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Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

335 points by laurex 4y ago

intrasight 4y ago
Is't the easy solution - both in FB in IG - to just go visit your friends profiles?
winternett 4y ago
It's interesting that they don't care, it's a Marie Antoinette-esque attitude to their lifeblood, and ultimately what will end their dominance. The truth is they converted a free service into a pay service (the gas-lights creators and businesses into paying for visibility). The visibility, even when paid for is not very fruitful for many as well... If you run a small business like a restaurant in the US, but get 40,000 views directed to your profile of people who live in Russia, it is unlikely to turn into a pipeline of sales that can sustain your business... This is just one way modern social apps gaslight people who are working very hard to build business... It undermines the very model of business success, to keep people working very hard... For no reward. These site let memes and non-business-related things flow all day on feeds provided they are not promoting anything, which makes the sites appear "full of life". People seem to be catching on that it was all one big gaslight after they've spent tons of money on ads, they are slowly realizing that it's a rigged carnival game, but social apps like Instagram have pitted the rest of the Internet, and they constantly play a dictatorial role. The carpet can get pulled at any time if they don't take these complaints seriously though, and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out. I really don't think TikTok is much better now either, these apps all use the technique of phasing adds and slowly reducing (external) visibility for creators, and just judging from comments I see on Twitter, the economy is imploding as a result. With the economy as bad as it is, this current creator economy is not sustainable, and not fruitful. We'll all see the quality on these platforms decline as creators quit and protest, while platforms will burn up cash reserves and disappoint investors as their overhead for hosting and operations increase. We've praised the arrogance of social platform leadership for too long and now it's coming back to bite all of us. The biggest worry is that there will not much to gravitate back to if social media implodes... But it's also a great opportunity for IRC and web sites to re-emerge, and for someone to invent hopefully something better than these giant platforms that really aren't "social" at all any more.
- thepangolino 4y ago
- dvtrn 4y ago
  "Baudrillard was right" - me, often.
  - sizzle 4y ago
    Wow haven’t seen that name mentioned often, got any good recommendations if their writing for someone wanting to get into it?
    - dvtrn 4y ago
      I’m a little late to seeing your reply (my apologies) but the easiest point of reference (and where I’m drawing my prognostications from) is of course “Simulacra and Simulation”
      - sizzle 4y ago
        Thank you, will check it out!
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > it's a rigged carnival game A major "Aha!" moment for me was when I had it pointed out to me that the social media companies' algorithms that get and keep users attention by showing them what they want can easily be exapted to manipulate the metrics and ad buying behavior.
  - winternett 4y ago
    Yep, the algorithms are all geared towards serving company revenue, not towards finding the best content contributors... What you see on most platforms is now override by who pays the most to boost their posts. There's a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors goin on.
haspoken 4y ago
https://archive.ph/FF2d1 https://archive.ph/FF2d1
jacquesc 4y ago
Maybe it'll show up in their usage numbers. I stopped using IG because it's near impossible not to prevent the sound from blasting from accidentally scrolling or clicking on a reel. I feel like a product team that gave any shit whatsoever would give people a mute button that stays put. People use their phones in lots of different locations (with other people around). And phones are constantly blasting music at random points because of Reels.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > I stopped using IG because it's near impossible not to prevent the sound from blasting from accidentally scrolling or clicking on a reel. I don't know a single person who doesn't hate the muting functionality in IG. I can't believe how overlooked this is.
- alexashka 4y ago
  Is there not a physical mute button on your phone?
  - prepend 4y ago
    Instagram ignores the mute button on my iPhone. I have to manually turn the volume down to zero to consistently get no sound. It’s a real jerk app.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      I feel like it’s even worse. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and I haven’t figured out how to get it to do what I want 100% of the time. Just have a mute button on the player!
  - navanchauhan 4y ago
    maybe, not everyone has an iPhone or a OnePlus device?
- matsemann 4y ago
  What boggles my brain is when someone wants to show me a video on Instagram, but there is no way to play it from the beginning. So have to wait for it to loop around.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Adam Mosseri has been in full damage-control mode for years. Simply put, Instagram knows you're addicted and will make as much possible product change to make them more money while you struggle to get it out of your life given how personalized and predatory the experiences are becoming. There is a natural conclusion to "growth" of engagement though. Everyone is competing for our attention given we sit on devices longer each year. I think it's averaging about 3 hours today on a smartphone. That's crazy to think about.
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate: They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. Keith Rabois (top VC), mentioned that FB has always prioritized optimization over new products because of the Ad business. That also could explain their inability to do anything but copy other business ideas. The opposing point of view would be that Ads on FB/Google are so profitable that working on anything else pales in comparision (in terms of profit generation). And so they dont innovate, but iterate and optimize. My vote is that excessive leetcode testing selects for employees with no creativity. And while these companies are massive, lower level engineers hired ten years ago do rise to the top and run whole divisions EDIT: Counterpoint on how good early Google employees were: the above maxim does not apply because that was before leetcode became huge, people passing those interviews were actually brilliant, they didnt spend six months studying in a basement
- petre 4y ago
  > copy other business ideas Copy Chinese business ideas. CCP propaganda is over optimized. It should work fine for ads.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  How much leetcoding do their PMs do? I understand your overall point, but I don't think having a high algorithmic/data structures whiteboarding bar for their engineers correlates to Facebook's weakening product abilities. Ditto for Google.
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    I think it does. As much as companies want to believe that product runs the product, an engineer that can create new things that influences the product is massively more valuable. Amazon commonly has engineers drive new innovations, product people nowhere to be seen
    - 4y ago
vannevar 4y ago
Social media companies are in a bind. They're companies, so they have to grow or die. But they're invested in their current platform, and the likelihood of a particular innovation being successful is low, so it's tough for them to do radical R&D, they're limited to tweaking their current platform. This opens the door to startups, which can capture the new (young) users who aren't committed to a platform. A small number of startups succeed and experience exponential growth that starts cutting into the growth of the established players. The Instagrams of the world have to chase features to retain growth (a strategy ultimately doomed to fail), or they will have to acquire the upstarts. Because of its close ties with the Chinese government any kind of merger or acquisition with TikTok is fraught with potential problems. Instagram is taking the only path available to it, as unlikely to succeed as it is.
- samwillis 4y ago
  > They're companies, so they have to grow or die. This is a failing of modern corporate culture. There is nothing wrong in reaching a stable equilibrium, becoming profitable, and if you are a public company, paying dividends. It’s unfortunate that it’s become growth at all costs, there is something to be said about public companies just stabilising, and paying out profits to shareholders. Now, that’s not to say Facebook is able to reach a stable equilibrium. I think they are struggling to maintain that, and that’s the problem. It’s a case of not loosing market share, especially when you have promised your shareholders the world.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > a failing of modern corporate culture. There is nothing wrong in reaching a stable equilibrium, becoming profitable, and if you are a public company, paying dividends It’s the failing of a culture. Plenty of companies do this. (I cautiously venture that most American companies do this?)
    - alt227 4y ago
      Its not a failure of culture, it's Capitalism.
matsemann 4y ago
If at least the algorithm was any good, people might not have complained as much. Like, I only follow sport stuff. Some triathletes, professional bicyclists, skiers etc. What does Instagram then decide to show me? A female cyclist with her zipper down and lots of cleavage, a skier in bikini, ass pics of swimmers etc.. Probably that's the most trending stuff related to my interests, but I follow no accounts related to that, anf scrolling through my likes they're nowhere like that, so please show me what I want instead.
- gdulli 4y ago
  When Twitter forced the algorithmic timeline on people, someone tweeted: "Is the algorithm based what everyone else likes, or what I like? Because I hate what everyone else likes, and I don't know what I like."
  - shmatt 4y ago
    I don't have TikTok, but for 2 years this is what I've been hearing from people who love it. They figured out a way to show you exactly what you're interested in, without you giving them any specific input There have been many articles about the phenomenon of the "For You Page"[1][2]. But the funny part is Meta sees this and figures - people are looking at videos, we'll do videos. And not - people are seeing what they specifically like, lets do that [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg... [2] https://repeller.com/tiktok-algorithm-bisexual/ https://repeller.com/tiktok-algorithm-bisexual/
    - alexb_ 4y ago
      I think one of the biggest things TikTok does is that it shows completely random videos from time to time. I often get videos with 0 views that were just randomly shown to me. So the platform actually has some randomness that can spontaneously find something interesting instead of having people build up a base first.
    - fluidcruft 4y ago
alexashka 4y ago
The infinite growth beast comes for everyone. It's the second coming, again and again, and again. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
- l33tbro 4y ago
  Did you really just post a Yeats poem in response to some feature changes on Instagram?
thebradbain 4y ago
Say what you want about Twitter, but as someone who's been on it since 2011 and has made it my primary platform for social media since 2016, I'm grateful that fundamentally it's still the same old Twitter. Yes, they've fallen into the copy-cat temptation machine in some regards – i.e. "fleets" (stories) – but unlike Instagram will at least admit when it's not working and revert (fleets are no longer a feature on the platform). Of course, their failure to innovate definitely cost them TikTok-level success with their mismanagement of both Vine and Periscope, but at least their stubbornness to change has kept the core experience intact. Obviously there's some larger issues around Twitter's direction ("who is going to be in control of the company?") and the ever-present critiques of misinformation/harassment/"moderation versus censorship" that comes with the territory of being a public forum, but overall it's still the Twitter I know. I wonder if instagram's downfall will be a boon for Twitter in this regard: at least I know what it is.
