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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

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.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  My audible app is full of recommendations for books I ALREADY HAVE I MY LIBRARY. Netflix seems to be actually getting better, for a while, watching a single video could entirely change my recommended list.
  - onychomys 4y ago
    Facebook served me an ad a couple of months back urging me to apply for a job at the hospital I've worked for since 2015, WHILE I WAS ACCESSING FACEBOOK FROM MY WORK VPN. I have it listed as my workplace and I was coming from a IP addy owned by it and still the computer thought it should show me the ad. I just don't get it.
  - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    Spotify transitions to a “song like those in your playlist” when a playlist finishes…and 95% of those songs are from the playlist I just finished listening to…makes no sense.
aquova 4y ago
Using Twitter as an example, it ran into the problem around 2010 or so where it, in my opinion, had found the perfect set of features. All of the tweets from the people you follow would be shown in chronological order for you. Liking a tweet simply showed support for that tweet, while retweeting it would repost it for all of your own followers. It was simple and clean. However they then ran into the problem where they felt the need to do something to maximize user retention on the site. Algorithms dictate what order things are seen in, new users and tags and trendy things are being shown to you, your likes are now also shown to the people who follow you but only sometimes, anything they could do to try and get people to consume more. It's not just Twitter; these long running social media networks are so afraid of becoming stagnant that they are chasing every trend they come across, and at some point it's going to catch up to them.
- dharma1 4y ago
  You can click on the little star top right on Twitter and choose “Latest tweets” to get a mostly chronological feed
MikusR 4y ago
Youtube has a whole section with all the people you follow. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions all the videos are in reverse chronological order. Twitter has a button with stars where you can select to show only the tweets of people you follow in reverse chronological order. Called Latest Tweets.
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  I got super excited for that YouTube functionality, then I clicked the link and realized that either I follow way too many people for this to be useful, or the people I follow are producing way more content than I can handle. I guess maybe if I "un-ring" the bell for a few of the bigger channels this could be useful...
  - twiceaday 4y ago
    People harp on social media algorithms but this right here is the actual problem. Your stated preferences, to see and be notified of all those videos, run contrary to your revealed preferences. And services catering to the former will lose to services catering to the latter. By harboring these mismatches we train these systems to ignore what we say we want or risk losing profits and market share.
    - praestigiare 4y ago
      The problem is that engagement is a poor proxy for preference.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Yeah I did the same. I find the best way to use YouTube with a lot of subscriptions is just to click the subscriptions list and it shows you who has a new video and you can decide what you're in the mood for based on the channel.
  - lizknope 4y ago
    Every morning I to go youtube and check my subscriptions for new videos. I have zero bell notifications because I just find it really annoying. I work from home most days so I play the interesting new videos that day from my subscriptions and really don't bother with anything else.
leviathant 4y ago
When in the Instagram app, click on the word Instagram. A select menu appears, and you can choose "Following" - you have to do this every time you open the app, and who knows when it will get the axe, but it's made this terrible platform a little more usable for me.
loudandskittish 4y ago
> Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it. Facebook has suddenly started flooding me with posts from political meme groups I never joined and have never even looked at. Twitch's recommended section used to be spot-on. Now they're trying to push me to watch women in hot tubs for some reason. For me, YouTube is the only one that still manages to surface things I actually want to watch. I don't know what changed (I've really only noticed this in the past two months), but this is starting to feel like the old broadcast TV model of executives deciding we should all watch the same thing.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Twitch has a situation where they are trying to improve discoverability of underperforming streamers. The directory used to just be sorted by live concurrent viewers, which I guess does do a lot to ensure that the front page is full of streams that people will watch (by virtue of them already being watched) but it also leads to the site being dominated by a very small group of people. Youtube does very well but it's a lot easier to categorize and tag 10-minute videos than it is to do so to a currently active livestream... and I will point out that discovering livestreams on youtube is abysmal. I've got one person that I follow pretty closely and if they arent super good about setting up the stream beforehand it is real easy to miss because youtube will make zero effort in informing you.
  - loudandskittish 4y ago
    But the thing is, a year ago, Twitch actually did a good job suggesting people with only six viewers. *Now* for some reason, they're pushing people in hot tubs who already have thousands of viewers. That's what I'm complaining about.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  > I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it. They've stopped using it to serve their users. They use it to serve their customers. The content they show you is what they want you to see so they can sell to advertisers, not what you want to see.
grishka 4y ago
> All of social media is broken right now. Not all, at least for me. VKontakte is the least broken of them all. There's still chronological feed and 95% of it is posts from people and pages you follow. But I imagine it's not very popular, or even known, outside of Russian-speaking countries. Don't get me wrong, there are product managers now and they do keep on relentlessly pushing their agenda (the TikTok clone aka "clips" no one asked for), but compared to what Facebook/Instagram routinely pulls off, VK feels extremely conservative. Twitter has an algorithmic feed at all? I tend to forget that. There's a small button at the top right that I never click. One thing that DOES annoy the crap out of me though, is their insistence on exposing me to people I don't follow. Those "%user% liked" and "%user% follows" things. If only there was a dedicated button for showing someone else's tweet to your followers!
nocommandline 4y ago
>> 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 This switching to similar 'stuff' because you looked at one thing seems to be common on social media and my guess is that this is due to 'wrong' application of recommendation engines. Twitter, LinkedIn does it too. While logged in to Twitter, you click a 'one-off' tweet and suddenly your timeline is filled with those types of tweets and those type of topics. If you go to your settings/topics, you will see that it is now populated with variations of that topic. Same thing with LinkedIn. You view a job and your feed/job recommendation is now populated with those type of jobs. Social media companies don't seem to be accounting for - oh, maybe I was just being curious about this tweet or this job or this company. It's especially bad for Twitter given that you already follow certain people so they have an idea of your interest

