25 ms·

Instagram Is Facebook Now

402 points by lawrenceyan 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I haven't really seen it, but I also don't scroll Instagram endlessly. I've noticed I get a lot of "You might also like..." posts if I start scrolling past the point where Instagram has new content for me to see. That's usually my cue that I've gone too far and there's no more interesting content from the people I follow.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Yeah, I’m exactly the same. I would have thought that they would notice that I literally never scroll past there (except every now and then by accident, then I wonder why my feed is full of crap) and stop showing it… I guess not enough people stop scrolling there? Or maybe they do and Instagram is just trying to ram it down everybody’s throats to show more ads? It really sucks that you can’t turn it off. The worst bit is when you see “You’re all caught up”, click the ‘View older posts’ link, and then see posts that I don’t remember seeing from friends that I follow and want to see posts from. Makes me so annoyed! But these friends are only posting on Instagram (or Instagram and FB, which is worse) so there’s not really any good options for seeing these posts I want to see except fighting Insta’s stupid interface…
jacquesc 5y ago
Not only that, it keeps showing me the same posts over and over. Just because I liked something months ago, doesn't mean I want to see it every week
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  Sounds like they got their inspiration from the youtube recommendation engine.
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    Except at least in my case, I do rewatch YouTube videos a lot.
    - daveslash 5y ago
      Seems like something an algorithm could be modified to take into account ~ a given users proclivity to rewatch/review the same content. After a few recommendations of seen content, if that particular user isn't engaging, decrease their "rewatch recommendation" parameter.
      - tacocataco 5y ago
        It seems clicking "not interested" has no effect on YouTubes recommendations for me. I will see videos I clicked not into on on a week or two again.
        daveslash 5y ago
        Well, you're right of course. And I experience the same thing as well. My point really was that it seems like something that would be straight forward enough to implement in an algorithm. Whether they actually do is another question....
  - colordrops 5y ago
    What is this about exactly? Do the majority of people want to see the same post over and over for days?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  If they just showed you a chronological feed you'll be able to tell when you've reached the end of the new posts and stop there. With an algorithmic feed there's essentially no end in sight, people will scroll way more in hopes of seeing new content, which gives them the opportunity to include more ads.
thebean11 5y ago
Ha, for a second I thought they were changing the name to “Facebook Now”.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Ahahaha. Long time since I’ve laughed so hard on HN. And thing is, it kind of makes sense.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Metagram Instant
- er4hn 5y ago
  To be followed up by "WhatsApp" rebranding to "What's Facebook" and "Oculus" to "Facebook Live 360".
  - spacelamb 5y ago
    Even shorter for branding: "FaceApp" and "Facebook Rift"
    - johnyzee 5y ago
      No, just "Face" (it's cleaner). And then sue anyone else using the word.
- adolph 5y ago
  I've been thinking the same until I got this far down in the comments. The article doesn't seem to address the service's name, just bla-bla-bla average grade navel gazing. I first started using the app in earnest my final year of college, and look back wistfully at how I artfully chronicled my life for the subsequent six years, weaving together pictures of concerts and coffee shops with mirror selfies and delicious meals into an effortless pointillist tableau of my 20s. I still post on the app occasionally, but basically left a little over a month ago in favor of a personal newsletter, where I feel less pressure to be constantly documenting my consciousness.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
athenot 5y ago
At this point, Instagram decided it wants to be a TV and just show me what it wants me to see, not my carefully curated feed. I'm letting my account die.
- MarcelOlsz 5y ago
  Exactly. I just use instagram to msg people who aren't on Telegram and other services as I don't have FB. I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads. I never watch stories either. It's a dumpster fire, and any algorithm to show me stuff is a mistake, full stop. I only want to see my friends stuff chronologically, nothing else on the app matters for me. I genuinely don't understand why they do this. Sure, keep the ads, whatever, but make it chronological. Too many busy bodies I guess?
  - throwaway39203 5y ago
    I think the idea is that ads slip in more easily with an algorithm. Last time I used FB properly you could get the following kind of news feed: actual post from friend, friend actively liked a post from a business, ad from a business a friend previously liked Essentially posts from unknown accounts look less out of place this way
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    > I genuinely don't understand why they do this. $
    - dboreham 5y ago
      s/$/$$$/
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads. This is surprisingly disciplined and extreme. Kudos (i think? Can't quite tell if you're missing out due to ideology or holding good ground). > any algorithm to show me stuff is a mistake, full stop. I only want to see my friends stuff chronologically, nothing else on the app matters for me. > I genuinely don't understand why they do this Unfortunately, it seems like you're probably in the minority there. Algo feeds are way easier to ensure the user always sees something new (which is somewhat important), and you can still make it only people you follow (so still only your friends).
anarchy8 5y ago
Social media companies are trying too hard. People just want a chronological feed of things they followed. Nothing more. Stop trying to add shit people don't want.
- jacobmischka 5y ago
  Hacker News is not representative of the population at large. If people in fact do not like this, engagement will drop, and they'll stop doing it. It turns out most people in the silent majority actually do like this, or are at least more engaged/addicted because of it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > People just want a chronological feed of things they followed. Feed consumers are not the paying customers.
- whyenot 5y ago
  RSS/Atom was the way to do this. It's a huge shame hardly anyone (knowingly) uses it anymore.
rib3ye 5y ago
If you follow any Young People™ you'll notice that they're all using Stories now, which still have ads, but are at least chronological. Posts (the original product) are for "Old People" (28+).
- rtpg 5y ago
  Hell, im a pretty early adopter of instagram along with loads of friends and like 95% of content has become stories. Turns out Snapchat was what most of us wanted but without a purposefully obtuse interface
  - rib3ye 5y ago
    The fact that they succeeded in spite of a purposefully obtuse interface is a pretty clear validation for the concept.
    - rtpg 5y ago
      I think the general belief was that the concept was a thing for "kids"/"young people", but now I'm very convinced that that was because of Snap's branding + general incomprehensibility.
    - shp0ngle 5y ago
      Did they really succeed though?
      - rib3ye 5y ago
        They succeeded enough to scare zucc into war mode.
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    I liked Snapchat, but I don't like stories. To me, the beauty of Snapchat was that I could share a funny moment with a couple of friends who I thought would find the same thing amusing. I can't do that with stories. It's like being forced to tell a in-joke to all of my friends at the same time. I'd rather just not tell the joke at all.
chespinoza 5y ago
I abandoned my account some weeks ago when they where forcing me to add my phone number in order to log in.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Curtains open.... "But it's for security!"
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    It's for bot prevention. Phone number verification is the most effective anti bot tool around. It just sucks for privacy and legitimate alt accounting. I have a grandparent who lost their password to skype, microsoft rejected the password/email reset request, but also blocks them from creating a new account because the phone number is attached to the previous account.
vadfa 5y ago
I don't see the difference between the algorithm putting those posts in your feed and putting ads. They are both unwanted content.
Gwypaas 5y ago
Pressing the menu button on the post and then hide I got the choice to hide suggested posts. Though in true Facebook fashion only for 30 days and not permanently.
- 37 5y ago
  Wow. That is probably one of the more underhanded things I've heard about them. So they hope that you will forget, and in reality I'd bet most people do. Basically the same as a "Free 30 Day Trial" and then they take your credit card number. Of course most people don't remember and get charged anyway. (Which was deemed illegal in a court of law? Or am I just being hopeful?)
chris_wot 5y ago
I'm reading a lot of posts here of people who have just decided to drop Instagram. As someone who deleted Facebook only two months ago, and never looked back, I am really hoping this is the beginning of the end for Meta/Facebook/whatever stupid name they call themselves.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  There's a famous smoking cessation book (that I cannot remember the name of) with one core theme which is supposedly very powerful in the eyes of smokers. The idea that you gain nothing from smoking. That's my realisation when I quit Facebook. Meta/Facebook will crumble as more people come to realise that.
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    > There's a famous smoking cessation book You are probably thinking of Alan Carr's Easy way to stop smoking. For me it really worked.
mullingitover 5y ago
For Instagram to become Facebook they'd need to become entirely dominated by right-wing content[1]. They're nowhere close. [1] https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
keyle 5y ago
Well I guess there is a market opening for ChronoPic then, a new photosharing platform with comments, tags and likes... In chronological order! Because if Instagram acts like Facebook, it's ruined. I had noticed the last few months (and I'm not a heavy user at all), that literally every 4-5 pictures was an advert video. It made me sick to my gut to use it. What also makes me sick is the amount of people just doomscrolling this thing non stop, they actually don't even stop, the scrolling is like in perpetual movement, and when they like something it's a double tap and instant scroll. What kind of consumption is that?
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  What you want is SMS group chats. No ads. No sign up. Sorta ephemeral. Always chronological.
  - daveslash 5y ago
    The beauty of an open, distributed system.... as opposed to a walled garden.
StrLght 5y ago
I abandoned Instagram few weeks ago since it's absolutely hostile towards its' users. Opened an app, noticed that I got into another god awful AB-test (snapping posts to top of the feed instead of a normal scrolling) and just couldn't force myself to use it.
- james_pm 5y ago
  It's awful. I have it on one account, and not on my other one. The result of the snapping is I stop scrolling and close the app much sooner when browsing that account.
beansu 5y ago
If all you care about is messaging and viewing stories of people that you have messaged lately, I would suggest you to look into Threads. It's basically messenger but for instagram and there are no ads when viewing stories.