system16 4y ago
It's fascinating how reactionary and directionless Instagram and Facebook have become. Instagram in particular has become Frankenstein's monster over the last few years, pathetically trying to reproduce functionality from other apps. The latest cloning of TikTok's feed is almost embarrassing. It's a testament to how deep the lack of a creative culture at Meta runs.
- alexashka 4y ago
  What creative culture? A billion user beast does not know, need or want creative or culture. It wants profits and more of them, every quarter. TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos. Instagram isn't losing to TikTok's 'creative culture', it's losing to American elite's favorite move - throwing money at a problem until everyone else quits, at which point you give talks and write books about how it was due to innovation, freedom and democracy, oh and LGBTQ+ or whatever the term is nowadays. Source: know a couple of people who could barely scrape by on Instagram/youtube, switched to TikTok and are all of a sudden making more money than me. The infinite money faucet at TikTok will soon run dry and it'll become just another shit social media platform, like all the rest.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos TikTok has at least done three innovative things. One is the frictionless sign in that doesn't require an account, secondly the well done video editing tools and most importantly abstracting away the social graph. And on the finance site this doesn't check out either. TikTok is on track to triple revenue this year alone and top creators generally make more money from outside sponsors and deals than from the company itself. Of all the social media site TikTok arguably chips in the least amount of money themselves.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - alexashka 4y ago
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
I’ve developed a deep dislike for Mosseri following his Instagram Kids predation. The lack of empathy seems a recurring theme. Is there inside ball on why he commands respect at Facebook? Or is there a conservation of clowns rule in play with David Marcus’s departure?
mnd999 4y ago
“I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be” Sure, because they could get the information they want without having to wade through the mountains of crap you’re pumping out of the septic tank into your users faces. You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown.
- Strom 4y ago
  You have a good point that would stand even stronger without the name calling.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    It does seem very appropriate though, doesnt it?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - _2d30 4y ago
    Actually, it's a terrible point because Tommy Marcus, the Brooklyn based content creator, has no say in Instagram's optimization choices!
  - sh4rks 4y ago
    I'm not sure it would have
  - gjs278 4y ago
- t_mann 4y ago
  I have a feeling that from Meta's perspective, that is the right metric. It's probably also a decent metric for that guy, because his influencer business depends on people wading through his content.
- _2d30 4y ago
spaceman_2020 4y ago
TikTok is banned in my country but friends from UK and US say that the algorithm is much better at recommending videos. True or just plain individual bias?
- Quikinterp 4y ago
  It's algorithm is way more aggressive than other social media. Sometimes it's almost creepy. I don't care about a lot of stuff on there but it's easy to find yourself in very niche communities on tiktok.
- system16 4y ago
  In my experience it's absolutely true. Maybe it's just early in Instagram's phase of their new feed and it's not optimized, but all I see are a bunch of seemingly random memes and videos that don't interest me at all, and they only appear targeted to me in the most superficial of ways. Essentially I skip past the videos looking for friend photos, and after about 30 seconds get bored and shut the app. TikTok on the other hand seems to know me better than I do myself (or care to admit). I go out of my way to not open it because I know 30 minutes of my time will vanish in an instant.
- dahdum 4y ago
  Very true, but partly due to the broad content variety TikTok has. Their tools to help creators are excellent and they do a lot to promote highly niche content. Instagram is a clunky mishmash of features rolled out in desperation. TikTok may suffer the same fate eventually, but I think they are years away from that.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  https://restofworld.org/2021/instagram-and-class-in-india/ https://restofworld.org/2021/instagram-and-class-in-india/ I saw this last year and it does a great job telling the story of how Instagram's recommendation engine biased towards "elites"
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    When TikTok was available here, I loved it largely because it had a lot of creators from poor and rural areas. The content was genuinely way more fun and authentic than any slickly edited video on Instagram
kache_ 4y ago
You know what? I love the new instagram changes. And everyone I know has been using it more and more over the years. Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. Data doesn't lie. TikTok copied short form videos from.. vine. I mean youtube YLYL videos. I mean... newgrounds. Shit's been around, and both facebook and google are going to lap tik tok. Keep up :)
- zippergz 4y ago
  Data doesn't lie is, in itself, a lie. Data has to be collected, so it's biased by what you choose to measure. Data has to be interpreted, so it's biased by how you interpret it. Data is only a snapshot in time, so it doesn't predict the future. There are many, many ways to make engagement metrics look much better in the short term while absolutely destroying long term engagement. Whether that's what Instagram is doing is still up for debate, but I think there's a very real chance it is.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. You're jumping the gun there. The people who hate it and use it are the people who were using it before the change and want it to go back. They were strongarmed into it and they're not about to abandon their userbase/followers overnight - they'll try and advocate for change and then migrate elsewhere. But these changes are so relatively new that there hasn't even been time for any of that to play out yet.
- TillE 4y ago
  There are infinite reasons people might continue using something despite liking it less and less. The network effect is a big one. So pointing at numbers and saying "they've clearly made the right decisions" is...flawed, to say the least.
Foobar8568 4y ago
IG kept requesting to add my birthday, going fullscreen notification like even if I forced quit earlier/rebooted my cellphone, didn't use cause birthday thing. I uninstalled it, didn't kill my account as there are some stuff I appreciate but the dark patterns won't fly.
hn8305823 4y ago
> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be,” Uh, no. I stop and close app as soon as I realize I'm being fed "videos you just can't stop watching." This unfortunately means I only use IG for about 2.5 seconds before I give up and try another day.
Animats 4y ago
The key point here is that TikTok is now beating all the US social networks. This may be the beginning of the end for what Silicon Valley calls "tech", but is just ads with social content. Peak Facebook was in Q2 2021.[1] Instagram is losing to TikTok. (If you think the "metaverse" is going to be important in the social space, check out what's happening in China in that area. While the US has been distracted by the NFT clown car and Facebook's rather pathetic efforts, companies in China are actually building it.) [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/peak-facebook.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/peak-facebook.html
- alexb_ 4y ago
  What are Chinese companies doing metaverse wise?
  - t_mann 4y ago
    Yeah, the parent left us on a bit of a cliffhanger there re China.
    - Animats 4y ago
      www.google.com: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/metaverse-in-china-trends/ https://www.china-briefing.com/news/metaverse-in-china-trend...
  - edm0nd 4y ago
    Likely waiting on stolen metaverse R&D from American companies given to them from the Chinese government. That's the entire Chinese nation-state backed hackers MO. Steal R&D from Fortune 500 companies to then give it to private Chinese businesses to further the Chinese economy. Why waste your own time/money/resources on R&D when you can just steal it. Same with IP and IP laws. - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-in-intellectual-property-from-about-30-multinational-companies/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-... - https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/suspected-chinese-hackers-targeted-u-s-and-european-agencies-and-companies-report/ https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/suspected-chinese-hackers-tar... - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technology-theft-fbi-biggest-threat https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technolo...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ensorceled 4y ago
All of social media is broken right now. Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. Last night a photo from my step daughter flickered briefly and then was lost. I couldn't find it again until this morning. I literally can't find their content anymore without scrolling and dodging videos that keep popping up. Youtube broke entirely a few months ago. The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent. Several content creators I follow have their business dying from sudden drop in ad revenue due to the changes. Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home. Stuff appears from friends or family days after posting, now at the top of my feed. Twitter is, surprisingly, the least broken, at least I mostly still see the people I follow. I still miss stuff because of the algorithm, but it's not, yet, forcing a ton of stuff I'm not actually following down my throat. And the ads are still clearly ads.
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  I agree that they're "broken" in that they don't work the way I want them to - but they're functioning perfectly normally to maximize profit. I think TikTok kinda broke the dam on this and we see it in more apps now, but it seems like we've found out that people will spend more time on the app when you show them random new people based on their interests compared to showing them just the people they chose to follow. I think the main solution to this would be some sort of public social media platform that isn't trying to be profitable. As long we we're requiring companies to prioritize profit we're not going to get outcomes that go against that
  - chadlavi 4y ago
    This. They're not broken, they're working as intended for their customers, who are quite emphatically not us.
- kpierce 4y ago
  All entertainment seems to be broken. Let me watch something on netflix my recommended list is almost identical to comedy, adventure, etc. Their machine learning must show that people will just watch what is in front of them.
jeremymims 4y ago
Steve Jobs famously said that he saw the computer as a "bicycle of the mind." He saw technology as a tool to amplify humanity's abilities. Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to build a "casino of the mind." Facebook and Instagram have been purpose-built to amplify and prey on humanity's weaknesses. The fact that "Meta" is now trying to make their casino _even more_ addictive to compete with TikTok does not bode well for the world.
- and-not-drew 4y ago
  While casino is probably the best comparison, I've always thought of social media as kind of the high fructose corn syrup for this generation. We took something that in small doses isn't really an issue and over optimized without thinking of the human cost. We've figured out the most addictive part and have turned that up to 11 and are now realizing, "oh shit, maybe that was too much".
