18 ms·

Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

222 points by echen 4y ago

KidComputer 4y ago
Search for yoga on TikTok and Instagram and compare the results. Guess which one returns almost all softcore pornography vs actually educational content. It's not a surprise which one teenagers would find more engaging.
flanbiscuit 4y ago
I haven't installed TikTok on my phone because of privacy concerns but I am curious to check out its content. I think there is a "safe" way of using TikTok, but I have yet to try it. 1. I have read that you can browse the site completely in the browser, and even as a PWA. So this prevents all of the concerns coming from the privileges and permissions native apps have. 2. You can even browse it without an account (supposedly). But if I do create an account, I'd create a new email for it 3. I will browse it only with Firefox for Android, with uBlock Origin installed, only in private windows (giving uBlock Origin access to private windows, which I already do) 4. Even though there is no "in-app" browser in their web client, I would never enter any personal details or log-in into anything from links I click. If I'm really into a product advertised I'd just search for it in a new tab 5. Use a VPN I know this is not fool-proof, I'm still going to be fingerprinted and uniquely identified, but this should prevent collection of the things that concern _me_ specifically like location, contacts, ability to scan phone's storage and see what other apps I have installed, reading my clipboard, biometric prints, etc. Is it worth going through these hoops just for an entertainment app? Probably not, I might get tired of it real quick. We'll see
talivision 4y ago
I am very confident the image at the top of this article is generated by any of these currently popular text-to-image models. This feels like the beginning of ignoring artworks I see online, foreshadowed by header images at the start of tech blogs.
- trentgreene 4y ago
  The tell for me is the nonsense in the details of the image which aren’t super noticeable in the macro. Some of the faces aren’t faces.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    Agreed, DALL-E 2 seems to have real issues with faces, hands (fingers especially), and objects inside other objects (look at the beakers the teddy bears are using) and actual 3d depth awareness of objects. Looking at these it started to get really easy to pick out the AI versus a human of the style, the humans had really good attention to details like fingers, eye placement, and other facial features.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I think its less that DALL-E has an issue with them, and more that humans are just extremely sensitive to details of faces and body parts in general. It's also extremely difficult for a human to draw a hand or face. AI images only seem different in that they draw mistakes in hyper detail so you get something that's the combination of a child's pencil drawing composition and an expert painters style.
      - yreg 4y ago
        It's both, DALL-E specifically is bad at faces (perhaps intentionally?) compared to the other models. But at the current state of things, the details are usually wrong in every subject, not only people.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  Likely. It appears to be part of the company's potential toolbox and has been researched by them for their blog: https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/humans-vs-dall-e https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/humans-vs-dall-e
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Blog pictures have always been irrelevant stock images but I agree this one is particularly bad and clearly AI generated.
MaxikCZ 4y ago
Yes, put a looping gif with no way to stop it right in the middle of the text. Thank you
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  You clicked the bimbo buzzfeed headline
skilled 4y ago
I think the issue with Instagram is the “follow the money” mentality from a lot of its users. I follow around 600 accounts, many of which are artists and brands, and I definitely saw a drastic shift towards video content. I do not open Instagram and expect to look at pictures alone unless it is from friends, pretty much.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
i dont know.... i never understood "hip" things. back when orkut was all the rage, i was stuck being anonymous. then facebook, twitter, whatsapp, instagram, sarahah app, titok, youtube shorts, i could not be convinced enough to maintain an account there..... i mean i am on HN, reddit but i dont have my own name, my "social graph" isnt tied to my AFK identity, my AFK friends aren't my online friends, my location is not my location........ the original internet user
- dieselgate 4y ago
  I kinda feel the essence of your comment is “nobody stays at the top forever” or something - have never used tiktok but it just seems to benefit from being newer than any FB company. FB is so large they are just experiencing diminishing returns on things now
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    no.... i was saying what i said. no "network" has been able to convince me to "engage with content", any of these networks and maybe even in future.... a year or 2 ago, i got my own pleroma instance for my family. its just a few of us for now and because i don't have any b2 storage set up, i do not recommend posting media but still,
rychco 4y ago
I disagree with their premise that Reels is "performative" while TikTok is "authentic". They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite. They're both equally performative & inauthentic.