- yosito 5y ago
  This is the first time I ever heard of Threads. Just downloaded it, and the first thing I see is a message that says "Threads will no longer be available, starting December 2021", as in, today.
  - twodai 5y ago
    Yeah but for that one day it will be pretty good.
marcodiego 5y ago
I don't understand Instagram language. My GF uses it. It is full of digital influencers, people who make money because they are digital influencers. Young people with sometimes funny but generally pointless and most often ridiculous dancing moves to an equally ridiculous repetitive song. People buying expensive things, doing idiot things talking about uninteresting details of the uninteresting lives of equally uninteresting people... I don't understand the hypnotic effect it has.
- pembrook 5y ago
  I'm almost certain you could make the same argument about this site. We're all here clamoring to post overly analytical and smart-sounding things in response to news headlines in the hopes that we'll get meaningless upvotes from strangers. When looking down on the things that other people like and do, it pays to look in the mirror first.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  It's television for the current generation. I've noticed my parents and inlaws cannot exist without having the television on. I mean they can, but pick a random day, show up at their house and the TV is on some show that they are remotely interested in but watching because they had nothing else to do. That's instagram/facebook/snapchat/etc.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    I have always had stuff to do. This sounds like mental torture.
    - freeflight 5y ago
      I consider it like white noise, having something running in the background somehow helps me better focus on what's in-front of me. In a way it's also a bit of a social substitute; When you live alone, and spend a lot of time alone, it can be nice to just listen to some human voices in the background as if you were not alone.
andrew_eit 5y ago
Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Whatever product it is, whether a social media platform or an online learning platform, it will slowly be zombified into an attention sucking machine, whose goal has now become to keep you interacting with the app as much as possible (using ML and DL of course). I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?), Udemy now has a notification service and an inbox that fills up with automated messages that are just a "welcome to the course" message. Everywhere I look, the pattern is the same, Product is good > Product adds social features > Product attempts to cluster user activity and make recommendations based on social features. We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog. I'm deeply worried about the long-term effects of an industry that is booming by sending sending some of our brightest minds to scale the economy of distractions Or to innovate Ad-tech. I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age. Where smog factories were built in the middle of cities and dusty kids were shovelling coal. We lack any sort of foresight wrt. the digital economy we're building. Maybe one day we'll find a healthy alternative to make software-products users love. But until then, seldom are the days where I do not look at the internet with such savage despair.
- taneq 5y ago
  > it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month" The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.
AlexandrB 5y ago
This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform. When you start inserting content into my feed based on some engagement algorithm you become responsible for what content goes viral.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform. Who claims that?
  - roughly 5y ago
    Facebook, primarily
  - dls2016 5y ago
    Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection? No, the opposite: § 230 exists to protect platform’s (and user’s, to the extent they have control of these things) ability to pick and choose when to promote, demote, or outright block third-party content—based on their view of what is worthy or objectionable or somewhere in between—and how to present the content they do present, without being exposed to either publisher liability for what they present or how they present it or any liability for the decisions they make to block content based on their view of what is objectionable. It exists to enable the polar opposite of neutrality by all parties involved.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > > Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection? > No, the opposite As an illustration of this point, when Florida recently adopted a law intended to impose the kind of neutrality requirement you ascribe to § 230 on to social media providers, the federal court order preventing enforcement of that law found that it was invalid for several reasons, but the first one cited was that the the Florida law violated the protections in § 230. https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NetChoice-v.-Moody-PI-decision.pdf https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NetChoice-v...
littlestymaar 5y ago
So Meta wants to kill their last relevant product? They really do want to become the next Yahoo! right? Facebook has yielded much more profit than Amazon but their user base has remained stagnant and aging for years, and their recent PR stuns (Libra a few years ago, now the “Metaverse”) don't really sound like their perspective will improve. I can understand why a publicly traded company engages in short term profit maximization to satisfy the shareholders and eventually declines, but since Zuck still owns 50+% of the company, I really don't understand why.
- duud 5y ago
  Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) and Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. In terms of the rebrand they committed $10+ billion a year to VR development and promoted the head of VR to CTO so it's a pretty bold PR stunt.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) You're right to clarify, but it's “Just” the only thing that matters. > Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. Oculus is a “market leader” in a really narrow niche. Is FB marketplace really a market leader? I didn't even know that was the thing actually (it may very well depends on your country). FB groups is just Facebook, it's like the only feature to be still significantly used. That's pretty much true for Whatsapp, but they've already started to dynamite it up earlier this year with their monetization attempt: a third of my phones contacts now have signal including one neighbor and my plumber (and also a random lady I had a car crash with last year, I should really tidy my contact list up), they have severely damaged Whatsapp position with this move, and now they are doing the same with instagram.
    - duud 5y ago
      The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter? FB marketplace has a billion monthly active users. That's more than Amazon and eBay combined. Anecdotally I know people who hated FB before it was cool that have returned because of Marketplace. The feed, Facebook video, birthdays, events and a host of other features are still significantly used. VR is a rapidly growing narrow niche which Oculus is dominating. I am a Signal fan and I actively push my contacts to use it but I don't see it surpassing WhatsApp anytime soon. Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.
Wavelets 5y ago
Feels like LinkedIn has gone down this road as well. It really doesn’t feel like a professional network any longer… too much attention seeking spam.
- epolanski 5y ago
  It’s terrible. Should be a network for professionals talking about careers, it’s half people discussing Facebook things (squid game was a popular topic a month ago…), and its another half of attention seekers. Tech Twitter and HNs are the only socials I read to find interesting content and read everyday, plus few selected subreddits on sports I care for as soccer or formula 1, but step out on some other subreddits and its bigocy and cringe.
  - wyclif 5y ago
    LinkedIn has the same "engagement-driven" toxicity that Facebook and Instagram suffer from. That's because "a network for professionals talking about careers" and content limited to work and employment doesn't drive engagement. Squid Game probably does.
eloisius 5y ago
Is there a a federated Mastodon-like that replicates Instagram decently? I know you could just share photos on Mastodon, but I think the photo centric design and stories are what’s fun. At this point I don’t care about the network effects, if I could share bike trip pictures with 5 friends with something that works like IG stories I’d quit IG today. Edit: maybe an answer to my own question is PixelFed but I’m still searching for a mobile app that supports it
- cardamomo 5y ago
  Pixelfed has a very thoughtfully designed webapp. It's not the same experience as a native app, but I find it works nicely.
- wraptile 5y ago
  PixelDroid[1] is a great android client for PixelFed! 1 - https://pixeldroid.org/ https://pixeldroid.org/
davee5 5y ago
Instagram has slowly been deprioritizing content creation and promoting content consumption. This was clearest to me when they recently moved the Post button up to the top, out of the way, to make room for more consumption buttons within thumb reach. For a good long time IG was the only place I could reliably see actual user-generated content. Moreover it was actual friend-generated content, and mostly they posted their actual (best, happy) lives. With culling of the slideshow preachers, the media re-grammers, and the vacuous influencers, an honest social media experience can still be enjoyed-ish. But ads and re-designs will continue to chip away at the creative sharing and interactions that used to be the core UX until it's fully unusable for its original purpose. Instagram now wants you to watch and scroll, not capture and share. Soon I'll need to take my creative sharing elsewhere, but where?
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  TikTok probably. Everyone is saying they're really prioritizing creation tools in-app. Once upon a time, youtube did the same until it got enough (semi professional) content creators.
- stereoradonc 5y ago
  Take it to Telegram channel. No algorithmic mess.
- spacelamb 5y ago
  As a counter-point, IG recently made it much easier to upload content directly from a desktop operating system. It finally added a button for users upload posts from a web browser from a desktop OS (before, you had to switch the browser's user agent to identify as a mobile device, then refresh). But separately, if professional brands really do take over IG over user-generated content between friends, the runner-up is Pinterest. A February 2021 study of social media usage shows that Instagram usage among US adults is 40% [0], with Pinterest at 31% usage. Beyond Pinterest, the runner-ups for (high-quality, artistic) creative content are platforms like Adobe's Behance or Dribbble, but the users for these are primarily creative professionals. For user-generated content between friends (day-to-day stuff), Snapchat isn't a bad replacement (25% usage, according to the same survey). I would guess that most content remains user-generated (via photos that delete themselves sent to other friends). I would also guess it's less less harmful to mental health for certain groups, as it doesn't feature Likes or Comments. To be totally honest, though, I wouldn't regret the loss of user-generated social media content. Exchanging messages, having video calls, and seeing people in-person feels a lot more enjoyable and helpful for strengthening relationships. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...
jjj123 5y ago
I haven’t noticed this, but I only use Instagram on mobile web, which I think skips most of the new features on the news feed. I haven’t seen one of those reels horizontal carousels since I switched to the webapp 6 months ago. Also: ad-blockers seem to work on safari iOS. It’s all around a less predatory experience, though the creation tools are basically non-existent.