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.

Ensorceled 4y ago
My audible app is full of recommendations for books I ALREADY HAVE I MY LIBRARY. Netflix seems to be actually getting better, for a while, watching a single video could entirely change my recommended list.
- onychomys 4y ago
  Facebook served me an ad a couple of months back urging me to apply for a job at the hospital I've worked for since 2015, WHILE I WAS ACCESSING FACEBOOK FROM MY WORK VPN. I have it listed as my workplace and I was coming from a IP addy owned by it and still the computer thought it should show me the ad. I just don't get it.
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  Spotify transitions to a “song like those in your playlist” when a playlist finishes…and 95% of those songs are from the playlist I just finished listening to…makes no sense.

aquova 4y ago

Using Twitter as an example, it ran into the problem around 2010 or so where it, in my opinion, had found the perfect set of features. All of the tweets from the people you follow would be shown in chronological order for you. Liking a tweet simply showed support for that tweet, while retweeting it would repost it for all of your own followers. It was simple and clean. However they then ran into the problem where they felt the need to do something to maximize user retention on the site. Algorithms dictate what order things are seen in, new users and tags and trendy things are being shown to you, your likes are now also shown to the people who follow you but only sometimes, anything they could do to try and get people to consume more. It's not just Twitter; these long running social media networks are so afraid of becoming stagnant that they are chasing every trend they come across, and at some point it's going to catch up to them.

dharma1 4y ago
You can click on the little star top right on Twitter and choose “Latest tweets” to get a mostly chronological feed

MikusR 4y ago

Youtube has a whole section with all the people you follow. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions all the videos are in reverse chronological order. Twitter has a button with stars where you can select to show only the tweets of people you follow in reverse chronological order. Called Latest Tweets.

