why it's so popular. > Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos. TikTok has had AR filters for a long time now...

derivagral 6y ago
Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't? do the authors not know, and neither does the audience? I get the "you know your own field better than the writer" effect, but a very large group of people use and at least sort of know how TikTok works, right?
- chishaku 6y ago
  The average Axios reader does not use TikTok and the average Axios reporter probably doesn't either.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't? Do you mean the superficial author of the piece or the author of the PR material they are regurgitating? My guess is someone involved with the latter function knows what is going on in the market and is deliberately being deceptive (but probably not outright lying, the release itself probably doesn't claim that TikTok lacks the described features though it is probably written in a way which gives that impression), the former may or may not know, but probably doesn't care; the better a stenographer they are the more access they get.
Traster 6y ago
The AR claim is a claim that was made by instragram's head of product (who is quoted in other articles). The author presumably just wrote up the article and didn't bother to check that what Instagram are claiming is actually true.

surround 6y ago

Facebook launched Lasso as its own app two years ago. I’m not sure if there were any differences between it and TikTok, but either way, it failed miserably. https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...

jug 6y ago
FB also has a Stories feature as Instagram, in turn from Snapchat, but I barely see anyone use it while everyone and their cat (literally) use Instagram Stories. Also, FB took a more advanced friend list concept from Google+ but few use or know how it works. (Like how “Acquintances” are your friends but they are pushed down by the algorithm) It is apparent that it’s hard to just shoehorn different usage patterns due to different social cultures evolving on the respective networks. Let’s see how they do this time...
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  people use it in my country. it's quite popular. But here facebook = internet.
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  For me, I know majority of my younger friends use IG stories and have abandoned snapchat.
- vitorgrs 6y ago
  In Brazil, Instagram Stories basically killed Snapchat.
blisseyGo 6y ago
slightly unrelated but does anyone else find TechCrunch navigation to be absolutely unbearable? Also hijacking the back button on my browser.

mrkramer 6y ago

They should've chosen better name.

r00fus 6y ago
Instagram is gonna be constantly surprised and reeling from successive announcements.

euix 6y ago

I find myself never actually using social media. Good friends belong to the same Signal group chats. I have several of these which consists of cliques I have built up over the years in school and at work and that's how I stay in touch. For those that are further out of reach there is email and linkedin if I really need to dig someone up from the past.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new". I wish I could get a handful of my friends to use something like Signal. Best even something not requiring a phone number. It's stupid that Signal wants a phone number. What has my phone number to do with chatting via Internet? Any advice how to get your friends to switch, when they do not care much about their privacy and have a defeatism attitude with regard to guarding their privacy or simply do not understand, that their actions affect their friends?
- euix 6y ago
  I find good friends often share similar technological viewpoints right down to the basic level. The people I have on signal are pretty much all cut from the same cloth in that regard. I.E. they tend to avoid big internet corps whenever possible and hack their own solutions. For people I consider casual acquaintances or just outside of the "inner circle" so to speak, I just use SMS.
  - baby 6y ago
    Are you saying you have no diversity in your friends? They’re all technical and they all have the same privacy view as you?
- throwgeorge 6y ago
  >You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new". you're saying this about someone that claims all of their friends use only one app. the fact that that app is signal does that not make them more flexible or better informed than someone who was born into some religion and decided it was coincidentally the most true.

samcheng 6y ago

Comedian Jeff Wright had a great commentary recently on how Instagram has a history of copying upstart social networks (Vine, Snapchat, and now TikTok). https://twitter.com/JeffRightNoww/status/1287842365126914048 https://twitter.com/JeffRightNoww/status/1287842365126914048 (Coincidentally, I think Jeff Wright had his breakthrough TikTok...)