AndyKelley 5y ago
it has been facebook since 2012 when it was acquired by facebook
otrahuevada 5y ago
Facebook's unique brand of algorithmic bias is probably the one thing they will end up being remembered for once they manage to sunset themselves. Even Google will recommend some odd, interesting things from time to time to find out if your bubble is in need of expanding, while FB for whatever reason just can´t and defaults to showing you the most handsomely paid for, boring spam available. Here in Uruguay, the most useful feature I found in there and the main reason why I kept coming back to it was Events, and lately they seem to have dropped the ball on that too, only recommending the most anodine, generic things possible. Friends with bands and tiny galleries have complained that their events just don't get that much people in anymore. The boringest, most astroturfed events just get to eat their lunch instead, and as a consequence even that is getting unusable this days. -minor side rant- Also, Instagram has been Facebook For Teens for a while already, hence actual teens escaping to places like tiktok and wattpad. Whatever algorithmic choices FB is making, they don't seem to be working that well on them.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  > Friends with bands and tiny galleries Speaking of algorithmic feeds, I will always lament what could have been - for a short time, you got what was promised on the box: follow creators you like, see the event flyers they post, put the event on a calendar. Utopia. Then they pushed “organic reach” onto the world, and my musician friends with 5000 followers started to be informed that their event flyers would not be delivered unless they paid a fee for different levels of reach. since then, i’ve regularly been informed of events the day after they happen, because that’s when facebook decided a post was popular enough to show me. how many missed connections occurred because facebook was squeezing small creators for ad revenue? so much for connecting the world
  - rabenbru 5y ago
    The system design is fundamentally pernicious Infrastructure needs to be monetized but not in a fashion that undermines a fundamental socially beneficial function like connecting musicians with people who love music
rmrfslashbin 5y ago
Can we talk about the "personal newsletter" aspect of this post? Feels like the dawn of the blogs back in the 2000s. Everyone had one, then we got twitter, facebook, and instagram. Now we're done with those and going back? Lovely. Hope I still know how to LAMP stack.
- kylehotchkiss 5y ago
  No need for LAMP! Just use next.just or gatsby to build your static site and upload to cloudfront.
  - rmrfslashbin 5y ago
    Well yeah... The occasions I'd /actually/ stand up a LAMP stack nowadays are few. There are far better projects and platforms to make it happen.
- jakecopp 5y ago
  That was the part that captured me too. I really want to create a "personal feed" or newsletter out of a Matrix [1] group chat with threads [1] enabled, where I can post once a week or so and my friends can react/reply. [1]: https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#threads https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#threads
deergomoo 5y ago
I used to have a really nice, tailored experience on Instagram. All I saw was genuinely good photography and art that I was interested in. Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn. Not sure what I’ve done to get the algorithm all hot and heavy—perhaps just being an 18-35 male is enough—but it’s rather embarrassing to the point where I don’t always feel comfortable opening the app in public anymore. The annoying thing is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to say “stop showing me stuff like this” for Reels without actually opening them. In fact I’d disable it entirely if I could, I’m not interested in a shitty TikTok clone.
- presentation 5y ago
  Agreed, Google also added YouTube shorts and those are similarly overfit to whatever is the most “engaging” content for some broad demographic, so since I work out I just get nonstop videos of ripped 18-24 year old women doing squats to show off their butts - and I’m not into any of it but they’ve already decided that’s what I want to see, forever.
  - malwarebytess 5y ago
    There was some stat I saw a while ago that Gen Z doesn't visit free porn sites, finding themselves sated by regular social media. I wondered why. Now I see!
- kylehotchkiss 5y ago
  There’s a “sensitive content control” option in account settings. Set to “limit even more” and this type of content will actually stop showing. My search screen is just airplanes and Turkish construction videos now.
  - alphabetter 5y ago
    Thanks for the tip which I will try. I agree with the OP and parent, IG used to be an enjoyable experience if you were careful about who you follow, but it seems that it's now in the process of being destroyed by bad ideas borrowed from FB. My explore page used to be hit-and-miss, but generally somewhat relevent. Over the last few days it has been filled with revolting photos of fake-tanned idiots. No amount of attempting to swat then with "Not Interested" seems to work.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aleksiy123 5y ago
Anyone else think this is part of the natural life cycle of social media? Once something becomes big enough, even the users begin to monetize the content itself (meme pages, influencers). This is the beginning of the end. Everyone's just trying to milk it before it dies. I don't see any ways to address this. Once enough attention is captured it will be inevitably used by someone to sell something. Developers want to get their ROI before someone else does and I don't blame them.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago
  Federation instead of centralization.
  - aleksiy123 5y ago
    While I think this may be solution for a controlling entity to ruin a platform. I don't think it does anything for when the users themselves begin pushing advertisements through content. Which is what I believe really ruins platforms. For example a lot of Fitness Instagrammers start of by just posting of them working out or their daily lives. As they get popular, they start a clothing line, offer training, write ebooks, get sponsorships. Their instgram is now mostly for pushing those products on people.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Did not appreciate the casual ageism displayed in this post, it added nothing. “Leave it to another GenZ author.”
mikewarot 5y ago
Both sites serve the same content to their customers. We're not their customers.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Personalization and algorithmic sorting/filtering needs to be outlawed. This is the only way that our country can finally stop dividing and come together. For the last century or so, we all had a consistent sense of shared ideals because traditional media presented all the same news and ads to everyone. This, it turns out, is a good thing for society - especially one with hundreds of millions of people. Social media, however, manipulates everything that you see. I understand why - following just a few dozen accounts which post multiple times a day - on any service - and soon you will literally need to be doing nothing but scrolling all day to see all the posts. And most people are following hundreds of people. The math doesn't add up, so the algorithms try to increase engagement by bubbling interesting content to the top. It turns out that the most engaging content is hatred and demagoguery - both in recommendations and advertising ("Let's Go Brandon t-shirts! Just $9.99!). Obviously not good, but what can we do since, for the most part, all that hatred is legal free speech. The only way we can solve this is not by trying to limit free speech, but by limiting who doesn't see/hear it. Ads and suggested content need to be the exact same for everyone on an information service, and all sorting and filtering needs to be explicit. Facebook KNOWS they are killing civil discourse and they KNOW the cause. They are too greedy to care. Which is why we need a law.
- boppo1 5y ago
  I dunno. Until the recent changes, Instagram has been very very much a net positive for me. I've connected with artists I love, learned how to improve my work, and paid a particular woodworker north of $1k for a couple pochade boxes I absolutely adore. Without Instagram, my life would be significantly less fulfilling. Caveat though: I'm very good at clicking 'not interested' for content that isn't right in my particularly desired niche.
jaequery 5y ago
In what seems like a blink of an eye, Facebook, is now considered the old people platform, according to kids these days. It took me a while to grasp it but it looks like FB has a huge problem in there hands and it's interesting to see how they tackle their image.
- freeflight 5y ago
  I wouldn't really describe it as "blink of an eye", Facebook hasn't been popular with the younger crowd for many years. That was one of the reasons FB acquired Instagram, as most younger users started flocking there instead of FB.
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    For what it’s worth, I started noticing kids not caring about Facebook around 10 years ago. It was gradual, but evident for quite some time.
    - Juke_Ellington 5y ago
      And Facebook bought Instagram about 10 years ago. They know where the wind blows.
      - steve_adams_86 5y ago
        Oh, you’re right. I recall a lot of people thinking Facebook was in a major decline trying to stay relevant. $1B for Instagram?! What a joke! Well… it worked out for them alright.
  - presentation 5y ago
    I for one only blink at a rate of once every few years.
- Fordec 5y ago
  FB has had a big problem for years. Zuckerberg, notwithstanding everything else, to his credit has demonstrated he is intimately aware of it through his acquisition strategies. If it's in a blink of an eye, it's your eye. To others it's been the case ever since the Instagram/Whatsapp acquisitions.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Delete Instagram.
xwdv 5y ago
So what’s next? What’s the next big platform popular with the younger crowd?
lliamander 5y ago
RSS continues to be evergreen. I have a paid subscription to Inoreader and it's a lovely experience. A feature they have but I haven't used yet is the ability to follow feeds from social media platforms. I might try that.
kizer 5y ago
God I hope it all dies. Deleted FB months ago. All feed "algorithms" are awful! Whether it's YT, Instagram; they give terrible recommendations/content. But, we all know what the algorithms are really optimizing for (it's what happens when you're the product in a service, not a true user).
erickhill 5y ago
I'm not doubting the main thrust of the article. But it's a big pet peeve of mine when Tweets are used in the body of an article as supporting evidence and they have all of half a dozen likes/retweets. It's as if 3 or 4 people on Twitter mention something and that's collected as hard-cutting facts. /rant
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I recently started using the "Tweak New Twitter" add-on, and it has been amazing. Twitter now functions the way I expect it to. I see ONLY tweets from people I explicitly follow. No trending, no random tweets. Weirdly, however, because I don't follow that many people, it all seems a bit quiet and bit boring. I hate myself for it, but a (small) part of me wants to disable it just to get back to the random noise. Yikes.
jeffybefffy519 5y ago
I deleted reddit as soon as it started algorithmically suggesting content to me in my main feed. Why cant people just have an option with feeds?
emodendroket 5y ago
Every time a social networking site makes any change at all we hear all this Chicken Little stuff about how they're running the product and users will abandon it, and almost every time everyone has forgotten in a month or two. A lot of times it is even obvious later that the change was for the better. My money is on this one being the same.
