10 ms·

Forget "kids", I'm an adult and I'd love to have versions of all modern social media with the 'growth hacking' features axed. Remember the days before forever

Forget "kids", I'm an adult and I'd love to have versions of all modern social media with the 'growth hacking' features axed. Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? When Facebook timelines were chronological? When bullshit clickbait links didn't show up as "recommended" after you meticulously pruned bullshit clickbait groups from your feed? When Youtube didn't just autoplay down into the deep dark depths of crazytown? How about social media that's actually social instead of just being the same national outrage "conversation" being replayed in a slightly different setting?

flatiron 5y ago
At least for YouTube you can disable auto play.
- cube00 5y ago
  ...and yet it still manages to turn itself back on whenever you sign in again, when you cast to a new device...and you can't tell me the company that knows everything about me can't remember my preference for not wanting auto play. Other services seem to remember it just fine, I set it once on Netflix and have never needed to set it ever again.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  Actually, my issue with YouTube isn't really the autoplay per se, it's how the recommended videos (including autoplayed videos) go very aggressively into rabbit holes. I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.
  - stolenmerch 5y ago
    This is a feature and I love it. I don't want to subscribe to football channels, for example, but if I'm in the mood I watch a couple of them and then it shows me related videos for a few more hours and then it switches when I decide to search for cooking videos, of which I don't want to subscribe to either. Works great.
    - naravara 5y ago
      They could easily let you accomplish this by just giving you an option to actively seek out this content by giving you a "What else is like this?" button that takes you to a 'related videos' page. The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.
      - JohnWhigham 5y ago
        There needs to be a plugin to wipe cookies on every YouTube page load. The recommended videos list for a given video on your first visit? Excellent. Every subsequent page load where they give recommendations pertaining to a video from 30 minutes ago? Absolute garbage.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - prionassembly 5y ago
    Curiously, I don't have that experience at all. I'll play Backyardigans videos to watch with the baby ~4 times per week and nothing of the sort ever shows up in my recommended feed. I can't understand the reports of sub-par recommendation experience on YouTube. Maybe my behavior is somewhat different -- I tap "watch this later" a lot (and rarely do).
  - munk-a 5y ago
    You can reject the recommended videos and purely exist either checking subscribed channels or using the search function for every video. I've found that their recommendations are usually pretty good but I use youtube on different devices for different "moods" so I've got my background lets-plays on one device - people talking about maps on another device - and my youtube-only music needs on a third device - this helps keep my stuff pretty siloed.
- Cerium 5y ago
  I wish you could disable the free trial offers.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Sorta, kinda. Except it tends to turn itself back on at random. Except there IIRC are two auto-plays on YouTube: one for normal videos, one for playlists - and YouTube's search has a nasty habit of returning results that happen to be smack in the middle of some random playlist. And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    To be fair, you can disable autoplay by using youtube-dl[0], and it's (effectively) physically incapable of turning itself back on. Also fixes "Are you still watching?" and other engagement 'features'^Wdefects. 0: http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/
fortuna86 5y ago
I forgot they made a product just got kids, right when their teenager harm report was released.
frankfrank13 5y ago
Agreed, funny that it takes "for Kids" for instagram to finally (pretend) to care about involving external stakeholders on the implications of their at-any-cost growth mechanics
enahs-sf 5y ago
Now that most of them are the hyper growth stage, you’d think they could figure out which growth hacky things they could turn off and still retain users.
mylons 5y ago
you’re asking for them to remove the part that prints them money. the only reason they’re going this route is the whistle blower leaking and hopes to appease regulators before regulation.
the_snooze 5y ago
These services are so fucking needy. It's like they were designed by broken people. How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."
- tekromancr 5y ago
  What you describe is antithetical to capitalism as it is currently implemented
  - michaelchisari 5y ago
    Subscription services (at very low cost) could achieve this. In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually. Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use. Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete. The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.
    - learc83 5y ago
      $12 a year is misleading. Paying users are much more valuable ad targets than free users once you start segmenting them. So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table. Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.
gfodor 5y ago
Alternatively: delete your accounts, and stop using these services first, instead of maintaining them hoping a better thing comes along you can switch to.
- root_axis 5y ago
  Indeed. It's akin to complaining that there's too much poison in cigarettes because of course it'd be inhumane to suggest people stop smoking.
- grvdrm 5y ago
  I deleted Facebook a few years ago. Great decision. I don't miss it at all. But of course - I can't remember anyone's birthday anymore.
ativzzz 5y ago
> Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the next "page" I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Infinite-scrolling is awful for 2 reasons: 1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”). 2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    For #1 it's the same because the content on each page is dependent on reddit's algorithm, which may change by the time you load up the next page (maybe reddit has some caching that prevents this), so if you link page 3 to someone, they will see something different depending on when they open the link For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer
  - heartbreak 5y ago
    The truly awful implementation is the paging of comments on this website.
- asdff 5y ago
  It's a good thing that its awful to use with pagination. Frequently I would find myself using RES and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, the only thing stopping me from continuing scrolling was suddenly noticing that these posts had 12 upvotes and I was 600 posts off the front page at this point. Friction like pagination gives you pause. Sure, its annoying, but subconsciously that annoyance leads you to make a finite ending of saying "I'll stop after I get through this page," instead of time flying by scrolling and scrolling. Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.
jeffbee 5y ago
None of that really describes Instagram today, though. The problem with IG today is literally everyone is trying to sell something. 100% of Instagram today is marketing and there is no longer any reason to use it.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Unfortunately, there is: it's the few acquaintances you like that insist to post news about themselves as stories on Instagram. God, I hate stories. This is probably the most antisocial "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with your app at least once every single day.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> growth hacking More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we should get rid of it. Only thing worse is video game design which does this explicitly and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to the player's credit card.
dropdeadaccount 5y ago
I personally use Telegram as my main social network. No algorithms, no "recommended", just channels and chats you want. It is not secure, sure, but I don't need it to be secure. A lot of Russian buisness and science-related media is only found there. That said I am Russian and AFAIK most English content there is far-right propaganda so it might not be useful to you.