  - xtracto 4y ago
    This is the problem with most "free" digital services now: games, social nets, news sites, etc. They are optimizing user behaviour to cater their customers (advertisers), so they estimulate addictive behaviour. I blame advertising based internet. It pushes the wrong incentives for service providers.
toddh 4y ago
While having to respond to TikTok is understandable, what's their point of differentiation? It's hard to tell the difference between the two now. Maybe that's a good thing for insta?
zachrip 4y ago
"You are not the customer" - ring a bell?
turrini 4y ago
One thing I hate was the change from "disable/never see again" to "see less often" that surrounds almost every app now, be twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. So they keep repeating VERY OFTEN all that crap. The result? I've been using them less and less.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I've never had an Instagram account but I stopped lurking when they forced me to make an account. I guess I'll look at butts somewhere else. Tangentially- what is the deal with social media sites forcing you to login to lurk? I understand they want more data but lurkers are still forced to view ads.
runjake 4y ago
We are the product, not the customer. Advertisers are Instagram's customers. They only have to do enough to keep adequate product (us) around.
mpalmer 4y ago
> But users are notoriously fickle, and complaints often don’t align with their behavior. While some Instagram users claim that they want to see more photo-based posts in their feed, Mosseri said users are posting less of this content, _choosing instead to share pictures to their Stories or through direct messages_ Maybe they use DMs because they hate your ad delivery. Maybe they use stories because you make every effort to push users to it, so that's where the eyeballs are. Pretty tiresome to position your company as a victim of its users when you have a shocking level of influence over their behavior. Not to mention how credulous this passage is from a journalistic standpoint.
pessimizer 4y ago
Snapchat knew the same thing. A Kardashian even told them. Not working out so well now. Instagram is a slightly different story, because they've probably got official guarantees that government is going to finally ban TikTok in their endless campaign of aggression towards China. So Insta replaces their pissed-off old users with young TikTok users, and the government can tell angry TikTok that there's a red-blooded Jesus equivalent to the evil Chinese internet drug.
TheChaplain 4y ago
I wouldn't mind trying to build the new IG or Facebook, but issue is how to fund it without angel investors or others who push towards eyeball/click/attention-frenzy we have today.
oconnor663 4y ago
Equating "cares about something else more" with "doesn't care" is pretty toxic. Instagram is a big company that doesn't have feelings, so whatever, but this isn't a healthy discussion habit to reinforce.
doubtfuluser 4y ago
How do the micro kitchens look nowadays. That’s where people will realize how the company is really doing
flerchin 4y ago
They make gobs and gobs of money, that's the signal, and they're optimizing for it. I tend to think that social media is harmful, for everyone. Send pictures of your kids to your grandmother directly.
- Theodores 4y ago
  Hello WhatApp! In my family that is how pictures of grandchildren get to grandparents. It is a closed loop. The only people that care about each other are in the loop and there are no random gawkers.
throwaway4837 4y ago
Instagram is phasing people like us out of its ideal customer profile, and optimizing the app for Generation Z. It has no choice but to adapt or become irrelevant in the current ecosystem.
FalconSensei 4y ago
> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be,” This is what I also think. People (or, the mass of the users) keep following users that posts a lot of videos, they watch a lot of reels and like those... So instagram is doing the correct thing (for their goals of keeping people using it) in focusing on reels.
- praestigiare 4y ago
  I disagree. It's certainly not the case for me - Instagram has become an app I open out of habit or because I got a notification, remember that it sucks now, and close again. But more generally, this is two things: the tail wagging the dog, because Instagram pushes reels hard you get more engagement there as a creator which pushes people into them; and the fact that low quality engagement is a poor proxy for what people actually want. Instagram can show me videos of women in sheer tops all day, and if I am bored it is mindlessly engaging, but it is never what I want. What I want is to skim over 50 posts from people I care about, and maybe interact with one or two of them. I think am far from alone in what I want, but Instagram does not want what I want, because it is harder to keep me looking once I get to the end of my feed, and harder to put ads in front of me I don't scroll past almost immediately.
instastuff 4y ago
[anonymous account] No matter how many "users" Instagram has, TikTok is absolutely destroying Instagram in terms of minutes of user engagement. People are spending way, way more time on TikTok than Instagram and the trend is accelerating. Meta is in full panic mode. They see the sand slipping through their fingers. They are trying to turn Instagram into TikTok because they think that is the only move. After all, it worked for them last time when they copied Stories and beat Snap. But this time, not only is that strategy failing, but it is making their still enormous user base revolt. Stories was a relatively useful extension to Instagram that didn't break the core app, so adding it worked. TikTok is a different thing and doesn't slot into Instagram as cleanly. Meta already tried making their TikTok clone a new "tab" in the app, but that didn't get the kind of results they needed. So now they are trying to make the whole app into TikTok because they don't know what else to do . I'm not really sure where they go from here. Instagram isn't satisfied being Instagram - they need to lead the world in order to attract ad revenue. But they are losing ground quickly. In the social media game, momentum is everything. TikTok has way more watch time so creators get more user engagement and can build their profiles much more quickly. Instagram is behind in engagement, so there is no incentive for creators to jump ship and get worse results. Instagram gets less fresh content which leads to less engagement and less ad sales. It's a vicious cycle that puts TikTok further ahead.
CoryAlexMartin 4y ago
> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be” I'm likely not in the majority here, but my average usage of Instagram these days is me scrolling through my feed for about 20 seconds before getting frustrated and closing the app. All the ads and things I never opted into seeing make it an unpleasant and uninteresting experience. I was far more engaged when it was just a reverse chronological timeline of images from people I follow.
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Let me be devil's advocate for a second and say: I guess Meta must be knowing what they're doing? I'm sure they are basing their decisions entirely on actual analytics and A/B testing results. If the numbers say users are moving towards videos, away from photos, than that's what they will cater to. That's why public emotions won't sway them.
Marazan 4y ago
This is what happens when you manage to metrics. "Engagement" is the metric and the incredibly obviously stupid problem with it as your optimisation goal that is apparently ungraspable by the leadership of every single social network. It infects everything down even to Google search rankings. If you can quickly and easily find the info you want then that reduces "engagement" and that is bad, apparently.
- fleddr 4y ago
  It's totally graspable. Users are unable/unwilling to spend a penny on social networks, hence ads it is, hence engagement it is. If users would pay a monthly fee at scale, it wouldn't be needed. They'd in fact be happy if you'd keep your engagement brief.
  - Marazan 4y ago
    No, engagement is a (bad) proxy for clicking on Ads. If you want to measure Ad revenue then measure Ad revenue/impressions. However, Engagement is a great proxy for users listlessly clicking through the site desperately trying to find the content you care about that they know is on here somewhere yet the company has hidden it behind multiple click walls all of which rack up the Engagement score.
smm11 4y ago
Apple doesn't invent, as much as see what's out there and Make It Great.
jmyeet 4y ago
One reason I'm skeptical on the government bringing down the antitrust hammer on Big Tech is because of things like this. Antitrust is a slow process and a crude (but powerful) instrument. Facebook originally bought Instagram because IG represented an existential threat to FB's business. Remember it was only a few years old and had 13 employees at the time of acquisition. How can you be a monopoly when 13 people can threaten your business? So here we are some years later and Facebook is getting killed by Tiktok. IG, in particular, is no longer "sexy". it is not where influencers aspire to be anymore. Facebook proper has billions of DAU/MAU but many younger people don't even have acounts anymore. It's facing it's own myspace moment. FB (now Meta) is betting its future on something that (IMHO) will never happen: the Metaverse, much like how Uber (and even Tesla to a certain extent) were betting their futures on self-driving cars (both of which, much like AGI, are perennially 5-10 years away). The market will sort out FAcebook one way or the other. It requires no heavyhanded intervention. The MBA eventually turn every social media platform into an ecommerce platform because how else do you make money? When that happens that platform eventually dies. If you've been following IG redesigns, it's been moving further and further away from being creator-focused (eg the "create" button moved from the bottom bar to the top). IG has been pushing shopping, IGTV and other efforts to monetize the platform and/or tie it to commerce. Trying to clone Tiktok with Reels just isn't going to save it.
togs 4y ago
Here’s hoping for a large U.S. company to go under for once.
ketchupdebugger 4y ago
only time will tell. Every gamer was upset about diablo immortal being a mobile pay to win game, but recent reports suggests diablo making boatloads of money. The shift could work out in the long run.
_meu9 4y ago
Everytime I get on Facebook, the navbar seems to have a new combination. Watch, Gaming (Streaming), Dating, Marketplace, "News" Feed, Shop, Groups, Home, etc... These could all be different applications under the same login. Kylie Jenner is right (for once)... Nobody knows what Facebook or Instagram is for nowadays. Reddit - Communities and memes Snapchat - Sending snaps and watching stories of your actual friends Tiktok - Fast paced entertainment (Short videos) Twitter - What's happening right now? Instagram and Facebook is trying to be all of those at the same time.
alexpotato 4y ago
As a casual user of both Facebook and TikTok, I would share my impression of how they share videos: TikTok - Their algorithm seems to very quickly hone in on things I actually want to see. - e.g. if figured out that I like to see comedy clips, some woodworking videos etc - I suspect that they do this by a combination of showing you some "test" videos that quickly bucket your interests and then using additional data based on other videos that have paired well together from other users - Keep doing the above and I would imagine you get to a pretty good graph of what I'm into Facebook - Have been a user for YEARS - they have almost all of my personal relationships mapped - choose to show me videos with "Wait till you see what happens!" titles that are ~10 minutes of build up to an incredibly anticlimactic ending - As a user and a SRE/Developer, I ask myself: "The smartest people in tech + essentially limitless computing power and this is the best you can do?" I would guess one of two things is going on: 1. I remember seeing those video ads about 10-15 years ago that went on for about 20 minutes and there was no fast forward or skip etc. Someone pointed out: "Advertisers care a LOT about people who are willing to just sit there and watch a 20 minute video" 2. What I'll basically call the "Groupon Effect" (based on [0]) which is basically "Well X is good, X+1 is better so X*1000 must be great". Andrew Mason talks a lot about this in the linked article and how Groupon just blindly followed the "metrics" rather than thinking through "Ok, what is really the best for our users/community". It seems the tech giants have gone for "What makes the most money RIGHT NOW!" vs "How do we build a larger LTV over the next couple years" [0] - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-groupon.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou...
