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All social media-ish platforms are increasingly awful. FB, Twitter, Reddit, IG - all aggressively trying to make you create account and log in, hiding/clobberin
by 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 agoThe 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 agoYeah, 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)