flatiron 5y ago

At least for YouTube you can disable auto play.

cube00 5y ago
...and yet it still manages to turn itself back on whenever you sign in again, when you cast to a new device...and you can't tell me the company that knows everything about me can't remember my preference for not wanting auto play. Other services seem to remember it just fine, I set it once on Netflix and have never needed to set it ever again.
helen___keller 5y ago
Actually, my issue with YouTube isn't really the autoplay per se, it's how the recommended videos (including autoplayed videos) go very aggressively into rabbit holes. I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.
- stolenmerch 5y ago
  This is a feature and I love it. I don't want to subscribe to football channels, for example, but if I'm in the mood I watch a couple of them and then it shows me related videos for a few more hours and then it switches when I decide to search for cooking videos, of which I don't want to subscribe to either. Works great.
  - naravara 5y ago
    They could easily let you accomplish this by just giving you an option to actively seek out this content by giving you a "What else is like this?" button that takes you to a 'related videos' page. The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      There needs to be a plugin to wipe cookies on every YouTube page load. The recommended videos list for a given video on your first visit? Excellent. Every subsequent page load where they give recommendations pertaining to a video from 30 minutes ago? Absolute garbage.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- prionassembly 5y ago
  Curiously, I don't have that experience at all. I'll play Backyardigans videos to watch with the baby ~4 times per week and nothing of the sort ever shows up in my recommended feed. I can't understand the reports of sub-par recommendation experience on YouTube. Maybe my behavior is somewhat different -- I tap "watch this later" a lot (and rarely do).
- munk-a 5y ago
  You can reject the recommended videos and purely exist either checking subscribed channels or using the search function for every video. I've found that their recommendations are usually pretty good but I use youtube on different devices for different "moods" so I've got my background lets-plays on one device - people talking about maps on another device - and my youtube-only music needs on a third device - this helps keep my stuff pretty siloed.
Cerium 5y ago
I wish you could disable the free trial offers.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Sorta, kinda. Except it tends to turn itself back on at random. Except there IIRC are two auto-plays on YouTube: one for normal videos, one for playlists - and YouTube's search has a nasty habit of returning results that happen to be smack in the middle of some random playlist. And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".
- a1369209993 5y ago
  To be fair, you can disable autoplay by using youtube-dl[0], and it's (effectively) physically incapable of turning itself back on. Also fixes "Are you still watching?" and other engagement 'features'^Wdefects. 0: http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/