- shriphani 4y ago
  It could be that the deep bench of high quality content is not there on reels yet. Most of the power user base of ig (horology, woodworking, crafts, fine arts etc) knows how to take high quality pictures and need to adapt to making videos (i don't think it is that easy to do - totally different medium + style + maybe your current followers wont like it).
- slig 4y ago
  For me, it feels like the recommendations from Youtube, FB, Instagram, Spotify, etc, are really what they would want you to see, not what I would want to see. Never listened to those shitty podcasts, and that's what recommended for me on Spotify. The Youtube search is flooded with "recommendations" and "what's hot" that are hot garbage. Google search is getting useless, with tons of spam and obvious duplicated content.
simonbarker87 4y ago
Creators aren’t happy either. I have 107K followers for dev and learn to code content and the last few months have been a roller coaster. There’s about 50 to 100 of us devs with that size of following on IG and we all see the same thing time and time again which is that the algorithm moves and you have to change your content style to see what it wants. The messaging and content stays the same but it needs to be packaged in whatever way the IG algorithm wants to push at that moment. IG is scared of TikTok but rather than accepting that platforms can be different and that’s ok they’ve decided to force a move to basically copy them but without a guiding strategy - it’s baffling.
drusepth 4y ago
This seems like a great place to ask: Does anyone have a suggestion for a good alternative for old-Instagram (e.g. just sharing photos)? I only joined originally because of their cool map view that had pins around the world showing where each of your shared photos were taken, and they removed that feature a few years ago; I haven't found any other app than Google Photos that does it well. However, Google Photos does it for all of my photos (there's a lot!) and I'd much prefer a separate app just so I can edit and curate a very small collection for the map instead (1-2 photos per place), and ideally be able to share that map with other people. Anyone know of a good photo-sharing app for that?
- nikivi 4y ago
  https://glass.photo/ https://glass.photo/
  - anthropodie 4y ago
    iPhone only
  - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    +1 on glass. It's so purist about not having algo or becoming destroyed by influencers it's actually hard to find other photographers currently. Paid by users and no ads. I hope they work on some human-curated suggestions in the future!
    - drusepth 4y ago
      I hope they come to Android soon, too. Would love to try it.
- anthropodie 4y ago
  Not sure if map thing is supported but PixelFed is good alternative to Instagram in general.
harrisonjackson 4y ago
Instagram's biggest failing in trying to copy Tiktok is their feed algorithm. Tiktok has nailed the delightful "stumble upon" effect of getting users of all ages to keep going to the next and the next video. I don't mind how each new piece of content is paged because the content is better for the format and it doesn't feel clunky when I do want to skip to the next one. Instagram couldn't switch their algorithm because people think they still want to see the content they've been seeing... otherwise they'd just be using TikTok. In insta, we are used to scrolling really quickly until something catches the eye and THEN we engage. That is because the content in the insta feed is not as good and there are more ads. The new scrolling/paged UI in Instagram feels terrible because I can't fly through bad content to engage with what I want.
- labrador 4y ago
  > Tiktok has nailed the delightful "stumble upon" I didn't understand the appeal of Tiktok until just now when I read your comment. I was a StumbleUpon.com addict in 2006-07. I spent hours a day on it, saw really interesting content and even made some IRL friends. I have no idea why they killed that site. I'll give Tiktok another try.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I think they just never found a way to make money that didn’t destroy the experience.
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      I think Reddit also kind of replaced it. Back then, Reddit was more of a social bookmarking site like del.ic.ious but with expanded community features. You would go to the front page, and see a pretty similar selection of links to what you would get smashing the Stumble button that day, only it's been curated and sorted by the community through the karma system. Each link also came with a very well designed comment section where users could discuss it.
      - 4y ago
ISL 4y ago
I was very happy to learn that I could "Snooze suggested posts" for 30 days. That we can't disable them is, well, perhaps predatory, but here's how to do it. There's an X at the top-right of any suggested post. If you click it, an option appears to snooze those posts for 30d. Mosseri is right to be concerned about supporting creator-discovery, which is a huge problem on the supply-side of IG's creator/consumer marketplace. If suggested posts were only a few percent of posts and didn't favor eye-catching Reels, but rather content in the same spirit as a user already follows, quality content could again rise to the top.
harrisonjackson 4y ago
They rolled out this update slowly and when it hit my account, it happened to be the day Biden posted about his Covid diagnosis and that was the post at the top of my feed. I couldn't figure out why it was showing me this post with an all black border and not letting me scroll. First, I thought it was a bug and then I thought they were forcing everyone (or some subset of American users) to watch Biden's instagram lol. Not a logical reaction but was my first interaction with the new UI and I was very confused. My SO also thought it was a bug and we spent 5 minutes trying to fix the app before realizing it was just a clunky update.
kvetching 4y ago
It's IMPOSSIBLE to make an instagram account based solely off of images now. You're content will NOT even be pushed on the Recent tab of the hashtags you choose. You are essentially not seen at all unless someone is following you. The only way to be seen by the algorithm anymore to grow your account is to make videos. This is what happens when a company loses it's vision. Just check out how the filters have changed over the years. It's just Instagram losing it's soul and what made it unique.
tremendo 4y ago
Personally I don't care they're just copying a rival. I do not have/use Tiktok and do easily spend a good chunk of time looking at the "reels" in IG. Even if most of these turn out to be direct lifts out of Tiktok, I'm not about to "switch" or even open an account over there, I already have the content over here. I assume that's part of the strategy to not hemorrhage users, in my case it works.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 4y ago
(We're all adults here, yes?) If TikTok's algorithm's really so good, would someone please apply it to porn? I might actually pay money for that, and I doubt I'm alone (ha!)... Then again, despite trying TikTok a few times its never been able to capture my attention for long. Maybe I'm just hard to entertain.
- __alias 4y ago
  Big difference is that porn is incognito so probably a little more difficult to try matching preferences with your peers for good reasons lol I don't find myself using TikTok much, but when I do it's easy for me to slip into a black void for an hour watching videos. I found the app was able to determine a pretty reasonable algorithm for me waaaay to quickly
  - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 4y ago
    IIUC incognito's not effective at evading fingerprinting. It's really only good for preventing auto-complete accidents when e.g. you're giving a group presentation.
  - randycupertino 4y ago
    > Big difference is that porn is incognito so probably a little more difficult to try matching preferences with your peers for good reasons lol Maybe something like the reddit model where it's pseudonymous based on username. People who like this subreddit might also like that subreddit. People who like these porn videos might also like those videos, etc.
Kalanos 4y ago
i like it. it's better than a quintillion selfies and staged photos
wodenokoto 4y ago
What annoys me about the update is obviously the layout and UI. You can’t scroll freely and you don’t know how many flips it takes to move to the next item. But worse is the content selection. A really nice feature of instagram used to be that the feed had an end. “You are now done watching who you follow. If you wanna keep hanging around here’s some random stuff” That was really nice and quite the refresh compared to other doom scrollers. Then they slowly started adding non-subscribed content into your main feed and I’m sure the metrics were great. I at least ended up looking at them longer than average cause I couldn’t figure out who the hell I knew that was posting _that_. Then realized it wasn’t anyone I followed and got annoyed. But the metric don’t capture that. With the redesign you might as well not follow anyone. Its like 75% of your feed is ads and randos.
aabbcc1241 4y ago
I guess most content creators still staying there because of the network effect, not because they really like Instagram (the software)
anm89 4y ago
Am I the only one who is deeply unsettled by tiktok as a format in and of itself? The weird unnatural voice and the fast pace and the shallowness of the content. Is this what people really want? I think the answer is yes. But the people who want this are broken people. There's no sugar coating it. This is like some weird drug for reverting people to their dumbest instincts. The fact that everyone immediately acknowledges that this is great and the future is terrifying.
Hippocrates 4y ago
Seems obvious that showing people relevant, quality content drives engagement more than showing unrelatable, boring stuff from your long-lost friends and politically extreme uncle. Driving engagement is something FB and IG have always had as their North Star, just with the self-imposed limitation of using your friend network to do it. Now that they see what TikTok has done they want that juicier business instead. It's a bummer that there doesn't seem to be a great place to grow or maintain old/distant friendships (like the early days of FB) but hopefully this will open space for smaller players to get involved in that, if anyone has any time left in their day for it... An interesting next step would be to generate real-world friendships from TikTok's acutely tuned interest graph. Friendships are still mostly outcomes of a certain circumstance in the meatspace. You met at a party, or are the friend of a friend etc. It's a really weak algorithm for finding the right people to hang out with IRL.
greyhair 4y ago
Long time Instagram user. Deleted my Facebook account years ago. The recent changes to Instagram totally suck. I hardly see any of my friends pictures anymore. Maybe one, or two, then a constant shit-stream of 'reels'. I am done. No more Instagram for me. I am hoping someone will bootstrap a replacement that basically replicates Instagram from two years ago.
mancerayder 4y ago
Great. So that's even more likely to have people in public places and transport watching videos with the sound up on their phones and no headphones.
beej71 4y ago
What I don't like about the TikTok-like experience is that I can tell the algorithm "works" on me. I'd just keep scrolling through pointless, entertaining crap. So I don't use it.