Firebrand 6y ago

Reels’ inclusion in Instagram makes the UI confusing for me. Right now it only feeds me three or four videos that are peppered in my discover feed when I scroll down so I have to swipe up to refresh for more videos: https://imgur.com/a/jDtYbVP https://imgur.com/a/jDtYbVP Why not have a separate section dedicated to Reels content instead of having it interspersed with photos and regular video posts?

bigpumpkin 6y ago
Yeah, I was trying it out too and found it confusing as well. I think they are trying to make old users suddenly discover reels while flipping through photos, but it feels very messy.
reggieband 6y ago
I took me doing a Google search to find the original Instagram PR release that had instructions on where even to find Reels. But once you are in any Reel it acts just like TikTok, you swipe up for a never-ending feed of content. So in a sense, any Reel is a portal into "a separate section dedicated to Reels content".

heyheyhey 6y ago

Official announcement: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-instagram-reels-announcement/ https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-i...

ffggvv 6y ago

why does everyone think they can beat tik tok just taking their existing content and changing the navigation to clone tik tok? people use it for the content, not the navigation style

baby 6y ago
That’s what they said about Snapchat
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  What is the status of snapchat? Does it still exist? Does anyone use it? How do they split time between TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and the other half-dozen platforms?
  - Rompect 6y ago
    As a young(er) gen Z dude, I have no clue.
  - snazz 6y ago
    As someone roughly in the target age and location audience for all of the things you mentioned, here's my take: - TikTok is somewhat mindless entertainment. Keep scrolling, watch funny or informative videos, and the algorithm will tailor more content to your tastes. It's fun and an absolute time-suck, but not any kind of critical communication. I don't personally know anyone who makes TikTok content, but most people I know watch it at least occasionally. - Instagram is used for sharing a more public view of your life. While most people I know have private accounts, they usually follow and are followed by between a few hundred and a thousand or so other accounts (think classmates and friends of friends). Instagram is where you post photos of yourself in the best possible light, not just silly and random things. People use Stories to share news and post sillier and less permanent content. Not everyone just scrolls endlessly on Instagram; I only follow people I know in real life but many people follow celebrities and meme accounts as well. - Snapchat is more like a communication platform than a social media platform. People send disappearing photos (usually quick selfies or photos of what they're doing at the moment) to their friends. If you exchange a photo or video with someone for any number of consecutive days, you'll start a streak with that person, which further incentivizes you to continue sending photos to them. Snapchat also has stories, but these are usually intended to be even less permanent. Candid selfies with friends or videos of people doing silly things are the main use, at least within my extended group of friends. It's gotten no less popular recently. - YouTube continues to be popular. Hopefully this should be self-explanatory. Gaming content is popular. - Facebook is basically unused by anyone my age other than for specific groups that haven't migrated elsewhere. - GroupMe is popular for college class group chats and whatnot, but not as a place to hang out and talk about other stuff. - Twitter is still occasionally used for content consumption, but not as much as Instagram. - FaceTime, Snapchat's video-calling functionality, and Houseparty (sometimes) are the usual ways to communicate via video chat between friends. - Discord is expanding outside of gaming circles for text and voice chat. - Reddit is mildly popular for meme content.

plibither8 6y ago

This is it's worldwide launch. Reels was already launched in India a few weeks ago when the Indian government imposed a ban on TikTok.

sidcool 6y ago

This seems like a perfect opportunity since TikTok is banned in India. Most influencers will migrate to Instagram reels. I don't like facebook's business model, but seems they know how to make money.

kashyapc 6y ago

For a moment, I read the word "reels" in the headline as a verb (meaning: "lose one's balance and stagger"), instead of a noun (film reel). But my mind quickly readjusted: "that doesn't make sense, because FB owns Instagram."

joemi 6y ago
I read it the same way initially, thinking a different FB team made the tiktok competitor and the Instagram team didn't know about it and was taken aback.
drusepth 6y ago
I know how it's supposed to be read (and I've even seen real reels at old movie theaters!), but I still just think about fishing reels every time I see it.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > but I still just think about fishing reels every time I see it. The goal is to hook you after all...
ClikeX 6y ago
Instagram "Reel our users back in from Tik-Tok" didn't really roll from the tongue, I assume.

staycoolboy 6y ago

How can there be room for so many social media apps? One option is that all of them carve up the social media demographic in such a way that they have enough users to be profitable, but no majority. Another outcome is that teens are fickle, but if the platforms move from content creators to individuals, then it is no longer a social media platform and just the new MTV(s). I have no idea how this is going to shake out and I am fascinated by it, despite HN being the only social media platform I use.

