3 ms·

My wife and I were discussing Facebook vs Instagram vs TikTok the other day. Neither of us use Facebook. My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting

My wife and I were discussing Facebook vs Instagram vs TikTok the other day. Neither of us use Facebook. My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. On the flip side, I love TikTok. It's full of strangers! New, exciting strangers doing wild, strange things in trendy and funny and smart and annoying and cringe-filled ways! TikTok is an entire world of social media that could never exist on Facebook. (Or maybe it did back when it started? I can't remember.) Instagram is the more interesting one for me. I observed over the course of this conversation that if you look at my feed, it's boring stuff I don't care about. I follow my friends and they post pictures of their kids and blah blah blah. But if you click the "Discover" tab, it's almost entirely three of my biggest interests: horses, fitness, and D&D. To Eugene's point, my feed is my social graph, but my Discover tab is my interest graph. Like Eugene, one of the things I like about TikTok is that it's an interest graph and I happen to be connected to a few of my friends. But since I spend most of my time on the For You Page, I never see my friend's stuff. That's totally fine with me! I'd love more social media apps to understand that connecting with my friends doesn't mean I want to know everything they're doing, and instead I want to meet at the intersection of my social graph and my interests. Those two things don't often overlap, but when they do, it's a recipe for fun and engagement. FWIW, despite having dramatically increased the number of ads they display, I still maintain that Instagram's ads are far and away better than Facebook's, TikTok's, Twitter's, and even Google's. I see an ad on IG and I very often say, "huh, that looks cool" whereas I would just gloss over it on other platforms.

wenc 5y ago
> My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. This is a fascinating insight. Facebook is optimized for in groups whereas Instagram and TikTok are platforms for creators. Naturally the latter is going to be more interesting especially if your peer group is pretty stable. I guess I’m unusual in that I move around a lot (different countries, different parts of the country) and my peer group gets refreshed (or gets reshuffled) every few years. I often get to know people who have very little in common with my previous social groups so Facebook continues to be interesting for me. There’s also something to be said about continually upgrading or changing one’s peer group. Not practical for everyone of course but for me it just kinda happens.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  Point of clarification: our friends aren't boring. We love hanging out with them and doing things with them. But from a strictly social media standpoint, their posts aren't the kind of content we want to consume. I can only see photos of your kid so many times before I've seen enough. We don't need to "upgrade" our friends or our peer group at all. The distinction I am (and I think Eugene is) making is that my reasons for being friends with someone has no bearing on the types of media I am interested in consuming. You and I can be best friends, but that doesn't mean I need to see the photos of your breakfast. And the fact that I'd rather watch Hank Green pontificate on scientific facts in no way diminishes my friendship with you. As Eugene points out in his blog post, the social graph and the interest graph are two awfully different things that may wind up being totally orthogonal to one another, and the Venn diagram overlap may be very small in real life. If I may try and rephrase your takeaway, it's that our social media landscape needs to be refreshed or reshuffled periodically to maintain our interest, and that can take many forms, including but not limited to finding a totally new peer group. I would agree with that assessment. But reshuffling your interest graph is much easier than shuffling your social graph, at least for most people.
  - wenc 5y ago
    Thanks for that clarification. I think that’s a better distillation of what I was trying to say. That said I do believe in changing my peer groups from time to time to get out of my comfort zone, reinvent myself and be confronted with new ideas. But that’s just because I’m in a growth phase. Not everyone needs to do this. Also for me it helps to have friends who are writers and travelers. They may be the same people year after year but they constantly have new things to say about life or always have new observations/stories to share. I do think there’s a productive way to use Facebook. It’s just that that way only avails itself to certain groups of people like me and the kinds of friends I keep.
mst 5y ago
> Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. Plus, the life events that would be interesting to me, I much prefer hearing about once every however long over drinks - and even my heavy-facebook-user friends have commented that they really quite enjoy the fact that they get to tell me about things like that face to face rather than just assuming I'll have read it as it scrolls past.

wenc 5y ago

> My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. This is a fascinating insight. Facebook is optimized for in groups whereas Instagram and TikTok are platforms for creators. Naturally the latter is going to be more interesting especially if your peer group is pretty stable. I guess I’m unusual in that I move around a lot (different countries, different parts of the country) and my peer group gets refreshed (or gets reshuffled) every few years. I often get to know people who have very little in common with my previous social groups so Facebook continues to be interesting for me. There’s also something to be said about continually upgrading or changing one’s peer group. Not practical for everyone of course but for me it just kinda happens.

Jemaclus 5y ago
Point of clarification: our friends aren't boring. We love hanging out with them and doing things with them. But from a strictly social media standpoint, their posts aren't the kind of content we want to consume. I can only see photos of your kid so many times before I've seen enough. We don't need to "upgrade" our friends or our peer group at all. The distinction I am (and I think Eugene is) making is that my reasons for being friends with someone has no bearing on the types of media I am interested in consuming. You and I can be best friends, but that doesn't mean I need to see the photos of your breakfast. And the fact that I'd rather watch Hank Green pontificate on scientific facts in no way diminishes my friendship with you. As Eugene points out in his blog post, the social graph and the interest graph are two awfully different things that may wind up being totally orthogonal to one another, and the Venn diagram overlap may be very small in real life. If I may try and rephrase your takeaway, it's that our social media landscape needs to be refreshed or reshuffled periodically to maintain our interest, and that can take many forms, including but not limited to finding a totally new peer group. I would agree with that assessment. But reshuffling your interest graph is much easier than shuffling your social graph, at least for most people.
- wenc 5y ago
  Thanks for that clarification. I think that’s a better distillation of what I was trying to say. That said I do believe in changing my peer groups from time to time to get out of my comfort zone, reinvent myself and be confronted with new ideas. But that’s just because I’m in a growth phase. Not everyone needs to do this. Also for me it helps to have friends who are writers and travelers. They may be the same people year after year but they constantly have new things to say about life or always have new observations/stories to share. I do think there’s a productive way to use Facebook. It’s just that that way only avails itself to certain groups of people like me and the kinds of friends I keep.

mst 5y ago

> Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. Plus, the life events that would be interesting to me, I much prefer hearing about once every however long over drinks - and even my heavy-facebook-user friends have commented that they really quite enjoy the fact that they get to tell me about things like that face to face rather than just assuming I'll have read it as it scrolls past.