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Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled

Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to override them. There's at least several hundred of these, possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of stuff they're A/B testing, too — wording, button colors, bug fixes, animation durations... I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a disgrace to the IT industry.

lightbendover 4y ago
Honestly, blame humans. If our species wasn't susceptible to changing our behavior due to these seemingly-inconsequential changes, A/B testing would return to a more sane baseline; however, these "silly" changes (when statistically proven to be effective long-term) can lead to 8 figure shifts in megacorp revenue so they will continue to be made.
solarkraft 4y ago
It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is, for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe it has something to do with targeting "the kids". I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  Ig is the perfect example of an app that optimizes for engagement while providing a really buggy and low-quality experience