- kodt 4y ago
  Yes I think the real factor is that the TikTok feed was more relevant to that age group and Instagram was more relevant to 30 something parents and home owners. Also it sounds as if the users had previously spent more time generating curated feeds on TikTok.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    Knowing about a dozen people who spent more time in Instagram Reels and then switched to TikToks I don't know that that's true - it seems accurate to me. Personally I used Reels and YT Shorts for a few months before TikTok but the second is far better.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  I mean someone who would say: >As a part of Gen Z, I relate a lot more with TikTok creators in general. Even the ads on Tiktok don't bother me as much. sounds as authentically human as an android lizard.
- onpensionsterm 4y ago
  >They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite. They couldn't, because it's 'the algorithm' that does the picking & Facebook's algorithm optimises for inauthentic or boomer. Cherry-picking posts isn't a standard usecase.
nemothekid 4y ago
I like that they asked actual users, and provided actual examples; it's something I've always felt off about Instagram's Reels vs TikTok. However the takeaway is that your TikTok feed is curated by hand by artisan robots vs Instagram is curated by lizards who only care about data. Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome). My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
- biotinker 4y ago
  The problem with asking "actual users" in this way, is that it fundamentally ties the user's pre-existing conception of these apps to their responses. If a user had been served the same content on Reels that they were on TikTok, it's difficult to see them having the same reaction.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    But they weren't? You can't just discount Reels having worse content.
  - stainforth 4y ago
    An actual scientific experiment would have like recently fallen away Amish teens compare these apps having never used them.
    - permo-w 4y ago
      or present them with the videos through some kind of neutral UI the UI itself can be tested separately
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
dehrmann 4y ago
Dumb TikTok question: is the TikTok logo and branding supposed to recall old anaglyph 3D?
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Likely yes. Such effect/filter is pretty common in art anyway.
nixcraft 4y ago
Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting related shorts. I think YouTube doesn't have enough original shorts content creators, and like many of Google's side projects, it will go to /dev/null someday.
- bismuthcrystal 4y ago
  Shorts is really half baked. Almost all content i consume on Youtube is in english, but shorts surprisingly ignores that and show content native to my country (most of the time irrelevant). It boggles my mind how YouTube can screw up something as basic as that.
  - eitland 4y ago
    For years several large web properties have been pushing machine translated content. Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original. IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
  - wdutch 4y ago
    Tangentially related but when I have lived in countries where English isn't the first language I'm amazed how many big companies ignore the language set in my web requests (English) and serves me content in the county's native language. Google for example and they really hide the button to chsngethe language. I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
    - weberer 4y ago
      Google really sucks with this. It used to be a lot worse a couple years ago when you had to navigate the dumb GDPR thing before you could see the language selector. Believe it or not, its the main thing that pushed me to DuckDuckGo. Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.
raverbashing 4y ago
And instead of playing to their strengths, IG tries to jump and chase a competitor. Doesn't look like a very smart move
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Youtube seems to have done really well with that strategy, Shorts seems like a pretty well used feature.
  - orwin 4y ago
    I really hate it, but maybe I'm old now.
- danhak 4y ago
  IG jumped and chased Snapchat with stories and that was an incredibly smart / successful move. The same strategy isn't panning out with reels, for whatever reason.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    I think it's because they complement better. To be fair, "stories"/snaps are not a product, they are a feature. Reels/Tktks involve a different type of content producer than regular stories. On that side, it is "closer" to YT than regular IG And that I think is the impedance mismatch between IG and the Reels side
nb_key 4y ago
Cal Newport had written a blog[0] post about the very same reason which worths reading a while ago. [0]https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pill/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pi...
bmitc 4y ago
This is the way of the figurative boomer, in the parlance of our times. In 5-10 years, something will have replaced TikTok, if trends of the past continue. It's possible, in the same way that humans broke out of evolutionary balance, that an app such as TikTok and its machine learning algorithms can break out of the evolutionary balance of what teens find intriguing or "in", but that remains to be seen. I don't know why any company would try to target the current "in" thing. That shows that not only are they behind but that they are behind a minimum of two generations of "in" apps/things. So Google and Facebook are just showing that they only know what was next and not what is actually next.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  Because GOOG, FB/META need to hold up reach of their app platform, growth figures, and, ultimately, value of their shares. It's not an either/or strategy anyway, as will be seen by the insane biddings for a perceived next big thing; you can't typically innovate within an established org anyway.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
petesergeant 4y ago
If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, wait 'til you find out what a China-based company can do with detailed preference and arousal data from young people.