335 points by laurex 4y ago

Is't the easy solution - both in FB in IG - to just go visit your friends profiles?

It's interesting that they don't care, it's a Marie Antoinette-esque attitude to their lifeblood, and ultimately what will end their dominance. The truth is they converted a free service into a pay service (the gas-lights creators and businesses into paying for visibility). The visibility, even when paid for is not very fruitful for many as well... If you run a small business like a restaurant in the US, but get 40,000 views directed to your profile of people who live in Russia, it is unlikely to turn into a pipeline of sales that can sustain your business... This is just one way modern social apps gaslight people who are working very hard to build business... It undermines the very model of business success, to keep people working very hard... For no reward. These site let memes and non-business-related things flow all day on feeds provided they are not promoting anything, which makes the sites appear "full of life". People seem to be catching on that it was all one big gaslight after they've spent tons of money on ads, they are slowly realizing that it's a rigged carnival game, but social apps like Instagram have pitted the rest of the Internet, and they constantly play a dictatorial role. The carpet can get pulled at any time if they don't take these complaints seriously though, and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out. I really don't think TikTok is much better now either, these apps all use the technique of phasing adds and slowly reducing (external) visibility for creators, and just judging from comments I see on Twitter, the economy is imploding as a result. With the economy as bad as it is, this current creator economy is not sustainable, and not fruitful. We'll all see the quality on these platforms decline as creators quit and protest, while platforms will burn up cash reserves and disappoint investors as their overhead for hosting and operations increase. We've praised the arrogance of social platform leadership for too long and now it's coming back to bite all of us. The biggest worry is that there will not much to gravitate back to if social media implodes... But it's also a great opportunity for IRC and web sites to re-emerge, and for someone to invent hopefully something better than these giant platforms that really aren't "social" at all any more.

thepangolino 4y ago
dvtrn 4y ago
"Baudrillard was right" - me, often.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Wow haven’t seen that name mentioned often, got any good recommendations if their writing for someone wanting to get into it?
  - dvtrn 4y ago
    I’m a little late to seeing your reply (my apologies) but the easiest point of reference (and where I’m drawing my prognostications from) is of course “Simulacra and Simulation”
    - sizzle 4y ago
      Thank you, will check it out!
cratermoon 4y ago
> it's a rigged carnival game A major "Aha!" moment for me was when I had it pointed out to me that the social media companies' algorithms that get and keep users attention by showing them what they want can easily be exapted to manipulate the metrics and ad buying behavior.
- winternett 4y ago
  Yep, the algorithms are all geared towards serving company revenue, not towards finding the best content contributors... What you see on most platforms is now override by who pays the most to boost their posts. There's a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors goin on.

haspoken 4y ago

https://archive.ph/FF2d1 https://archive.ph/FF2d1

jacquesc 4y ago

Maybe it'll show up in their usage numbers. I stopped using IG because it's near impossible not to prevent the sound from blasting from accidentally scrolling or clicking on a reel. I feel like a product team that gave any shit whatsoever would give people a mute button that stays put. People use their phones in lots of different locations (with other people around). And phones are constantly blasting music at random points because of Reels.

mbesto 4y ago
> I stopped using IG because it's near impossible not to prevent the sound from blasting from accidentally scrolling or clicking on a reel. I don't know a single person who doesn't hate the muting functionality in IG. I can't believe how overlooked this is.
alexashka 4y ago
Is there not a physical mute button on your phone?
- prepend 4y ago
  Instagram ignores the mute button on my iPhone. I have to manually turn the volume down to zero to consistently get no sound. It’s a real jerk app.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    I feel like it’s even worse. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and I haven’t figured out how to get it to do what I want 100% of the time. Just have a mute button on the player!
- navanchauhan 4y ago
  maybe, not everyone has an iPhone or a OnePlus device?
matsemann 4y ago
What boggles my brain is when someone wants to show me a video on Instagram, but there is no way to play it from the beginning. So have to wait for it to loop around.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Adam Mosseri has been in full damage-control mode for years. Simply put, Instagram knows you're addicted and will make as much possible product change to make them more money while you struggle to get it out of your life given how personalized and predatory the experiences are becoming. There is a natural conclusion to "growth" of engagement though. Everyone is competing for our attention given we sit on devices longer each year. I think it's averaging about 3 hours today on a smartphone. That's crazy to think about.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate: They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. Keith Rabois (top VC), mentioned that FB has always prioritized optimization over new products because of the Ad business. That also could explain their inability to do anything but copy other business ideas. The opposing point of view would be that Ads on FB/Google are so profitable that working on anything else pales in comparision (in terms of profit generation). And so they dont innovate, but iterate and optimize. My vote is that excessive leetcode testing selects for employees with no creativity. And while these companies are massive, lower level engineers hired ten years ago do rise to the top and run whole divisions EDIT: Counterpoint on how good early Google employees were: the above maxim does not apply because that was before leetcode became huge, people passing those interviews were actually brilliant, they didnt spend six months studying in a basement

petre 4y ago
> copy other business ideas Copy Chinese business ideas. CCP propaganda is over optimized. It should work fine for ads.
Apocryphon 4y ago
How much leetcoding do their PMs do? I understand your overall point, but I don't think having a high algorithmic/data structures whiteboarding bar for their engineers correlates to Facebook's weakening product abilities. Ditto for Google.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I think it does. As much as companies want to believe that product runs the product, an engineer that can create new things that influences the product is massively more valuable. Amazon commonly has engineers drive new innovations, product people nowhere to be seen
  - 4y ago

vannevar 4y ago

Social media companies are in a bind. They're companies, so they have to grow or die. But they're invested in their current platform, and the likelihood of a particular innovation being successful is low, so it's tough for them to do radical R&D, they're limited to tweaking their current platform. This opens the door to startups, which can capture the new (young) users who aren't committed to a platform. A small number of startups succeed and experience exponential growth that starts cutting into the growth of the established players. The Instagrams of the world have to chase features to retain growth (a strategy ultimately doomed to fail), or they will have to acquire the upstarts. Because of its close ties with the Chinese government any kind of merger or acquisition with TikTok is fraught with potential problems. Instagram is taking the only path available to it, as unlikely to succeed as it is.

samwillis 4y ago
> They're companies, so they have to grow or die. This is a failing of modern corporate culture. There is nothing wrong in reaching a stable equilibrium, becoming profitable, and if you are a public company, paying dividends. It’s unfortunate that it’s become growth at all costs, there is something to be said about public companies just stabilising, and paying out profits to shareholders. Now, that’s not to say Facebook is able to reach a stable equilibrium. I think they are struggling to maintain that, and that’s the problem. It’s a case of not loosing market share, especially when you have promised your shareholders the world.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > a failing of modern corporate culture. There is nothing wrong in reaching a stable equilibrium, becoming profitable, and if you are a public company, paying dividends It’s the failing of a culture. Plenty of companies do this. (I cautiously venture that most American companies do this?)
  - alt227 4y ago
    Its not a failure of culture, it's Capitalism.

matsemann 4y ago

If at least the algorithm was any good, people might not have complained as much. Like, I only follow sport stuff. Some triathletes, professional bicyclists, skiers etc. What does Instagram then decide to show me? A female cyclist with her zipper down and lots of cleavage, a skier in bikini, ass pics of swimmers etc.. Probably that's the most trending stuff related to my interests, but I follow no accounts related to that, anf scrolling through my likes they're nowhere like that, so please show me what I want instead.

gdulli 4y ago
When Twitter forced the algorithmic timeline on people, someone tweeted: "Is the algorithm based what everyone else likes, or what I like? Because I hate what everyone else likes, and I don't know what I like."
- shmatt 4y ago
  I don't have TikTok, but for 2 years this is what I've been hearing from people who love it. They figured out a way to show you exactly what you're interested in, without you giving them any specific input There have been many articles about the phenomenon of the "For You Page"[1][2]. But the funny part is Meta sees this and figures - people are looking at videos, we'll do videos. And not - people are seeing what they specifically like, lets do that [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg... [2] https://repeller.com/tiktok-algorithm-bisexual/ https://repeller.com/tiktok-algorithm-bisexual/
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    I think one of the biggest things TikTok does is that it shows completely random videos from time to time. I often get videos with 0 views that were just randomly shown to me. So the platform actually has some randomness that can spontaneously find something interesting instead of having people build up a base first.
  - fluidcruft 4y ago

alexashka 4y ago

The infinite growth beast comes for everyone. It's the second coming, again and again, and again. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

l33tbro 4y ago
Did you really just post a Yeats poem in response to some feature changes on Instagram?

thebradbain 4y ago

Say what you want about Twitter, but as someone who's been on it since 2011 and has made it my primary platform for social media since 2016, I'm grateful that fundamentally it's still the same old Twitter. Yes, they've fallen into the copy-cat temptation machine in some regards – i.e. "fleets" (stories) – but unlike Instagram will at least admit when it's not working and revert (fleets are no longer a feature on the platform). Of course, their failure to innovate definitely cost them TikTok-level success with their mismanagement of both Vine and Periscope, but at least their stubbornness to change has kept the core experience intact. Obviously there's some larger issues around Twitter's direction ("who is going to be in control of the company?") and the ever-present critiques of misinformation/harassment/"moderation versus censorship" that comes with the territory of being a public forum, but overall it's still the Twitter I know. I wonder if instagram's downfall will be a boon for Twitter in this regard: at least I know what it is.