musicpulpite 5y ago
Reddit started doing this too over the summer - aggressively showing me content from other subreddits in my feed taking any interaction with the posts as proof that I should join them as well. I find it annoying too since curating a list of my favorite subreddits was always a fundamental part of using the site.
- meeseeks26 5y ago
  that's why I use reddit clients like sync for reddit ..no recommendation bs just get the feed from subreddits I subscribed for .. imo you should try it
  - vanilla_nut 5y ago
    The one thing that keeps reddit going for me is their detente policy with third-party clients and browser add-ons. I can use RES + old reddit redirect on my desktop browsers and Narwhal on my phone, and I can completely avoid ads and scummy behavior that's seeping into the site in general. Unlike, say, Facebook, who literally spent thousands and thousands of (wo)man hours figuring out how to beat ad blockers in the News Feed. Someone at Reddit is still looking out for power users, giving us ways to beat the system and still use the site. And it's remained the only (non-HN) social media I can stand for years as a result. Whoever you are, thank you!
    - codq 5y ago
      Just wanted to +1 Narwhal for Reddit — excellent UI, and lacking all the right features. I can’t, and won’t do mobile reddit without it.
yalogin 5y ago
Companies don't listen to complaints about functionality much. Facebook has an even bigger problem of privacy and that their platform is actively harming society. None of these matter, Zuckerberg is not trying to fix the problem. Rather he is trying to hide it from public view. The recent change to Meta is just that. They want Oculus to be face of the company and get some cover/distraction from the problem they aren't willing solve.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Whatever happened to VSCO as an Instagram substitute? It didn't include likes for a reason.
imgabe 5y ago
The switch to highlight “suggested posts” is disastrous. It’s the worst kind of garbage. Just interesting enough to keep you scrolling, but almost completely devoid of value.
jakecopp 5y ago
On the theme of the personal newsletter mentioned in the article, I really like the idea of using a group chat on Matrix with threads [1] as a personal newsletter - where I can post something say once a week and my friends can react or add comments if they wish. It means they can get a direct notification (if they'd like), on a self hosted platform (my Matrix server), with any client they choose. [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element- https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element...
sysOpOpPERAND 5y ago
young people don't like well established systems
bitwize 5y ago
Duh. All the cool kids are on TikTok now. Welcome to this decade.
locusofself 5y ago
I've posted thousands of photos to my instagram over the last decade and generally loved being a user of it (although it did give me FOMO and jealousy). A month or so ago instagram deleted my account permanently because their system falsely flagged it as "suspicious activity". My account was never compromised or spammy. It was simply because I used the web interface from a few locations as well as the mobile app. Really frustrating. I don't actually miss it though, I thought I would.
- nichos 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who quit social media that says they miss it. Granted, that's only a handful of people.
  - tempodox 5y ago
    There's probably a good deal of selection bias in there. People who seriously think they'd miss it wouldn't quit in the first place.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  You didn't "engage" with it the right way.
publiush 5y ago
It's time for peer to peer hosted content.
physicles 5y ago
Just following the playbook: > The economics of building a social network: focus only on growth until the old people move in, then monetize aggressively as it slowly dies. https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/329835724906041344 https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/32983572490604134...
mclightning 5y ago
This will be the end of Instagram and Facebook to an extent. People have already left FB, and some deleted it entirely. Next will be Instagram, if they do the same thing there. Probably good for society. Let Facebook do their mistakes.
- r0b05 5y ago
  They probably know this acutely which explains Meta.
randomsearch 5y ago
I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp. Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all. Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention. Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company. In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users. If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part. It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it. Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.
- nicce 5y ago
  While many are still using WhatsApp, it has taken significant reputation impact and users are dropping. Potential is only for the limited user group. It can be only changed by changing owner in general.
  - randomsearch 5y ago
    2 Billion MAU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
  - dx034 5y ago
    From my experience (Europe), not that many users actually left it. Sure, many people constantly complain about privacy issues but only a few very tech-savy left for Signal. And even they cannot leave Whatsapp as it's the de-facto standard. I don't know a single person who has a mobile phone and isn't on Whatsapp at least once a month.
solmag 5y ago
I fucking HATE the Instagram algorithm. Literally random order of stupid shit from 3-7 days instead of the newest releases. Whoever was in charge of this should get banned from programming or product design.
unobatbayar 5y ago
Technically it became Facebook in 2012.
myaccount80 5y ago
Personally, I use Instagram to see what my friends are doing and I’m not interested in the random addictive feed. So I just use Instagram from the web (safari on mobile) and use AdGuard to block the search feed thing. I even waste less time now
sharperguy 5y ago
I've completely lost touch with most of my family due to the degraded user experience of facebook and instagram in the last several years. It's all just a huge mess now, and I have no idea how anybody is supposed to navigate it and just simply keep in touch with people. At least a few people have moved to other messenger services.
- tacocataco 5y ago
  Have you tried making a discord server? My server is my social media entirely now and I love it. The hard part is getting non gamers into it. I wish we could force advasarial integration on social media like we did with telephones. Imagine only being able to call and talk to only other people on the Sprint network. Let the tech companies compete on UX and what they do with your data. Don't hide my friends and family away from me
UkIvZTPcDPCr 5y ago
Posting from a throwaway account to avoid any backlash. I know early, early Facebook employees, like from when the company was just a handful of people. A lot of these people are incredible impressive, capable, creative, risk-tolerant, etc... it's actually intimidating and I don't want to make it sound like I'm at their level at all. Also, we don't keep up anymore - and they haven't worked there in ages - but I back then, I knew them well enough to have insight into the "ethos" of Facebook. What I don't think the people see is how much making something "cool" is literally the essence of Facebook's DNA. Maybe not in the managers, directors, the employees, etc... but at the top, with Zuck, it is 100% the case. Unfortunately, Facebook has become incredibly uncool, as Zuck has tried to impress the grownups, while being way too confident in his ability to continue replicating early Facebook's coolness. For example, I kind of think Zuck was really jealous of Instagram, and this really poisoned their partnership. The same goes for WhatsApp. He doesn't like platforms with different ethos' to outshine his mid-2000's baby. A consequence of this, and this is purely speculative by the way, is that there is a certain willingness to destroy these platforms in the pursuit of user engagement. Like, what doesn't exist in this ethos is thoughtfulness towards what makes each platform special. All that matters is that room full of his friends, and the shared excitement of building one of the first of a new generation of billion dollar companies. It seems that this ethos is basically of accepting others - and obviously Instagram and WhatsApp are super different in terms of their design. So just bear this in mind. Every time you see news about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, it should always be understood through this lens. That "building cool stuff" (that's vague, I know but it's really the most concise way to articulate it), I.e. Facebook's absolute core, is gone, it will never come back, and you can expect proportionate reaction from its founder, who wields an outsized influence over the company, due to their corporate structure.
- urthor 5y ago
  Makes sense. Even from the outside the absolute interest of the 2005 generation in Myspace YouTube and Facebook was extraordinary at the time. I imagine from the inside it must have been an amazing high to be part of Facebook Twitter YouTube. Trying to recapture that high of being the absolute crest of the wave of the future makes sense as a motivation for someone who has it all.
jakub_g 5y ago
All social media-ish platforms are increasingly awful. FB, Twitter, Reddit, IG - all aggressively trying to make you create account and log in, hiding/clobbering content if you're not. Less and less content from people I explicitly followed, and more from "we think you'll like this tweet from someone that is followed by Bob" (not even liked or retweeted by people I know!).
- mrweasel 5y ago
  The changes to Instagrams algorithms are, just like those of Facebook, to optimize "engagement". Where I believe most platforms fail is how they measure their improvements. For the first weeks, or months, people just sort of deal with the new algorithms, because Facebook, Instagram and so on is part of their rutine. Engangement goes up, because people stay longer, as they can find anything. Over time, engagement then decreases, as users are increasingly annoyed. They starts to use the platform less and less, because the content they originally came for is hidden away. At that point the platform has moved on and is no longer seeing users leaving as a result of some change made months ago. I'd be extremely surprised if Facebook has the attention span to tracking changes to their platforms over longer periods of time. As a result they focus on sort term improvements, because that's what they reward internally, without considering what the cost will be next year.
  - jakub_g 5y ago
    Yeah, it feels like an evil cycle. And since no one reverts anything because ego and stuff, they just keep digging their hole. "The numbers started going down... We need to throw even more random shit to catch users' attention and make them stay longer" (just my theory, maybe I'm wrong)
smcg 5y ago
I too would be upset at unsolicited pictures of blotchy English people
kartoshechka 5y ago
I wish music streaming services were as pervasive as FB/Instagram algorithms, for example, here's the album that the artist liked that you follow. Spotify is trying to fill this with ID playlists but that should be an ongoing stream rather than a carefully picked set of songs. On the other side I wouldn't expect artists to be genuinely happy that their actions are mirrored to basically the whole Internet
edpichler 5y ago
For those missing the old internet days, I recommend to take a look in the https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org project.
thekillerb 5y ago
Facebook has just become a place to post all your complaints.