- irq 4y ago
  This is what keeps me off Tiktok. I feel like I’m losing my mind even having to make a judgement like this, but I trust Facebook more than China. Only a tiny bit, but it’s there.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    That’s because Facebook’s motives are absolutely sublime in their purity: they want you to use their product and they want you to click on those ads. The motives of a company controlled by the CCP are much much murkier.
  - hackflip 4y ago
    The Devil you know
- matsemann 4y ago
  Well, as a non-US person I like that not all my PII is concentrated in US companies. If anything, I feel that US having something on me can have worse effects on me, compared to China, given the amount of US/western stuff I use.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I honestly don’t care if the Chinese government knows everything about me. Much more worried about the American government.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    Any entity that knows so much about you can manipulate you in ways you won’t suspect. Their government isn’t held back by the Constitution and they probably wouldn’t hesitate to influence the citizenry of their main rival on the world stage.
__t__ 4y ago
Interesting read, would be interesting to see how TikTok optimizes their recommendation algorithms and what kind of metrics they use. Like another commenter said, it may also be that Instagram had already a use case and a "spot" in peoples minds so its harder to change that mentality to the one that TikTok naturally gained and as such people tend to upload "better" content on there.
btilly 4y ago
Time to trot out http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf again. (Yes, I am one of the co-authors.) Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like. We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill. And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them. Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.
- taneq 4y ago
  > But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
  - btilly 4y ago
    If the total value of the network is O(n log(n)) then the value per user is only O(log(n)). So comparing a 2 million user network with a 1 million user network, if the second one is on a product that is 10% better, users should find switching an improvement.
    - taneq 4y ago
      Thanks for explaining! I'd always heard that O(n^2) value for social networks but never really thought about who that value is for. Now that you mention it, the value of a network to an individual user really is only O(n) or even O(log(n)). So while the company still has a massive cash advantage, it's much harder to deepen that moat and secure your customers with it than it seemed.
smelendez 4y ago
TikTok has such a content and data advantage. More viewers, more creators, more content. Feels like it’ll be very hard for Meta, YouTube or any competitor to come back without coming up with a hugely superior recommendation algorithm, and TikTok’s feels hard to beat, or some kind of improved creation tools that give it a content library advantage. And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too when the idea of having a high quality networked camera and fun filters with you all the time was revolutionary, and Instagram was the way to take advantage of it. Now that phone power, storage space, network bandwidth, and good editing software have made watchable short video easy to shoot, TikTok is that platform.
- sytelus 4y ago
  Content and data are not advantage. Creators can simply re-upload their content to Insta/YouTube to increase their revenues. It's already happening. It will accelerate if Insta/YouTube provides right incentives.
- zip1234 4y ago
  ...also Tiktok doesn't care about privacy
  - midoBB 4y ago
    Does anyone? Has Cambridge Analytica not shown us anything?
drewbeck 4y ago
TikTok developed the whole contemporary mobile video style in concert with its users and it’s algorithm. I don’t think you can just copy the features and throw them at a different audience and expect things to work out. I don’t think chasing the current hot thing is necessarily a terrible idea but I think pivoting your app constantly to chase the hot thing is. “Be willing to cannibalize your user base” doesn’t mean “force new things on your user base”!
yosito 4y ago
I'm one of the olds, but I wish Instagram would just go back to simple photo sharing with friends. No video, no sponsored posts, no ranking algorithm, just show me what my friends are up to, damn it!
- carlivar 4y ago
  Yep. I uninstalled it. Can we go back to Flickr?