system16 4y ago

It's fascinating how reactionary and directionless Instagram and Facebook have become. Instagram in particular has become Frankenstein's monster over the last few years, pathetically trying to reproduce functionality from other apps. The latest cloning of TikTok's feed is almost embarrassing. It's a testament to how deep the lack of a creative culture at Meta runs.

alexashka 4y ago
What creative culture? A billion user beast does not know, need or want creative or culture. It wants profits and more of them, every quarter. TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos. Instagram isn't losing to TikTok's 'creative culture', it's losing to American elite's favorite move - throwing money at a problem until everyone else quits, at which point you give talks and write books about how it was due to innovation, freedom and democracy, oh and LGBTQ+ or whatever the term is nowadays. Source: know a couple of people who could barely scrape by on Instagram/youtube, switched to TikTok and are all of a sudden making more money than me. The infinite money faucet at TikTok will soon run dry and it'll become just another shit social media platform, like all the rest.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos TikTok has at least done three innovative things. One is the frictionless sign in that doesn't require an account, secondly the well done video editing tools and most importantly abstracting away the social graph. And on the finance site this doesn't check out either. TikTok is on track to triple revenue this year alone and top creators generally make more money from outside sponsors and deals than from the company itself. Of all the social media site TikTok arguably chips in the least amount of money themselves.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - alexashka 4y ago

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

I’ve developed a deep dislike for Mosseri following his Instagram Kids predation. The lack of empathy seems a recurring theme. Is there inside ball on why he commands respect at Facebook? Or is there a conservation of clowns rule in play with David Marcus’s departure?

mnd999 4y ago

“I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be” Sure, because they could get the information they want without having to wade through the mountains of crap you’re pumping out of the septic tank into your users faces. You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown.

Strom 4y ago
You have a good point that would stand even stronger without the name calling.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  It does seem very appropriate though, doesnt it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _2d30 4y ago
  Actually, it's a terrible point because Tommy Marcus, the Brooklyn based content creator, has no say in Instagram's optimization choices!
- sh4rks 4y ago
  I'm not sure it would have
- gjs278 4y ago
t_mann 4y ago
I have a feeling that from Meta's perspective, that is the right metric. It's probably also a decent metric for that guy, because his influencer business depends on people wading through his content.
_2d30 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

TikTok is banned in my country but friends from UK and US say that the algorithm is much better at recommending videos. True or just plain individual bias?

Quikinterp 4y ago
It's algorithm is way more aggressive than other social media. Sometimes it's almost creepy. I don't care about a lot of stuff on there but it's easy to find yourself in very niche communities on tiktok.
system16 4y ago
In my experience it's absolutely true. Maybe it's just early in Instagram's phase of their new feed and it's not optimized, but all I see are a bunch of seemingly random memes and videos that don't interest me at all, and they only appear targeted to me in the most superficial of ways. Essentially I skip past the videos looking for friend photos, and after about 30 seconds get bored and shut the app. TikTok on the other hand seems to know me better than I do myself (or care to admit). I go out of my way to not open it because I know 30 minutes of my time will vanish in an instant.
dahdum 4y ago
Very true, but partly due to the broad content variety TikTok has. Their tools to help creators are excellent and they do a lot to promote highly niche content. Instagram is a clunky mishmash of features rolled out in desperation. TikTok may suffer the same fate eventually, but I think they are years away from that.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
https://restofworld.org/2021/instagram-and-class-in-india/ https://restofworld.org/2021/instagram-and-class-in-india/ I saw this last year and it does a great job telling the story of how Instagram's recommendation engine biased towards "elites"
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  When TikTok was available here, I loved it largely because it had a lot of creators from poor and rural areas. The content was genuinely way more fun and authentic than any slickly edited video on Instagram

kache_ 4y ago

You know what? I love the new instagram changes. And everyone I know has been using it more and more over the years. Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. Data doesn't lie. TikTok copied short form videos from.. vine. I mean youtube YLYL videos. I mean... newgrounds. Shit's been around, and both facebook and google are going to lap tik tok. Keep up :)

zippergz 4y ago
Data doesn't lie is, in itself, a lie. Data has to be collected, so it's biased by what you choose to measure. Data has to be interpreted, so it's biased by how you interpret it. Data is only a snapshot in time, so it doesn't predict the future. There are many, many ways to make engagement metrics look much better in the short term while absolutely destroying long term engagement. Whether that's what Instagram is doing is still up for debate, but I think there's a very real chance it is.
jjulius 4y ago
>Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. You're jumping the gun there. The people who hate it and use it are the people who were using it before the change and want it to go back. They were strongarmed into it and they're not about to abandon their userbase/followers overnight - they'll try and advocate for change and then migrate elsewhere. But these changes are so relatively new that there hasn't even been time for any of that to play out yet.
TillE 4y ago
There are infinite reasons people might continue using something despite liking it less and less. The network effect is a big one. So pointing at numbers and saying "they've clearly made the right decisions" is...flawed, to say the least.

Foobar8568 4y ago

IG kept requesting to add my birthday, going fullscreen notification like even if I forced quit earlier/rebooted my cellphone, didn't use cause birthday thing. I uninstalled it, didn't kill my account as there are some stuff I appreciate but the dark patterns won't fly.

hn8305823 4y ago

> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be,” Uh, no. I stop and close app as soon as I realize I'm being fed "videos you just can't stop watching." This unfortunately means I only use IG for about 2.5 seconds before I give up and try another day.

Animats 4y ago

The key point here is that TikTok is now beating all the US social networks. This may be the beginning of the end for what Silicon Valley calls "tech", but is just ads with social content. Peak Facebook was in Q2 2021.[1] Instagram is losing to TikTok. (If you think the "metaverse" is going to be important in the social space, check out what's happening in China in that area. While the US has been distracted by the NFT clown car and Facebook's rather pathetic efforts, companies in China are actually building it.) [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/peak-facebook.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/peak-facebook.html

alexb_ 4y ago
What are Chinese companies doing metaverse wise?
- t_mann 4y ago
  Yeah, the parent left us on a bit of a cliffhanger there re China.
  - Animats 4y ago
    www.google.com: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/metaverse-in-china-trends/ https://www.china-briefing.com/news/metaverse-in-china-trend...
- edm0nd 4y ago
  Likely waiting on stolen metaverse R&D from American companies given to them from the Chinese government. That's the entire Chinese nation-state backed hackers MO. Steal R&D from Fortune 500 companies to then give it to private Chinese businesses to further the Chinese economy. Why waste your own time/money/resources on R&D when you can just steal it. Same with IP and IP laws. - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-in-intellectual-property-from-about-30-multinational-companies/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-... - https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/suspected-chinese-hackers-targeted-u-s-and-european-agencies-and-companies-report/ https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/suspected-chinese-hackers-tar... - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technology-theft-fbi-biggest-threat https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technolo...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Ensorceled 4y ago

All of social media is broken right now. Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. Last night a photo from my step daughter flickered briefly and then was lost. I couldn't find it again until this morning. I literally can't find their content anymore without scrolling and dodging videos that keep popping up. Youtube broke entirely a few months ago. The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent. Several content creators I follow have their business dying from sudden drop in ad revenue due to the changes. Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home. Stuff appears from friends or family days after posting, now at the top of my feed. Twitter is, surprisingly, the least broken, at least I mostly still see the people I follow. I still miss stuff because of the algorithm, but it's not, yet, forcing a ton of stuff I'm not actually following down my throat. And the ads are still clearly ads.

e_i_pi_2 4y ago
I agree that they're "broken" in that they don't work the way I want them to - but they're functioning perfectly normally to maximize profit. I think TikTok kinda broke the dam on this and we see it in more apps now, but it seems like we've found out that people will spend more time on the app when you show them random new people based on their interests compared to showing them just the people they chose to follow. I think the main solution to this would be some sort of public social media platform that isn't trying to be profitable. As long we we're requiring companies to prioritize profit we're not going to get outcomes that go against that
- chadlavi 4y ago
  This. They're not broken, they're working as intended for their customers, who are quite emphatically not us.
kpierce 4y ago
All entertainment seems to be broken. Let me watch something on netflix my recommended list is almost identical to comedy, adventure, etc. Their machine learning must show that people will just watch what is in front of them.

jeremymims 4y ago

Steve Jobs famously said that he saw the computer as a "bicycle of the mind." He saw technology as a tool to amplify humanity's abilities. Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to build a "casino of the mind." Facebook and Instagram have been purpose-built to amplify and prey on humanity's weaknesses. The fact that "Meta" is now trying to make their casino _even more_ addictive to compete with TikTok does not bode well for the world.

and-not-drew 4y ago
While casino is probably the best comparison, I've always thought of social media as kind of the high fructose corn syrup for this generation. We took something that in small doses isn't really an issue and over optimized without thinking of the human cost. We've figured out the most addictive part and have turned that up to 11 and are now realizing, "oh shit, maybe that was too much".
- xtracto 4y ago
  This is the problem with most "free" digital services now: games, social nets, news sites, etc. They are optimizing user behaviour to cater their customers (advertisers), so they estimulate addictive behaviour. I blame advertising based internet. It pushes the wrong incentives for service providers.

toddh 4y ago

While having to respond to TikTok is understandable, what's their point of differentiation? It's hard to tell the difference between the two now. Maybe that's a good thing for insta?

zachrip 4y ago

"You are not the customer" - ring a bell?

turrini 4y ago

One thing I hate was the change from "disable/never see again" to "see less often" that surrounds almost every app now, be twitter, facebook, instagram, etc. So they keep repeating VERY OFTEN all that crap. The result? I've been using them less and less.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

I've never had an Instagram account but I stopped lurking when they forced me to make an account. I guess I'll look at butts somewhere else. Tangentially- what is the deal with social media sites forcing you to login to lurk? I understand they want more data but lurkers are still forced to view ads.

runjake 4y ago

We are the product, not the customer. Advertisers are Instagram's customers. They only have to do enough to keep adequate product (us) around.

mpalmer 4y ago

> But users are notoriously fickle, and complaints often don’t align with their behavior. While some Instagram users claim that they want to see more photo-based posts in their feed, Mosseri said users are posting less of this content, _choosing instead to share pictures to their Stories or through direct messages_ Maybe they use DMs because they hate your ad delivery. Maybe they use stories because you make every effort to push users to it, so that's where the eyeballs are. Pretty tiresome to position your company as a victim of its users when you have a shocking level of influence over their behavior. Not to mention how credulous this passage is from a journalistic standpoint.

pessimizer 4y ago

Snapchat knew the same thing. A Kardashian even told them. Not working out so well now. Instagram is a slightly different story, because they've probably got official guarantees that government is going to finally ban TikTok in their endless campaign of aggression towards China. So Insta replaces their pissed-off old users with young TikTok users, and the government can tell angry TikTok that there's a red-blooded Jesus equivalent to the evil Chinese internet drug.