kart23 6y ago
I think influences, celebrities and other people that teens look up to have a massive effect on these platforms. Look at clothes, streetwear brands that celebrities wear instantly become popular and sell out. The purpose of social media is to interact with your friends but also see celebrities and their pages. Even if a platform is better or cooler than another, nobodys going to switch because none of your friends are on it and there's no point. But if your favorite artist and a couple of popular youtubers get on, you might make an account to see their content. And then you see that some of your friends have it, and start using it more. After a while, maybe people stopped posting on the old social media app and you delete it because the people you follow aren't active on it anymore.

praveen9920 6y ago

>..popular karaoke app TikTok.. Never heard it that way.

parliament32 6y ago
The entire article is filled with things that are flat-out wrong, I'm not sure how this made it past an editor. > Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile TikTok is all about showing you content tailored to you. Compare your TikTok feed to any of your friends' and it'll be super different. > Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos TikTok's had this forever.

nilkn 6y ago

Reels isn’t going to compete with TikTok in any real way for a few simple reasons. First and foremost, as a non-Instagram user, I flat-out can’t use it. A while back, when I was curious about TikTok, I downloaded it and was instantly swiping through a video feed that was already getting customized for me. I downloaded Instagram this morning and was presented with a wall to create an account. Nope. Second, TikTok is new. Instagram is old. Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated.

parliament32 6y ago
People also want to use the apps that corporations haven't infiltrated yet. Notice how there's very little advertising / sponsored posts / product placement on TikTok. See: IG is basically the Home Shopping Network now, with an ad between every third post and sponsored products in every mainstream account's feed.
- powerapple 6y ago
  Lol. I use IG mainly for advertisings from local restaurants and hotels. It worked pretty well for me so far. I have discovered so many businesses.
rattray 6y ago
> Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated. There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW. I definitely agree that TikTok's no-login-wall NUX was wonderful. You can even watch on a laptop without logging in.
- rsa25519 6y ago
  > There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW. And the beauty of TikTok is that's okay. People over 30 can join the app without disrupting my feed of age-relevant content. This is unlike a lot of other social networks (e.g. Reddit) where content is shows from outside my social graph

Apocryphon 6y ago

The Congressional antitrust hearings were a week ago.

RedditKon 6y ago
Which is probably why Zuk is doubling down on Reels instead of trying to buy TikTok - he know it'd never get approved.

rsynnott 6y ago

How to appeal to Gen Z; name the thing after a form of video playback that was totally obsolete before any of them were born.

daenz 6y ago
People seem to underestimate how important a name can be. "Instagram Reels", "Reels", "IG Reels"... they have no buzz, they're clunky to say, and like you said, it already implies ancient uncool tech. The marketing people must have been phoning it in when they named this.
- ttamslam 6y ago
  I obviously don't speak a generation but I'm in the target demo and I like the name. "Did you see X's reel the other day?" to me feels better than "Did you see X's tiktok the other day?"
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    reel sounds like a word that has another meaning. tiktok doesn't. i feel better saying tiktok
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Such as, fishing reel. I'd actually forgotten it was the word for the thing film went on.
  - fr2null 6y ago
    I am also in the target demo, do not like the product, but the name sounds pretty good. Like "Have you seen her story?" "Did you see her last reel?" just sounds nice.
arkitaip 6y ago
The people who launched Reels are probably in their 30s and 40s and working against serious organizational biases that prevent them from innovating. So not surprised that they named this Reels.

tqwhite 6y ago

I wonder if Zuck included the Suppress Biden Tags feature? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/instagram-related-hashtags-favoring-trump-over-biden https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/instagram-relat...

chessmango 6y ago

"Instagram Reels" in this headline reads like present simple tense. But then you realize that Instagram isn't a competitor to Facebook, and well...

ogre_codes 6y ago

It seems like Instagram is Facebook's anti-competitive tool. Whenever some new social network crops up, Facebook bolts on a clone to Instagram. Eventually it's going to be such a bloated mess it's going to cease being useful to anyone.