anoonmoose 4y ago
I got super excited for that YouTube functionality, then I clicked the link and realized that either I follow way too many people for this to be useful, or the people I follow are producing way more content than I can handle. I guess maybe if I "un-ring" the bell for a few of the bigger channels this could be useful...
- twiceaday 4y ago
  People harp on social media algorithms but this right here is the actual problem. Your stated preferences, to see and be notified of all those videos, run contrary to your revealed preferences. And services catering to the former will lose to services catering to the latter. By harboring these mismatches we train these systems to ignore what we say we want or risk losing profits and market share.
  - praestigiare 4y ago
    The problem is that engagement is a poor proxy for preference.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah I did the same. I find the best way to use YouTube with a lot of subscriptions is just to click the subscriptions list and it shows you who has a new video and you can decide what you're in the mood for based on the channel.
- lizknope 4y ago
  Every morning I to go youtube and check my subscriptions for new videos. I have zero bell notifications because I just find it really annoying. I work from home most days so I play the interesting new videos that day from my subscriptions and really don't bother with anything else.

leviathant 4y ago

When in the Instagram app, click on the word Instagram. A select menu appears, and you can choose "Following" - you have to do this every time you open the app, and who knows when it will get the axe, but it's made this terrible platform a little more usable for me.

loudandskittish 4y ago

> Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it. Facebook has suddenly started flooding me with posts from political meme groups I never joined and have never even looked at. Twitch's recommended section used to be spot-on. Now they're trying to push me to watch women in hot tubs for some reason. For me, YouTube is the only one that still manages to surface things I actually want to watch. I don't know what changed (I've really only noticed this in the past two months), but this is starting to feel like the old broadcast TV model of executives deciding we should all watch the same thing.

jabroni_salad 4y ago
Twitch has a situation where they are trying to improve discoverability of underperforming streamers. The directory used to just be sorted by live concurrent viewers, which I guess does do a lot to ensure that the front page is full of streams that people will watch (by virtue of them already being watched) but it also leads to the site being dominated by a very small group of people. Youtube does very well but it's a lot easier to categorize and tag 10-minute videos than it is to do so to a currently active livestream... and I will point out that discovering livestreams on youtube is abysmal. I've got one person that I follow pretty closely and if they arent super good about setting up the stream beforehand it is real easy to miss because youtube will make zero effort in informing you.
- loudandskittish 4y ago
  But the thing is, a year ago, Twitch actually did a good job suggesting people with only six viewers. *Now* for some reason, they're pushing people in hot tubs who already have thousands of viewers. That's what I'm complaining about.
slowmovintarget 4y ago
> I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it. They've stopped using it to serve their users. They use it to serve their customers. The content they show you is what they want you to see so they can sell to advertisers, not what you want to see.

grishka 4y ago

> All of social media is broken right now. Not all, at least for me. VKontakte is the least broken of them all. There's still chronological feed and 95% of it is posts from people and pages you follow. But I imagine it's not very popular, or even known, outside of Russian-speaking countries. Don't get me wrong, there are product managers now and they do keep on relentlessly pushing their agenda (the TikTok clone aka "clips" no one asked for), but compared to what Facebook/Instagram routinely pulls off, VK feels extremely conservative. Twitter has an algorithmic feed at all? I tend to forget that. There's a small button at the top right that I never click. One thing that DOES annoy the crap out of me though, is their insistence on exposing me to people I don't follow. Those "%user% liked" and "%user% follows" things. If only there was a dedicated button for showing someone else's tweet to your followers!

nocommandline 4y ago

>> 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 This switching to similar 'stuff' because you looked at one thing seems to be common on social media and my guess is that this is due to 'wrong' application of recommendation engines. Twitter, LinkedIn does it too. While logged in to Twitter, you click a 'one-off' tweet and suddenly your timeline is filled with those types of tweets and those type of topics. If you go to your settings/topics, you will see that it is now populated with variations of that topic. Same thing with LinkedIn. You view a job and your feed/job recommendation is now populated with those type of jobs. Social media companies don't seem to be accounting for - oh, maybe I was just being curious about this tweet or this job or this company. It's especially bad for Twitter given that you already follow certain people so they have an idea of your interest