TheChaplain 4y ago

I wouldn't mind trying to build the new IG or Facebook, but issue is how to fund it without angel investors or others who push towards eyeball/click/attention-frenzy we have today.

oconnor663 4y ago

Equating "cares about something else more" with "doesn't care" is pretty toxic. Instagram is a big company that doesn't have feelings, so whatever, but this isn't a healthy discussion habit to reinforce.

doubtfuluser 4y ago

How do the micro kitchens look nowadays. That’s where people will realize how the company is really doing

flerchin 4y ago

They make gobs and gobs of money, that's the signal, and they're optimizing for it. I tend to think that social media is harmful, for everyone. Send pictures of your kids to your grandmother directly.

Theodores 4y ago
Hello WhatApp! In my family that is how pictures of grandchildren get to grandparents. It is a closed loop. The only people that care about each other are in the loop and there are no random gawkers.

throwaway4837 4y ago

Instagram is phasing people like us out of its ideal customer profile, and optimizing the app for Generation Z. It has no choice but to adapt or become irrelevant in the current ecosystem.

FalconSensei 4y ago

> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be,” This is what I also think. People (or, the mass of the users) keep following users that posts a lot of videos, they watch a lot of reels and like those... So instagram is doing the correct thing (for their goals of keeping people using it) in focusing on reels.

praestigiare 4y ago
I disagree. It's certainly not the case for me - Instagram has become an app I open out of habit or because I got a notification, remember that it sucks now, and close again. But more generally, this is two things: the tail wagging the dog, because Instagram pushes reels hard you get more engagement there as a creator which pushes people into them; and the fact that low quality engagement is a poor proxy for what people actually want. Instagram can show me videos of women in sheer tops all day, and if I am bored it is mindlessly engaging, but it is never what I want. What I want is to skim over 50 posts from people I care about, and maybe interact with one or two of them. I think am far from alone in what I want, but Instagram does not want what I want, because it is harder to keep me looking once I get to the end of my feed, and harder to put ads in front of me I don't scroll past almost immediately.

instastuff 4y ago

[anonymous account] No matter how many "users" Instagram has, TikTok is absolutely destroying Instagram in terms of minutes of user engagement. People are spending way, way more time on TikTok than Instagram and the trend is accelerating. Meta is in full panic mode. They see the sand slipping through their fingers. They are trying to turn Instagram into TikTok because they think that is the only move. After all, it worked for them last time when they copied Stories and beat Snap. But this time, not only is that strategy failing, but it is making their still enormous user base revolt. Stories was a relatively useful extension to Instagram that didn't break the core app, so adding it worked. TikTok is a different thing and doesn't slot into Instagram as cleanly. Meta already tried making their TikTok clone a new "tab" in the app, but that didn't get the kind of results they needed. So now they are trying to make the whole app into TikTok because they don't know what else to do . I'm not really sure where they go from here. Instagram isn't satisfied being Instagram - they need to lead the world in order to attract ad revenue. But they are losing ground quickly. In the social media game, momentum is everything. TikTok has way more watch time so creators get more user engagement and can build their profiles much more quickly. Instagram is behind in engagement, so there is no incentive for creators to jump ship and get worse results. Instagram gets less fresh content which leads to less engagement and less ad sales. It's a vicious cycle that puts TikTok further ahead.

CoryAlexMartin 4y ago

> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be” I'm likely not in the majority here, but my average usage of Instagram these days is me scrolling through my feed for about 20 seconds before getting frustrated and closing the app. All the ads and things I never opted into seeing make it an unpleasant and uninteresting experience. I was far more engaged when it was just a reverse chronological timeline of images from people I follow.

jdthedisciple 4y ago

Let me be devil's advocate for a second and say: I guess Meta must be knowing what they're doing? I'm sure they are basing their decisions entirely on actual analytics and A/B testing results. If the numbers say users are moving towards videos, away from photos, than that's what they will cater to. That's why public emotions won't sway them.

Marazan 4y ago

This is what happens when you manage to metrics. "Engagement" is the metric and the incredibly obviously stupid problem with it as your optimisation goal that is apparently ungraspable by the leadership of every single social network. It infects everything down even to Google search rankings. If you can quickly and easily find the info you want then that reduces "engagement" and that is bad, apparently.

fleddr 4y ago
It's totally graspable. Users are unable/unwilling to spend a penny on social networks, hence ads it is, hence engagement it is. If users would pay a monthly fee at scale, it wouldn't be needed. They'd in fact be happy if you'd keep your engagement brief.
- Marazan 4y ago
  No, engagement is a (bad) proxy for clicking on Ads. If you want to measure Ad revenue then measure Ad revenue/impressions. However, Engagement is a great proxy for users listlessly clicking through the site desperately trying to find the content you care about that they know is on here somewhere yet the company has hidden it behind multiple click walls all of which rack up the Engagement score.

smm11 4y ago

Apple doesn't invent, as much as see what's out there and Make It Great.

jmyeet 4y ago

One reason I'm skeptical on the government bringing down the antitrust hammer on Big Tech is because of things like this. Antitrust is a slow process and a crude (but powerful) instrument. Facebook originally bought Instagram because IG represented an existential threat to FB's business. Remember it was only a few years old and had 13 employees at the time of acquisition. How can you be a monopoly when 13 people can threaten your business? So here we are some years later and Facebook is getting killed by Tiktok. IG, in particular, is no longer "sexy". it is not where influencers aspire to be anymore. Facebook proper has billions of DAU/MAU but many younger people don't even have acounts anymore. It's facing it's own myspace moment. FB (now Meta) is betting its future on something that (IMHO) will never happen: the Metaverse, much like how Uber (and even Tesla to a certain extent) were betting their futures on self-driving cars (both of which, much like AGI, are perennially 5-10 years away). The market will sort out FAcebook one way or the other. It requires no heavyhanded intervention. The MBA eventually turn every social media platform into an ecommerce platform because how else do you make money? When that happens that platform eventually dies. If you've been following IG redesigns, it's been moving further and further away from being creator-focused (eg the "create" button moved from the bottom bar to the top). IG has been pushing shopping, IGTV and other efforts to monetize the platform and/or tie it to commerce. Trying to clone Tiktok with Reels just isn't going to save it.

togs 4y ago

Here’s hoping for a large U.S. company to go under for once.

ketchupdebugger 4y ago

only time will tell. Every gamer was upset about diablo immortal being a mobile pay to win game, but recent reports suggests diablo making boatloads of money. The shift could work out in the long run.

_meu9 4y ago

Everytime I get on Facebook, the navbar seems to have a new combination. Watch, Gaming (Streaming), Dating, Marketplace, "News" Feed, Shop, Groups, Home, etc... These could all be different applications under the same login. Kylie Jenner is right (for once)... Nobody knows what Facebook or Instagram is for nowadays. Reddit - Communities and memes Snapchat - Sending snaps and watching stories of your actual friends Tiktok - Fast paced entertainment (Short videos) Twitter - What's happening right now? Instagram and Facebook is trying to be all of those at the same time.

alexpotato 4y ago

As a casual user of both Facebook and TikTok, I would share my impression of how they share videos: TikTok - Their algorithm seems to very quickly hone in on things I actually want to see. - e.g. if figured out that I like to see comedy clips, some woodworking videos etc - I suspect that they do this by a combination of showing you some "test" videos that quickly bucket your interests and then using additional data based on other videos that have paired well together from other users - Keep doing the above and I would imagine you get to a pretty good graph of what I'm into Facebook - Have been a user for YEARS - they have almost all of my personal relationships mapped - choose to show me videos with "Wait till you see what happens!" titles that are ~10 minutes of build up to an incredibly anticlimactic ending - As a user and a SRE/Developer, I ask myself: "The smartest people in tech + essentially limitless computing power and this is the best you can do?" I would guess one of two things is going on: 1. I remember seeing those video ads about 10-15 years ago that went on for about 20 minutes and there was no fast forward or skip etc. Someone pointed out: "Advertisers care a LOT about people who are willing to just sit there and watch a 20 minute video" 2. What I'll basically call the "Groupon Effect" (based on [0]) which is basically "Well X is good, X+1 is better so X*1000 must be great". Andrew Mason talks a lot about this in the linked article and how Groupon just blindly followed the "metrics" rather than thinking through "Ok, what is really the best for our users/community". It seems the tech giants have gone for "What makes the most money RIGHT NOW!" vs "How do we build a larger LTV over the next couple years" [0] - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-groupon.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou...