holler 6y ago
Might simply be due to IG's popularity vs Blue app... If there's ever an exodus from IG I don't know what they'll do (probably try to buy the other company).
ClikeX 6y ago
Is going to be? Instagram already lost me a while ago. It started to hamfist Snapchat stories in there. I also believe they tried to force in Facebook Messenger features at some point. It also totally ruined any proper disoverability. You like one Comic Book post and suddenly you only get stupid text only posts about superhero facts. With no way to manually configure your interests. And to make things worse, my personal feed got messed up because they thought it was best to no longer show the feed chronologically. Because hiding new posts lower in the feed, and keep showing me week-old posts on top was obviously a good idea. All I want is sharing pictures I took with my friends, while also looking at photography from random people.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > All I want is sharing pictures I took with my friends, while also looking at photography from random people. Sharing pics & stories with friends/ family was why I started using FB years ago. I think Instagram became popular because FB had become a polluted mess before young people even had a chance to try it. Older people just stuck around out of habit. I never liked IG because generally my FB posts and images are hosted on my blog first and crossposted, something you can't do on IG. Fully agree that IG is already a mess. But people haven't really abandoned it yet in numbers. They just stopped attracting new people.
  - ClikeX 6y ago

Touche 6y ago

These types of articles are so frustrating and show why media is failing so badly. This is an article about a product launch that: * Barely talks about the product at all. * No demos of what the product does. * Not even a single picture of what the product looks like. * Does not link to the actual product's page. * Very few links at all, and mostly to their own pages. * Is 50% about the competitor's legal/political issues. * IS 50% about the parent company's strategy in launching the product. I don't understand why there can't be 2 articles here: * Information about the product launch. * An opinion article about Facebook strategy vs. Microsoft TikTok Trump. I'm pretty sure everyone just skims these articles because they are so uninformative. Can I be the only person who feels this way?

chris_va 6y ago
This reads to me like it was written by Facebook PR (indirectly) via a press packet. A lot of "news" articles are just PR departments lobbying journalists. The journalist tweaks stuff slightly, then dumps it over the wall. This sort of thing is very cheap to produce. And, to be fair, it isn't actually new. The more useful/novel/investigative content has slowly declined, so this is all that's left. There just isn't any money in writing news. Newspapers were never paid for news content, but rather delivering ads to everyone's doorstep daily. E.g. subscription revenue was much less than ad revenue, to the point that it was never clear to me why subscription prices were non-zero (though they were usually separate departments with their own P&L, so it's probably just historical). There are better ways to find classifieds, job listings, and brand advertising these days... So now we have this junk. If one could find a way of financially or otherwise incentivizing real journalism, you'd be a folk hero.
- Touche 6y ago
  I'm not expecting investigative journalism here. I just expect the article about a product launch to be mostly about the product being launched. Like pull out your phone install the app and take a screenshot or two. List what it does and how it works. Save the corporate strategery and political intrigue stuff for another article.

tus88 6y ago

That's a reel bad name.

beepboopbeep 6y ago

I can't help but feel that zuckerberg has unduly influenced the president to ban tiktok in order for them to further corner the social media market. This feels wrong.

jimmaswell 6y ago

Not a catchy name at all. I'd forecast failure on that alone.

cboornaz17 6y ago

Jumped on my Instagram explore page to see what Reels actually looks like since the article doesn’t show any screenshots.. Of the first three posts I saw, two of them were cross posted from TikTok. Not that it’s new to see social media content posted to another app, but is there anything to be said for the fact that Facebook can now monetize TikToks in another fashion? Seems like even if they don’t win in terms of creators moving platforms, it would still be in a creator’s best interest to post a successful TikTok again as a Reel.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

collegeburner 6y ago

Instagram has a real shot at out-doing ticktock here. It's got much better penetration among youth and can take serious advantage of that. Ticktock is basically a subculture, used by the same people that used vsco a few years ago. Just my two cents.

rconti 6y ago

I was going to say "I can't wait to have a second row of crap across the top of my Instagram feed that I don't care about" ... and I open the IG app, and now "stories" takes up two rows. haha.

fatjokes 6y ago

> Facebook launches its TikTok clone, Instagram Reels FTFY. I'm being facetious of course. The real clone here is being done by the US gov't, who is copying the Chinese playbook: keep out a foreign company by political means, thus encouraging local competitors. I guess it's really true that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

l33tbro 6y ago
> keep out a foreign company by political means, thus encouraging the domestic tech oligopoly. FTFY ;)

shuringai 6y ago

wow we can finally get back to being spied on by the US as usual instead of china!