402 points by lawrenceyan 5y ago

I haven't really seen it, but I also don't scroll Instagram endlessly. I've noticed I get a lot of "You might also like..." posts if I start scrolling past the point where Instagram has new content for me to see. That's usually my cue that I've gone too far and there's no more interesting content from the people I follow.

stephen_g 5y ago
Yeah, I’m exactly the same. I would have thought that they would notice that I literally never scroll past there (except every now and then by accident, then I wonder why my feed is full of crap) and stop showing it… I guess not enough people stop scrolling there? Or maybe they do and Instagram is just trying to ram it down everybody’s throats to show more ads? It really sucks that you can’t turn it off. The worst bit is when you see “You’re all caught up”, click the ‘View older posts’ link, and then see posts that I don’t remember seeing from friends that I follow and want to see posts from. Makes me so annoyed! But these friends are only posting on Instagram (or Instagram and FB, which is worse) so there’s not really any good options for seeing these posts I want to see except fighting Insta’s stupid interface…

jacquesc 5y ago

Not only that, it keeps showing me the same posts over and over. Just because I liked something months ago, doesn't mean I want to see it every week

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
Sounds like they got their inspiration from the youtube recommendation engine.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Except at least in my case, I do rewatch YouTube videos a lot.
  - daveslash 5y ago
    Seems like something an algorithm could be modified to take into account ~ a given users proclivity to rewatch/review the same content. After a few recommendations of seen content, if that particular user isn't engaging, decrease their "rewatch recommendation" parameter.
    - tacocataco 5y ago
      It seems clicking "not interested" has no effect on YouTubes recommendations for me. I will see videos I clicked not into on on a week or two again.
      - daveslash 5y ago
        Well, you're right of course. And I experience the same thing as well. My point really was that it seems like something that would be straight forward enough to implement in an algorithm. Whether they actually do is another question....
- colordrops 5y ago
  What is this about exactly? Do the majority of people want to see the same post over and over for days?
Nextgrid 5y ago
If they just showed you a chronological feed you'll be able to tell when you've reached the end of the new posts and stop there. With an algorithmic feed there's essentially no end in sight, people will scroll way more in hopes of seeing new content, which gives them the opportunity to include more ads.

thebean11 5y ago

Ha, for a second I thought they were changing the name to “Facebook Now”.

elzbardico 5y ago
Ahahaha. Long time since I’ve laughed so hard on HN. And thing is, it kind of makes sense.
arcticbull 5y ago
Metagram Instant
er4hn 5y ago
To be followed up by "WhatsApp" rebranding to "What's Facebook" and "Oculus" to "Facebook Live 360".
- spacelamb 5y ago
  Even shorter for branding: "FaceApp" and "Facebook Rift"
  - johnyzee 5y ago
    No, just "Face" (it's cleaner). And then sue anyone else using the word.
adolph 5y ago
I've been thinking the same until I got this far down in the comments. The article doesn't seem to address the service's name, just bla-bla-bla average grade navel gazing. I first started using the app in earnest my final year of college, and look back wistfully at how I artfully chronicled my life for the subsequent six years, weaving together pictures of concerts and coffee shops with mirror selfies and delicious meals into an effortless pointillist tableau of my 20s. I still post on the app occasionally, but basically left a little over a month ago in favor of a personal newsletter, where I feel less pressure to be constantly documenting my consciousness.
5y ago

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athenot 5y ago

At this point, Instagram decided it wants to be a TV and just show me what it wants me to see, not my carefully curated feed. I'm letting my account die.

MarcelOlsz 5y ago
Exactly. I just use instagram to msg people who aren't on Telegram and other services as I don't have FB. I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads. I never watch stories either. It's a dumpster fire, and any algorithm to show me stuff is a mistake, full stop. I only want to see my friends stuff chronologically, nothing else on the app matters for me. I genuinely don't understand why they do this. Sure, keep the ads, whatever, but make it chronological. Too many busy bodies I guess?
- throwaway39203 5y ago
  I think the idea is that ads slip in more easily with an algorithm. Last time I used FB properly you could get the following kind of news feed: actual post from friend, friend actively liked a post from a business, ad from a business a friend previously liked Essentially posts from unknown accounts look less out of place this way
- ethbr0 5y ago
  > I genuinely don't understand why they do this. $
  - dboreham 5y ago
    s/$/$$$/
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads. This is surprisingly disciplined and extreme. Kudos (i think? Can't quite tell if you're missing out due to ideology or holding good ground). > any algorithm to show me stuff is a mistake, full stop. I only want to see my friends stuff chronologically, nothing else on the app matters for me. > I genuinely don't understand why they do this Unfortunately, it seems like you're probably in the minority there. Algo feeds are way easier to ensure the user always sees something new (which is somewhat important), and you can still make it only people you follow (so still only your friends).

anarchy8 5y ago

Social media companies are trying too hard. People just want a chronological feed of things they followed. Nothing more. Stop trying to add shit people don't want.

jacobmischka 5y ago
Hacker News is not representative of the population at large. If people in fact do not like this, engagement will drop, and they'll stop doing it. It turns out most people in the silent majority actually do like this, or are at least more engaged/addicted because of it.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> People just want a chronological feed of things they followed. Feed consumers are not the paying customers.
whyenot 5y ago
RSS/Atom was the way to do this. It's a huge shame hardly anyone (knowingly) uses it anymore.

rib3ye 5y ago

If you follow any Young People™ you'll notice that they're all using Stories now, which still have ads, but are at least chronological. Posts (the original product) are for "Old People" (28+).

rtpg 5y ago
Hell, im a pretty early adopter of instagram along with loads of friends and like 95% of content has become stories. Turns out Snapchat was what most of us wanted but without a purposefully obtuse interface
- rib3ye 5y ago
  The fact that they succeeded in spite of a purposefully obtuse interface is a pretty clear validation for the concept.
  - rtpg 5y ago
    I think the general belief was that the concept was a thing for "kids"/"young people", but now I'm very convinced that that was because of Snap's branding + general incomprehensibility.
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    Did they really succeed though?
    - rib3ye 5y ago
      They succeeded enough to scare zucc into war mode.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  I liked Snapchat, but I don't like stories. To me, the beauty of Snapchat was that I could share a funny moment with a couple of friends who I thought would find the same thing amusing. I can't do that with stories. It's like being forced to tell a in-joke to all of my friends at the same time. I'd rather just not tell the joke at all.

chespinoza 5y ago

I abandoned my account some weeks ago when they where forcing me to add my phone number in order to log in.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
quickthrower2 5y ago
Curtains open.... "But it's for security!"
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's for bot prevention. Phone number verification is the most effective anti bot tool around. It just sucks for privacy and legitimate alt accounting. I have a grandparent who lost their password to skype, microsoft rejected the password/email reset request, but also blocks them from creating a new account because the phone number is attached to the previous account.

vadfa 5y ago

I don't see the difference between the algorithm putting those posts in your feed and putting ads. They are both unwanted content.

Gwypaas 5y ago

Pressing the menu button on the post and then hide I got the choice to hide suggested posts. Though in true Facebook fashion only for 30 days and not permanently.

37 5y ago
Wow. That is probably one of the more underhanded things I've heard about them. So they hope that you will forget, and in reality I'd bet most people do. Basically the same as a "Free 30 Day Trial" and then they take your credit card number. Of course most people don't remember and get charged anyway. (Which was deemed illegal in a court of law? Or am I just being hopeful?)

chris_wot 5y ago

I'm reading a lot of posts here of people who have just decided to drop Instagram. As someone who deleted Facebook only two months ago, and never looked back, I am really hoping this is the beginning of the end for Meta/Facebook/whatever stupid name they call themselves.

tjpnz 5y ago
There's a famous smoking cessation book (that I cannot remember the name of) with one core theme which is supposedly very powerful in the eyes of smokers. The idea that you gain nothing from smoking. That's my realisation when I quit Facebook. Meta/Facebook will crumble as more people come to realise that.
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  > There's a famous smoking cessation book You are probably thinking of Alan Carr's Easy way to stop smoking. For me it really worked.

mullingitover 5y ago

For Instagram to become Facebook they'd need to become entirely dominated by right-wing content[1]. They're nowhere close. [1] https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

keyle 5y ago

Well I guess there is a market opening for ChronoPic then, a new photosharing platform with comments, tags and likes... In chronological order! Because if Instagram acts like Facebook, it's ruined. I had noticed the last few months (and I'm not a heavy user at all), that literally every 4-5 pictures was an advert video. It made me sick to my gut to use it. What also makes me sick is the amount of people just doomscrolling this thing non stop, they actually don't even stop, the scrolling is like in perpetual movement, and when they like something it's a double tap and instant scroll. What kind of consumption is that?

monkeybutton 5y ago
What you want is SMS group chats. No ads. No sign up. Sorta ephemeral. Always chronological.
- daveslash 5y ago
  The beauty of an open, distributed system.... as opposed to a walled garden.