shriphani 4y ago
It could be that the deep bench of high quality content is not there on reels yet. Most of the power user base of ig (horology, woodworking, crafts, fine arts etc) knows how to take high quality pictures and need to adapt to making videos (i don't think it is that easy to do - totally different medium + style + maybe your current followers wont like it).
slig 4y ago
For me, it feels like the recommendations from Youtube, FB, Instagram, Spotify, etc, are really what they would want you to see, not what I would want to see. Never listened to those shitty podcasts, and that's what recommended for me on Spotify. The Youtube search is flooded with "recommendations" and "what's hot" that are hot garbage. Google search is getting useless, with tons of spam and obvious duplicated content.

simonbarker87 4y ago

Creators aren’t happy either. I have 107K followers for dev and learn to code content and the last few months have been a roller coaster. There’s about 50 to 100 of us devs with that size of following on IG and we all see the same thing time and time again which is that the algorithm moves and you have to change your content style to see what it wants. The messaging and content stays the same but it needs to be packaged in whatever way the IG algorithm wants to push at that moment. IG is scared of TikTok but rather than accepting that platforms can be different and that’s ok they’ve decided to force a move to basically copy them but without a guiding strategy - it’s baffling.

drusepth 4y ago

This seems like a great place to ask: Does anyone have a suggestion for a good alternative for old-Instagram (e.g. just sharing photos)? I only joined originally because of their cool map view that had pins around the world showing where each of your shared photos were taken, and they removed that feature a few years ago; I haven't found any other app than Google Photos that does it well. However, Google Photos does it for all of my photos (there's a lot!) and I'd much prefer a separate app just so I can edit and curate a very small collection for the map instead (1-2 photos per place), and ideally be able to share that map with other people. Anyone know of a good photo-sharing app for that?

nikivi 4y ago
https://glass.photo/ https://glass.photo/
- anthropodie 4y ago
  iPhone only
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  +1 on glass. It's so purist about not having algo or becoming destroyed by influencers it's actually hard to find other photographers currently. Paid by users and no ads. I hope they work on some human-curated suggestions in the future!
  - drusepth 4y ago
    I hope they come to Android soon, too. Would love to try it.
anthropodie 4y ago
Not sure if map thing is supported but PixelFed is good alternative to Instagram in general.

harrisonjackson 4y ago

Instagram's biggest failing in trying to copy Tiktok is their feed algorithm. Tiktok has nailed the delightful "stumble upon" effect of getting users of all ages to keep going to the next and the next video. I don't mind how each new piece of content is paged because the content is better for the format and it doesn't feel clunky when I do want to skip to the next one. Instagram couldn't switch their algorithm because people think they still want to see the content they've been seeing... otherwise they'd just be using TikTok. In insta, we are used to scrolling really quickly until something catches the eye and THEN we engage. That is because the content in the insta feed is not as good and there are more ads. The new scrolling/paged UI in Instagram feels terrible because I can't fly through bad content to engage with what I want.

labrador 4y ago
> Tiktok has nailed the delightful "stumble upon" I didn't understand the appeal of Tiktok until just now when I read your comment. I was a StumbleUpon.com addict in 2006-07. I spent hours a day on it, saw really interesting content and even made some IRL friends. I have no idea why they killed that site. I'll give Tiktok another try.
- solarmist 4y ago
  I think they just never found a way to make money that didn’t destroy the experience.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    I think Reddit also kind of replaced it. Back then, Reddit was more of a social bookmarking site like del.ic.ious but with expanded community features. You would go to the front page, and see a pretty similar selection of links to what you would get smashing the Stumble button that day, only it's been curated and sorted by the community through the karma system. Each link also came with a very well designed comment section where users could discuss it.
    - 4y ago

ISL 4y ago

I was very happy to learn that I could "Snooze suggested posts" for 30 days. That we can't disable them is, well, perhaps predatory, but here's how to do it. There's an X at the top-right of any suggested post. If you click it, an option appears to snooze those posts for 30d. Mosseri is right to be concerned about supporting creator-discovery, which is a huge problem on the supply-side of IG's creator/consumer marketplace. If suggested posts were only a few percent of posts and didn't favor eye-catching Reels, but rather content in the same spirit as a user already follows, quality content could again rise to the top.

harrisonjackson 4y ago

They rolled out this update slowly and when it hit my account, it happened to be the day Biden posted about his Covid diagnosis and that was the post at the top of my feed. I couldn't figure out why it was showing me this post with an all black border and not letting me scroll. First, I thought it was a bug and then I thought they were forcing everyone (or some subset of American users) to watch Biden's instagram lol. Not a logical reaction but was my first interaction with the new UI and I was very confused. My SO also thought it was a bug and we spent 5 minutes trying to fix the app before realizing it was just a clunky update.

kvetching 4y ago

It's IMPOSSIBLE to make an instagram account based solely off of images now. You're content will NOT even be pushed on the Recent tab of the hashtags you choose. You are essentially not seen at all unless someone is following you. The only way to be seen by the algorithm anymore to grow your account is to make videos. This is what happens when a company loses it's vision. Just check out how the filters have changed over the years. It's just Instagram losing it's soul and what made it unique.

tremendo 4y ago

Personally I don't care they're just copying a rival. I do not have/use Tiktok and do easily spend a good chunk of time looking at the "reels" in IG. Even if most of these turn out to be direct lifts out of Tiktok, I'm not about to "switch" or even open an account over there, I already have the content over here. I assume that's part of the strategy to not hemorrhage users, in my case it works.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 4y ago

(We're all adults here, yes?) If TikTok's algorithm's really so good, would someone please apply it to porn? I might actually pay money for that, and I doubt I'm alone (ha!)... Then again, despite trying TikTok a few times its never been able to capture my attention for long. Maybe I'm just hard to entertain.

__alias 4y ago
Big difference is that porn is incognito so probably a little more difficult to try matching preferences with your peers for good reasons lol I don't find myself using TikTok much, but when I do it's easy for me to slip into a black void for an hour watching videos. I found the app was able to determine a pretty reasonable algorithm for me waaaay to quickly
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 4y ago
  IIUC incognito's not effective at evading fingerprinting. It's really only good for preventing auto-complete accidents when e.g. you're giving a group presentation.
- randycupertino 4y ago
  > Big difference is that porn is incognito so probably a little more difficult to try matching preferences with your peers for good reasons lol Maybe something like the reddit model where it's pseudonymous based on username. People who like this subreddit might also like that subreddit. People who like these porn videos might also like those videos, etc.

Kalanos 4y ago

i like it. it's better than a quintillion selfies and staged photos

wodenokoto 4y ago

What annoys me about the update is obviously the layout and UI. You can’t scroll freely and you don’t know how many flips it takes to move to the next item. But worse is the content selection. A really nice feature of instagram used to be that the feed had an end. “You are now done watching who you follow. If you wanna keep hanging around here’s some random stuff” That was really nice and quite the refresh compared to other doom scrollers. Then they slowly started adding non-subscribed content into your main feed and I’m sure the metrics were great. I at least ended up looking at them longer than average cause I couldn’t figure out who the hell I knew that was posting _that_. Then realized it wasn’t anyone I followed and got annoyed. But the metric don’t capture that. With the redesign you might as well not follow anyone. Its like 75% of your feed is ads and randos.

aabbcc1241 4y ago

I guess most content creators still staying there because of the network effect, not because they really like Instagram (the software)

anm89 4y ago

Am I the only one who is deeply unsettled by tiktok as a format in and of itself? The weird unnatural voice and the fast pace and the shallowness of the content. Is this what people really want? I think the answer is yes. But the people who want this are broken people. There's no sugar coating it. This is like some weird drug for reverting people to their dumbest instincts. The fact that everyone immediately acknowledges that this is great and the future is terrifying.

Hippocrates 4y ago

Seems obvious that showing people relevant, quality content drives engagement more than showing unrelatable, boring stuff from your long-lost friends and politically extreme uncle. Driving engagement is something FB and IG have always had as their North Star, just with the self-imposed limitation of using your friend network to do it. Now that they see what TikTok has done they want that juicier business instead. It's a bummer that there doesn't seem to be a great place to grow or maintain old/distant friendships (like the early days of FB) but hopefully this will open space for smaller players to get involved in that, if anyone has any time left in their day for it... An interesting next step would be to generate real-world friendships from TikTok's acutely tuned interest graph. Friendships are still mostly outcomes of a certain circumstance in the meatspace. You met at a party, or are the friend of a friend etc. It's a really weak algorithm for finding the right people to hang out with IRL.

greyhair 4y ago

Long time Instagram user. Deleted my Facebook account years ago. The recent changes to Instagram totally suck. I hardly see any of my friends pictures anymore. Maybe one, or two, then a constant shit-stream of 'reels'. I am done. No more Instagram for me. I am hoping someone will bootstrap a replacement that basically replicates Instagram from two years ago.

mancerayder 4y ago

Great. So that's even more likely to have people in public places and transport watching videos with the sound up on their phones and no headphones.

beej71 4y ago

What I don't like about the TikTok-like experience is that I can tell the algorithm "works" on me. I'd just keep scrolling through pointless, entertaining crap. So I don't use it.