magic7s 6y ago

I have a hunch that TikTok fakes the amount of likes that users post. I’ve heard people say their first post goes viral. It’s an interesting strategy. Young person posts a TikTok, “get famous”, keeps posting.

snazz 6y ago
It could also be that they give more prominence to people's first or second posts to get them off the ground. That effect doesn't have to be caused by artificial like inflation.
corford 6y ago
I don't think it's faking. That behaviour sounds broadly inline with https://www.veed.io/grow/reverse-engineering-how-tiktok-algorithm-works/ https://www.veed.io/grow/reverse-engineering-how-tiktok-algo...
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

nikolay 6y ago

What a huge favor to Microsoft, which now can acquire TikTok for a lot less!

verst 6y ago

Today I tried posting a Reel. This wasn't intuitive as the flow for doing this is similar to creating a Story. When selecting an existing video as a reel I do not have a way to edit it or add overlays and the total reel duration is 15 seconds vs 60 on TikTok. Discovering reels is tricky also. I have to go to search and click on the word reels within the random suggested reel at the top. What is more - I want reels to be separate from whom I follow on Instagram. I want to follow certain content creators for their reels, but do not want to see their stories or photo stream. I also don't want them to show up as people I follow on my main Instagram profile. The TikTok features for creating content, discovering it, replying to it (remix / duet etc) and just the responsiveness of the UI make it much more fun and pleasant to use. Reels does not meaningfully compete with TikTok. It will only appeal to some of the existing user base, but not attract TikTok users. FYI I'm 34. I post music, running, travel and random adventure clips to Instagram, TikTok and other places.

f1ying_1otus 6y ago

"log in with Tik Tok" will be their aim. They'll push their decentralized identity platform with this and advertise that your data is safe and you aren't being tracked.

theodric 6y ago

Cool, another piece of Millennial crap I don't need to install

smabie 6y ago
Millenials are getting old, zoomers are the new hot thing.
dencodev 6y ago
ok boomer

chris_wot 6y ago

I read this as "Instagram reels" from the fact that Facebook launched a rival...

holografix 6y ago

Instagram is what it always was for Facebook: a clear sign of the decline of Facebook’s original product into irrelevance while it slowly mutates into infinite town square forums trapped in valley of echoing stupidity and a less anonymous craigslist/gumtree. The Instagram acquisition was the first clear sign Facebook never could innovate it could only steal and perfect existing ideas. Now they decided that outright copying is cheaper than buying, so they copy Snapchat and now TikTok.

Panini_Jones 6y ago
Facebook came out with the Oculus Quest last year which is hugely innovative.
- ngokevin 6y ago
  You could say that evolved out of the "buying" era as the above commenter said, as Oculus was an acquisition.
  - Panini_Jones 6y ago
    Oculus Quest was developed by Facebook, not Oculus.
- ClikeX 6y ago
  Apart from Quest being a standalone device, it was just an iteration on the original Rift. And it was another company they bought, and I'd be more inclined to give credits to the Occulus team than to Facebook.
  - Panini_Jones 6y ago
    > Apart from Quest being a standalone device, it was just an iteration on the original Rift In that it's a VR device, yes. But it's a standalone headset with Inside Out tracking. Many people didn't think this was possible. > And it was another company they bought, and I'd be more inclined to give credits to the Occulus team than to Facebook. A significant amount of FB employees developed this headset. It is Oculus is Facebook now.

switch11 6y ago

hats off to Facebook for being absolutely shameless and zero ethics they don't even pretend to be honest (unlike Google) and it's a miracle so far they haven't had to pay damages for all the 'inspiration' they have found from other people's products

wmeredith 6y ago
I'm sure 'Zuck is very sorry.
- wmeredith 6y ago
  For reference: https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...

Mupuff 6y ago

I wonder if they waited for after the congress testimony to launch this. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg was questioned[1] about this strategy. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyI3ixI1xSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyI3ixI1xSk

esotericsean 6y ago

I truly hate that Instagram is owned by Facebook. It's genuinely the best, most positive social media platform that I've been a part of. I've made genuine friends and found an amazing community in my niche. Please don't destroy it, Facebook.