StrLght 5y ago

I abandoned Instagram few weeks ago since it's absolutely hostile towards its' users. Opened an app, noticed that I got into another god awful AB-test (snapping posts to top of the feed instead of a normal scrolling) and just couldn't force myself to use it.

james_pm 5y ago
It's awful. I have it on one account, and not on my other one. The result of the snapping is I stop scrolling and close the app much sooner when browsing that account.

beansu 5y ago

If all you care about is messaging and viewing stories of people that you have messaged lately, I would suggest you to look into Threads. It's basically messenger but for instagram and there are no ads when viewing stories.

yosito 5y ago
This is the first time I ever heard of Threads. Just downloaded it, and the first thing I see is a message that says "Threads will no longer be available, starting December 2021", as in, today.
- twodai 5y ago
  Yeah but for that one day it will be pretty good.

marcodiego 5y ago

I don't understand Instagram language. My GF uses it. It is full of digital influencers, people who make money because they are digital influencers. Young people with sometimes funny but generally pointless and most often ridiculous dancing moves to an equally ridiculous repetitive song. People buying expensive things, doing idiot things talking about uninteresting details of the uninteresting lives of equally uninteresting people... I don't understand the hypnotic effect it has.

pembrook 5y ago
I'm almost certain you could make the same argument about this site. We're all here clamoring to post overly analytical and smart-sounding things in response to news headlines in the hopes that we'll get meaningless upvotes from strangers. When looking down on the things that other people like and do, it pays to look in the mirror first.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
grepfru_it 5y ago
It's television for the current generation. I've noticed my parents and inlaws cannot exist without having the television on. I mean they can, but pick a random day, show up at their house and the TV is on some show that they are remotely interested in but watching because they had nothing else to do. That's instagram/facebook/snapchat/etc.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  I have always had stuff to do. This sounds like mental torture.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    I consider it like white noise, having something running in the background somehow helps me better focus on what's in-front of me. In a way it's also a bit of a social substitute; When you live alone, and spend a lot of time alone, it can be nice to just listen to some human voices in the background as if you were not alone.

andrew_eit 5y ago

Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Whatever product it is, whether a social media platform or an online learning platform, it will slowly be zombified into an attention sucking machine, whose goal has now become to keep you interacting with the app as much as possible (using ML and DL of course). I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?), Udemy now has a notification service and an inbox that fills up with automated messages that are just a "welcome to the course" message. Everywhere I look, the pattern is the same, Product is good > Product adds social features > Product attempts to cluster user activity and make recommendations based on social features. We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog. I'm deeply worried about the long-term effects of an industry that is booming by sending sending some of our brightest minds to scale the economy of distractions Or to innovate Ad-tech. I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age. Where smog factories were built in the middle of cities and dusty kids were shovelling coal. We lack any sort of foresight wrt. the digital economy we're building. Maybe one day we'll find a healthy alternative to make software-products users love. But until then, seldom are the days where I do not look at the internet with such savage despair.

taneq 5y ago
> it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month" The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.

AlexandrB 5y ago

This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform. When you start inserting content into my feed based on some engagement algorithm you become responsible for what content goes viral.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform. Who claims that?
- roughly 5y ago
  Facebook, primarily
- dls2016 5y ago
  Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection?
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection? No, the opposite: § 230 exists to protect platform’s (and user’s, to the extent they have control of these things) ability to pick and choose when to promote, demote, or outright block third-party content—based on their view of what is worthy or objectionable or somewhere in between—and how to present the content they do present, without being exposed to either publisher liability for what they present or how they present it or any liability for the decisions they make to block content based on their view of what is objectionable. It exists to enable the polar opposite of neutrality by all parties involved.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > > Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection? > No, the opposite As an illustration of this point, when Florida recently adopted a law intended to impose the kind of neutrality requirement you ascribe to § 230 on to social media providers, the federal court order preventing enforcement of that law found that it was invalid for several reasons, but the first one cited was that the the Florida law violated the protections in § 230. https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NetChoice-v.-Moody-PI-decision.pdf https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NetChoice-v...

littlestymaar 5y ago

So Meta wants to kill their last relevant product? They really do want to become the next Yahoo! right? Facebook has yielded much more profit than Amazon but their user base has remained stagnant and aging for years, and their recent PR stuns (Libra a few years ago, now the “Metaverse”) don't really sound like their perspective will improve. I can understand why a publicly traded company engages in short term profit maximization to satisfy the shareholders and eventually declines, but since Zuck still owns 50+% of the company, I really don't understand why.

duud 5y ago
Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) and Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. In terms of the rebrand they committed $10+ billion a year to VR development and promoted the head of VR to CTO so it's a pretty bold PR stunt.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) You're right to clarify, but it's “Just” the only thing that matters. > Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. Oculus is a “market leader” in a really narrow niche. Is FB marketplace really a market leader? I didn't even know that was the thing actually (it may very well depends on your country). FB groups is just Facebook, it's like the only feature to be still significantly used. That's pretty much true for Whatsapp, but they've already started to dynamite it up earlier this year with their monetization attempt: a third of my phones contacts now have signal including one neighbor and my plumber (and also a random lady I had a car crash with last year, I should really tidy my contact list up), they have severely damaged Whatsapp position with this move, and now they are doing the same with instagram.
  - duud 5y ago
    The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter? FB marketplace has a billion monthly active users. That's more than Amazon and eBay combined. Anecdotally I know people who hated FB before it was cool that have returned because of Marketplace. The feed, Facebook video, birthdays, events and a host of other features are still significantly used. VR is a rapidly growing narrow niche which Oculus is dominating. I am a Signal fan and I actively push my contacts to use it but I don't see it surpassing WhatsApp anytime soon. Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.

Wavelets 5y ago

Feels like LinkedIn has gone down this road as well. It really doesn’t feel like a professional network any longer… too much attention seeking spam.

epolanski 5y ago
It’s terrible. Should be a network for professionals talking about careers, it’s half people discussing Facebook things (squid game was a popular topic a month ago…), and its another half of attention seekers. Tech Twitter and HNs are the only socials I read to find interesting content and read everyday, plus few selected subreddits on sports I care for as soccer or formula 1, but step out on some other subreddits and its bigocy and cringe.
- wyclif 5y ago
  LinkedIn has the same "engagement-driven" toxicity that Facebook and Instagram suffer from. That's because "a network for professionals talking about careers" and content limited to work and employment doesn't drive engagement. Squid Game probably does.

eloisius 5y ago

Is there a a federated Mastodon-like that replicates Instagram decently? I know you could just share photos on Mastodon, but I think the photo centric design and stories are what’s fun. At this point I don’t care about the network effects, if I could share bike trip pictures with 5 friends with something that works like IG stories I’d quit IG today. Edit: maybe an answer to my own question is PixelFed but I’m still searching for a mobile app that supports it

cardamomo 5y ago
Pixelfed has a very thoughtfully designed webapp. It's not the same experience as a native app, but I find it works nicely.
wraptile 5y ago
PixelDroid[1] is a great android client for PixelFed! 1 - https://pixeldroid.org/ https://pixeldroid.org/

davee5 5y ago

Instagram has slowly been deprioritizing content creation and promoting content consumption. This was clearest to me when they recently moved the Post button up to the top, out of the way, to make room for more consumption buttons within thumb reach. For a good long time IG was the only place I could reliably see actual user-generated content. Moreover it was actual friend-generated content, and mostly they posted their actual (best, happy) lives. With culling of the slideshow preachers, the media re-grammers, and the vacuous influencers, an honest social media experience can still be enjoyed-ish. But ads and re-designs will continue to chip away at the creative sharing and interactions that used to be the core UX until it's fully unusable for its original purpose. Instagram now wants you to watch and scroll, not capture and share. Soon I'll need to take my creative sharing elsewhere, but where?

vineyardmike 5y ago
TikTok probably. Everyone is saying they're really prioritizing creation tools in-app. Once upon a time, youtube did the same until it got enough (semi professional) content creators.
stereoradonc 5y ago
Take it to Telegram channel. No algorithmic mess.
spacelamb 5y ago
As a counter-point, IG recently made it much easier to upload content directly from a desktop operating system. It finally added a button for users upload posts from a web browser from a desktop OS (before, you had to switch the browser's user agent to identify as a mobile device, then refresh). But separately, if professional brands really do take over IG over user-generated content between friends, the runner-up is Pinterest. A February 2021 study of social media usage shows that Instagram usage among US adults is 40% [0], with Pinterest at 31% usage. Beyond Pinterest, the runner-ups for (high-quality, artistic) creative content are platforms like Adobe's Behance or Dribbble, but the users for these are primarily creative professionals. For user-generated content between friends (day-to-day stuff), Snapchat isn't a bad replacement (25% usage, according to the same survey). I would guess that most content remains user-generated (via photos that delete themselves sent to other friends). I would also guess it's less less harmful to mental health for certain groups, as it doesn't feature Likes or Comments. To be totally honest, though, I wouldn't regret the loss of user-generated social media content. Exchanging messages, having video calls, and seeing people in-person feels a lot more enjoyable and helpful for strengthening relationships. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...

jjj123 5y ago

I haven’t noticed this, but I only use Instagram on mobile web, which I think skips most of the new features on the news feed. I haven’t seen one of those reels horizontal carousels since I switched to the webapp 6 months ago. Also: ad-blockers seem to work on safari iOS. It’s all around a less predatory experience, though the creation tools are basically non-existent.