fortuna86 5y ago

I forgot they made a product just got kids, right when their teenager harm report was released.

frankfrank13 5y ago

Agreed, funny that it takes "for Kids" for instagram to finally (pretend) to care about involving external stakeholders on the implications of their at-any-cost growth mechanics

enahs-sf 5y ago

Now that most of them are the hyper growth stage, you’d think they could figure out which growth hacky things they could turn off and still retain users.

mylons 5y ago

you’re asking for them to remove the part that prints them money. the only reason they’re going this route is the whistle blower leaking and hopes to appease regulators before regulation.

the_snooze 5y ago

These services are so fucking needy. It's like they were designed by broken people. How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."

tekromancr 5y ago
What you describe is antithetical to capitalism as it is currently implemented
- michaelchisari 5y ago
  Subscription services (at very low cost) could achieve this. In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually. Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use. Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete. The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.
  - learc83 5y ago
    $12 a year is misleading. Paying users are much more valuable ad targets than free users once you start segmenting them. So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table. Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.

gfodor 5y ago

Alternatively: delete your accounts, and stop using these services first, instead of maintaining them hoping a better thing comes along you can switch to.

root_axis 5y ago
Indeed. It's akin to complaining that there's too much poison in cigarettes because of course it'd be inhumane to suggest people stop smoking.
grvdrm 5y ago
I deleted Facebook a few years ago. Great decision. I don't miss it at all. But of course - I can't remember anyone's birthday anymore.

ativzzz 5y ago

> Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the next "page" I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
Infinite-scrolling is awful for 2 reasons: 1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”). 2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  For #1 it's the same because the content on each page is dependent on reddit's algorithm, which may change by the time you load up the next page (maybe reddit has some caching that prevents this), so if you link page 3 to someone, they will see something different depending on when they open the link For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer
- heartbreak 5y ago
  The truly awful implementation is the paging of comments on this website.
asdff 5y ago
It's a good thing that its awful to use with pagination. Frequently I would find myself using RES and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, the only thing stopping me from continuing scrolling was suddenly noticing that these posts had 12 upvotes and I was 600 posts off the front page at this point. Friction like pagination gives you pause. Sure, its annoying, but subconsciously that annoyance leads you to make a finite ending of saying "I'll stop after I get through this page," instead of time flying by scrolling and scrolling. Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.

jeffbee 5y ago

None of that really describes Instagram today, though. The problem with IG today is literally everyone is trying to sell something. 100% of Instagram today is marketing and there is no longer any reason to use it.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Unfortunately, there is: it's the few acquaintances you like that insist to post news about themselves as stories on Instagram. God, I hate stories. This is probably the most antisocial "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with your app at least once every single day.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> growth hacking More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we should get rid of it. Only thing worse is video game design which does this explicitly and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to the player's credit card.

dropdeadaccount 5y ago

I personally use Telegram as my main social network. No algorithms, no "recommended", just channels and chats you want. It is not secure, sure, but I don't need it to be secure. A lot of Russian buisness and science-related media is only found there. That said I am Russian and AFAIK most English content there is far-right propaganda so it might not be useful to you.