AndyKelley 5y ago

it has been facebook since 2012 when it was acquired by facebook

otrahuevada 5y ago

Facebook's unique brand of algorithmic bias is probably the one thing they will end up being remembered for once they manage to sunset themselves. Even Google will recommend some odd, interesting things from time to time to find out if your bubble is in need of expanding, while FB for whatever reason just can´t and defaults to showing you the most handsomely paid for, boring spam available. Here in Uruguay, the most useful feature I found in there and the main reason why I kept coming back to it was Events, and lately they seem to have dropped the ball on that too, only recommending the most anodine, generic things possible. Friends with bands and tiny galleries have complained that their events just don't get that much people in anymore. The boringest, most astroturfed events just get to eat their lunch instead, and as a consequence even that is getting unusable this days. -minor side rant- Also, Instagram has been Facebook For Teens for a while already, hence actual teens escaping to places like tiktok and wattpad. Whatever algorithmic choices FB is making, they don't seem to be working that well on them.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
> Friends with bands and tiny galleries Speaking of algorithmic feeds, I will always lament what could have been - for a short time, you got what was promised on the box: follow creators you like, see the event flyers they post, put the event on a calendar. Utopia. Then they pushed “organic reach” onto the world, and my musician friends with 5000 followers started to be informed that their event flyers would not be delivered unless they paid a fee for different levels of reach. since then, i’ve regularly been informed of events the day after they happen, because that’s when facebook decided a post was popular enough to show me. how many missed connections occurred because facebook was squeezing small creators for ad revenue? so much for connecting the world
- rabenbru 5y ago
  The system design is fundamentally pernicious Infrastructure needs to be monetized but not in a fashion that undermines a fundamental socially beneficial function like connecting musicians with people who love music

rmrfslashbin 5y ago

Can we talk about the "personal newsletter" aspect of this post? Feels like the dawn of the blogs back in the 2000s. Everyone had one, then we got twitter, facebook, and instagram. Now we're done with those and going back? Lovely. Hope I still know how to LAMP stack.

kylehotchkiss 5y ago
No need for LAMP! Just use next.just or gatsby to build your static site and upload to cloudfront.
- rmrfslashbin 5y ago
  Well yeah... The occasions I'd /actually/ stand up a LAMP stack nowadays are few. There are far better projects and platforms to make it happen.
jakecopp 5y ago
That was the part that captured me too. I really want to create a "personal feed" or newsletter out of a Matrix [1] group chat with threads [1] enabled, where I can post once a week or so and my friends can react/reply. [1]: https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#threads https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#threads

deergomoo 5y ago

I used to have a really nice, tailored experience on Instagram. All I saw was genuinely good photography and art that I was interested in. Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn. Not sure what I’ve done to get the algorithm all hot and heavy—perhaps just being an 18-35 male is enough—but it’s rather embarrassing to the point where I don’t always feel comfortable opening the app in public anymore. The annoying thing is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to say “stop showing me stuff like this” for Reels without actually opening them. In fact I’d disable it entirely if I could, I’m not interested in a shitty TikTok clone.

presentation 5y ago
Agreed, Google also added YouTube shorts and those are similarly overfit to whatever is the most “engaging” content for some broad demographic, so since I work out I just get nonstop videos of ripped 18-24 year old women doing squats to show off their butts - and I’m not into any of it but they’ve already decided that’s what I want to see, forever.
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  There was some stat I saw a while ago that Gen Z doesn't visit free porn sites, finding themselves sated by regular social media. I wondered why. Now I see!
kylehotchkiss 5y ago
There’s a “sensitive content control” option in account settings. Set to “limit even more” and this type of content will actually stop showing. My search screen is just airplanes and Turkish construction videos now.
- alphabetter 5y ago
  Thanks for the tip which I will try. I agree with the OP and parent, IG used to be an enjoyable experience if you were careful about who you follow, but it seems that it's now in the process of being destroyed by bad ideas borrowed from FB. My explore page used to be hit-and-miss, but generally somewhat relevent. Over the last few days it has been filled with revolting photos of fake-tanned idiots. No amount of attempting to swat then with "Not Interested" seems to work.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aleksiy123 5y ago

Anyone else think this is part of the natural life cycle of social media? Once something becomes big enough, even the users begin to monetize the content itself (meme pages, influencers). This is the beginning of the end. Everyone's just trying to milk it before it dies. I don't see any ways to address this. Once enough attention is captured it will be inevitably used by someone to sell something. Developers want to get their ROI before someone else does and I don't blame them.

SrslyJosh 5y ago
Federation instead of centralization.
- aleksiy123 5y ago
  While I think this may be solution for a controlling entity to ruin a platform. I don't think it does anything for when the users themselves begin pushing advertisements through content. Which is what I believe really ruins platforms. For example a lot of Fitness Instagrammers start of by just posting of them working out or their daily lives. As they get popular, they start a clothing line, offer training, write ebooks, get sponsorships. Their instgram is now mostly for pushing those products on people.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Did not appreciate the casual ageism displayed in this post, it added nothing. “Leave it to another GenZ author.”

mikewarot 5y ago

Both sites serve the same content to their customers. We're not their customers.

russellbeattie 5y ago

Personalization and algorithmic sorting/filtering needs to be outlawed. This is the only way that our country can finally stop dividing and come together. For the last century or so, we all had a consistent sense of shared ideals because traditional media presented all the same news and ads to everyone. This, it turns out, is a good thing for society - especially one with hundreds of millions of people. Social media, however, manipulates everything that you see. I understand why - following just a few dozen accounts which post multiple times a day - on any service - and soon you will literally need to be doing nothing but scrolling all day to see all the posts. And most people are following hundreds of people. The math doesn't add up, so the algorithms try to increase engagement by bubbling interesting content to the top. It turns out that the most engaging content is hatred and demagoguery - both in recommendations and advertising ("Let's Go Brandon t-shirts! Just $9.99!). Obviously not good, but what can we do since, for the most part, all that hatred is legal free speech. The only way we can solve this is not by trying to limit free speech, but by limiting who doesn't see/hear it. Ads and suggested content need to be the exact same for everyone on an information service, and all sorting and filtering needs to be explicit. Facebook KNOWS they are killing civil discourse and they KNOW the cause. They are too greedy to care. Which is why we need a law.

boppo1 5y ago
I dunno. Until the recent changes, Instagram has been very very much a net positive for me. I've connected with artists I love, learned how to improve my work, and paid a particular woodworker north of $1k for a couple pochade boxes I absolutely adore. Without Instagram, my life would be significantly less fulfilling. Caveat though: I'm very good at clicking 'not interested' for content that isn't right in my particularly desired niche.

jaequery 5y ago

In what seems like a blink of an eye, Facebook, is now considered the old people platform, according to kids these days. It took me a while to grasp it but it looks like FB has a huge problem in there hands and it's interesting to see how they tackle their image.

freeflight 5y ago
I wouldn't really describe it as "blink of an eye", Facebook hasn't been popular with the younger crowd for many years. That was one of the reasons FB acquired Instagram, as most younger users started flocking there instead of FB.
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, I started noticing kids not caring about Facebook around 10 years ago. It was gradual, but evident for quite some time.
  - Juke_Ellington 5y ago
    And Facebook bought Instagram about 10 years ago. They know where the wind blows.
    - steve_adams_86 5y ago
      Oh, you’re right. I recall a lot of people thinking Facebook was in a major decline trying to stay relevant. $1B for Instagram?! What a joke! Well… it worked out for them alright.
- presentation 5y ago
  I for one only blink at a rate of once every few years.
Fordec 5y ago
FB has had a big problem for years. Zuckerberg, notwithstanding everything else, to his credit has demonstrated he is intimately aware of it through his acquisition strategies. If it's in a blink of an eye, it's your eye. To others it's been the case ever since the Instagram/Whatsapp acquisitions.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Delete Instagram.

xwdv 5y ago

So what’s next? What’s the next big platform popular with the younger crowd?

lliamander 5y ago

RSS continues to be evergreen. I have a paid subscription to Inoreader and it's a lovely experience. A feature they have but I haven't used yet is the ability to follow feeds from social media platforms. I might try that.

kizer 5y ago

God I hope it all dies. Deleted FB months ago. All feed "algorithms" are awful! Whether it's YT, Instagram; they give terrible recommendations/content. But, we all know what the algorithms are really optimizing for (it's what happens when you're the product in a service, not a true user).

erickhill 5y ago

I'm not doubting the main thrust of the article. But it's a big pet peeve of mine when Tweets are used in the body of an article as supporting evidence and they have all of half a dozen likes/retweets. It's as if 3 or 4 people on Twitter mention something and that's collected as hard-cutting facts. /rant

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

I recently started using the "Tweak New Twitter" add-on, and it has been amazing. Twitter now functions the way I expect it to. I see ONLY tweets from people I explicitly follow. No trending, no random tweets. Weirdly, however, because I don't follow that many people, it all seems a bit quiet and bit boring. I hate myself for it, but a (small) part of me wants to disable it just to get back to the random noise. Yikes.

jeffybefffy519 5y ago

I deleted reddit as soon as it started algorithmically suggesting content to me in my main feed. Why cant people just have an option with feeds?

emodendroket 5y ago

Every time a social networking site makes any change at all we hear all this Chicken Little stuff about how they're running the product and users will abandon it, and almost every time everyone has forgotten in a month or two. A lot of times it is even obvious later that the change was for the better. My money is on this one being the same.

musicpulpite 5y ago

Reddit started doing this too over the summer - aggressively showing me content from other subreddits in my feed taking any interaction with the posts as proof that I should join them as well. I find it annoying too since curating a list of my favorite subreddits was always a fundamental part of using the site.

meeseeks26 5y ago
that's why I use reddit clients like sync for reddit ..no recommendation bs just get the feed from subreddits I subscribed for .. imo you should try it
- vanilla_nut 5y ago
  The one thing that keeps reddit going for me is their detente policy with third-party clients and browser add-ons. I can use RES + old reddit redirect on my desktop browsers and Narwhal on my phone, and I can completely avoid ads and scummy behavior that's seeping into the site in general. Unlike, say, Facebook, who literally spent thousands and thousands of (wo)man hours figuring out how to beat ad blockers in the News Feed. Someone at Reddit is still looking out for power users, giving us ways to beat the system and still use the site. And it's remained the only (non-HN) social media I can stand for years as a result. Whoever you are, thank you!
  - codq 5y ago
    Just wanted to +1 Narwhal for Reddit — excellent UI, and lacking all the right features. I can’t, and won’t do mobile reddit without it.

yalogin 5y ago

Companies don't listen to complaints about functionality much. Facebook has an even bigger problem of privacy and that their platform is actively harming society. None of these matter, Zuckerberg is not trying to fix the problem. Rather he is trying to hide it from public view. The recent change to Meta is just that. They want Oculus to be face of the company and get some cover/distraction from the problem they aren't willing solve.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Whatever happened to VSCO as an Instagram substitute? It didn't include likes for a reason.

imgabe 5y ago

The switch to highlight “suggested posts” is disastrous. It’s the worst kind of garbage. Just interesting enough to keep you scrolling, but almost completely devoid of value.

jakecopp 5y ago

On the theme of the personal newsletter mentioned in the article, I really like the idea of using a group chat on Matrix with threads [1] as a personal newsletter - where I can post something say once a week and my friends can react or add comments if they wish. It means they can get a direct notification (if they'd like), on a self hosted platform (my Matrix server), with any client they choose. [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element- https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element...

sysOpOpPERAND 5y ago

young people don't like well established systems

bitwize 5y ago

Duh. All the cool kids are on TikTok now. Welcome to this decade.

locusofself 5y ago

I've posted thousands of photos to my instagram over the last decade and generally loved being a user of it (although it did give me FOMO and jealousy). A month or so ago instagram deleted my account permanently because their system falsely flagged it as "suspicious activity". My account was never compromised or spammy. It was simply because I used the web interface from a few locations as well as the mobile app. Really frustrating. I don't actually miss it though, I thought I would.

nichos 5y ago
I don't know anyone who quit social media that says they miss it. Granted, that's only a handful of people.
- tempodox 5y ago
  There's probably a good deal of selection bias in there. People who seriously think they'd miss it wouldn't quit in the first place.
Nextgrid 5y ago
You didn't "engage" with it the right way.

publiush 5y ago

It's time for peer to peer hosted content.

physicles 5y ago

Just following the playbook: > The economics of building a social network: focus only on growth until the old people move in, then monetize aggressively as it slowly dies. https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/329835724906041344 https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/32983572490604134...

mclightning 5y ago

This will be the end of Instagram and Facebook to an extent. People have already left FB, and some deleted it entirely. Next will be Instagram, if they do the same thing there. Probably good for society. Let Facebook do their mistakes.

r0b05 5y ago
They probably know this acutely which explains Meta.

randomsearch 5y ago

I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp. Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all. Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention. Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company. In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users. If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part. It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it. Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.

nicce 5y ago
While many are still using WhatsApp, it has taken significant reputation impact and users are dropping. Potential is only for the limited user group. It can be only changed by changing owner in general.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  2 Billion MAU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
- dx034 5y ago
  From my experience (Europe), not that many users actually left it. Sure, many people constantly complain about privacy issues but only a few very tech-savy left for Signal. And even they cannot leave Whatsapp as it's the de-facto standard. I don't know a single person who has a mobile phone and isn't on Whatsapp at least once a month.

solmag 5y ago

I fucking HATE the Instagram algorithm. Literally random order of stupid shit from 3-7 days instead of the newest releases. Whoever was in charge of this should get banned from programming or product design.

unobatbayar 5y ago

Technically it became Facebook in 2012.

myaccount80 5y ago

Personally, I use Instagram to see what my friends are doing and I’m not interested in the random addictive feed. So I just use Instagram from the web (safari on mobile) and use AdGuard to block the search feed thing. I even waste less time now

sharperguy 5y ago

I've completely lost touch with most of my family due to the degraded user experience of facebook and instagram in the last several years. It's all just a huge mess now, and I have no idea how anybody is supposed to navigate it and just simply keep in touch with people. At least a few people have moved to other messenger services.

tacocataco 5y ago
Have you tried making a discord server? My server is my social media entirely now and I love it. The hard part is getting non gamers into it. I wish we could force advasarial integration on social media like we did with telephones. Imagine only being able to call and talk to only other people on the Sprint network. Let the tech companies compete on UX and what they do with your data. Don't hide my friends and family away from me

UkIvZTPcDPCr 5y ago

Posting from a throwaway account to avoid any backlash. I know early, early Facebook employees, like from when the company was just a handful of people. A lot of these people are incredible impressive, capable, creative, risk-tolerant, etc... it's actually intimidating and I don't want to make it sound like I'm at their level at all. Also, we don't keep up anymore - and they haven't worked there in ages - but I back then, I knew them well enough to have insight into the "ethos" of Facebook. What I don't think the people see is how much making something "cool" is literally the essence of Facebook's DNA. Maybe not in the managers, directors, the employees, etc... but at the top, with Zuck, it is 100% the case. Unfortunately, Facebook has become incredibly uncool, as Zuck has tried to impress the grownups, while being way too confident in his ability to continue replicating early Facebook's coolness. For example, I kind of think Zuck was really jealous of Instagram, and this really poisoned their partnership. The same goes for WhatsApp. He doesn't like platforms with different ethos' to outshine his mid-2000's baby. A consequence of this, and this is purely speculative by the way, is that there is a certain willingness to destroy these platforms in the pursuit of user engagement. Like, what doesn't exist in this ethos is thoughtfulness towards what makes each platform special. All that matters is that room full of his friends, and the shared excitement of building one of the first of a new generation of billion dollar companies. It seems that this ethos is basically of accepting others - and obviously Instagram and WhatsApp are super different in terms of their design. So just bear this in mind. Every time you see news about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, it should always be understood through this lens. That "building cool stuff" (that's vague, I know but it's really the most concise way to articulate it), I.e. Facebook's absolute core, is gone, it will never come back, and you can expect proportionate reaction from its founder, who wields an outsized influence over the company, due to their corporate structure.

urthor 5y ago
Makes sense. Even from the outside the absolute interest of the 2005 generation in Myspace YouTube and Facebook was extraordinary at the time. I imagine from the inside it must have been an amazing high to be part of Facebook Twitter YouTube. Trying to recapture that high of being the absolute crest of the wave of the future makes sense as a motivation for someone who has it all.

jakub_g 5y ago

All social media-ish platforms are increasingly awful. FB, Twitter, Reddit, IG - all aggressively trying to make you create account and log in, hiding/clobbering content if you're not. Less and less content from people I explicitly followed, and more from "we think you'll like this tweet from someone that is followed by Bob" (not even liked or retweeted by people I know!).

mrweasel 5y ago
The changes to Instagrams algorithms are, just like those of Facebook, to optimize "engagement". Where I believe most platforms fail is how they measure their improvements. For the first weeks, or months, people just sort of deal with the new algorithms, because Facebook, Instagram and so on is part of their rutine. Engangement goes up, because people stay longer, as they can find anything. Over time, engagement then decreases, as users are increasingly annoyed. They starts to use the platform less and less, because the content they originally came for is hidden away. At that point the platform has moved on and is no longer seeing users leaving as a result of some change made months ago. I'd be extremely surprised if Facebook has the attention span to tracking changes to their platforms over longer periods of time. As a result they focus on sort term improvements, because that's what they reward internally, without considering what the cost will be next year.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  Yeah, it feels like an evil cycle. And since no one reverts anything because ego and stuff, they just keep digging their hole. "The numbers started going down... We need to throw even more random shit to catch users' attention and make them stay longer" (just my theory, maybe I'm wrong)

smcg 5y ago

I too would be upset at unsolicited pictures of blotchy English people

kartoshechka 5y ago

I wish music streaming services were as pervasive as FB/Instagram algorithms, for example, here's the album that the artist liked that you follow. Spotify is trying to fill this with ID playlists but that should be an ongoing stream rather than a carefully picked set of songs. On the other side I wouldn't expect artists to be genuinely happy that their actions are mirrored to basically the whole Internet

edpichler 5y ago

For those missing the old internet days, I recommend to take a look in the https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org project.

thekillerb 5y ago

Facebook has just become a place to post all your complaints.