- criddell 4y ago
  Same here. The addition of Reels and how hard they push it is really annoying. If I wanted to use Tik Tok, I would use Tik Tok. I'm on Instagram because I want to use Instagram.
- acomjean 4y ago
  Me too. Its interesting, I work with a group of visual artists (about 300). Instagram was by far the most popular way for them to share what they were working on. It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)
iJohnDoe 4y ago
Instagram isn’t dying. It’s the default app while commuting, bored, taking a dump, “looked at all my other apps and I’m bored, mindless app surfing, etc. Also, Instagram adds value as an app that people truly enjoy from a consumption standpoint. It’s not going anyway.
wintercarver 4y ago
I think this quote from a recent New Yorker article[1] sums up a subtle difference that’s easy to overlook. Topic has been on my mind a bit lately[2]: “Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.”” [1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-fall-of-the-social-media-giants https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-an... [2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/ https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/
aaron695 4y ago
foobarbecue 4y ago
It's the app cycle. People always think the shiny new thing is better. The new thing is definitely way cooler than the old thing your parents are on.
eric4smith 4y ago
Been running some Facebook Lead ads recently. The ads are designed to run on both Facebook and Instagram. (Facebook owns Instagram) The lead reports show where they are coming from. Overwhelmingly from Instagram. I think we got about 20% of leads from core Facebook and the rest from IG. The core old timey Facebook is actually dying pretty quickly. All the traffic is going elsewhere. And all the bugs on Facebook.com is not helping matters. Especially on desktop. We really started to examine all of this and it’s startling the quick decline.
jakey_bakey 4y ago
Can we finally agree that 'currently cool' is no longer a moat, and stop giving insane 10x price/sales valuations to social media companies on the promise of eternal future growth / profitability.
- throwaway_4ever 4y ago
  You're talking about companies other than Facebook, right? Because Facebook is 3.6x price/sales with double digit growth still.
bluehorseray 4y ago
I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn't really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them. But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.
- altacc 4y ago
  I agree. There's something to be said for app/services that decide that medium sized is good enough and they'll stick to doing their one thing well. Flickr springs to mind (although is much past its hey-day). I know people who left facebook for Instagram because of the changes to facebook but the changes just followed them to Instagram.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  It's also stopped me uploading video to Instagram because now "your video will be uploaded as a Reel" and controlling the "share to Facebook" permissions for Reels isn't possible via facebook.com, you have to use the iOS app (which I do not have installed.) Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
- Aissen 4y ago
  It's their Google+ moment (as a reminder, Google+ destroyed Buzz, Reader, and heavily damaged Talk, YouTube and generally Google's reputation; I liked it, but it went too far on so many things). Or dare I remember when every app was integrating a "story" feature to compete with Snap ? Their are probably other examples of this.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app)
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Am I part of an aged, dying userbase no one cares about? I barely endured my third decade and yet I do not want to watch reels, TikToks or any other video that contains text, adhd and "fun" content. I just want to look at the photos and videos people I personally know uploaded, preferably ordered by how long ago they got posted.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > I just want to look at the photos and videos people I personally know uploaded, preferably ordered by how long ago they got posted. "on a platform we paid money for" - none of you.
alkonaut 4y ago
Why would Instagram even try to be TikTok to begin with? Why show a firehose of short videos that just makes everyone who made your platform what it is, hate it? How will you tell who is leaving the platform because it's suddenly TikTok (like me) vs who's leaving the platform for TikTok?
okasaki 4y ago
I've tried to sign up for instagram, but it always said "email is already used", including for emails that I had just created. Maybe they're losing users because nobody can sign up? Or maybe the web sign up doesn't work, and you're only allowed to sign up with a facebook account (now they have your data) or the mobile app (they also have your data). If so that's the kind of abject dishonesty that might also lose you users.
- saaspirant 4y ago
  Same thing happening to me as well. But it happens only to my throwaway email not my main one. Maybe they found out that mine is a throwaway a/c.
technion 4y ago
You know I just had a look at Reels and of the four on my screen, three have a tiktok logo. People are making "reels" already by just taking someone elses popular video and uploading it as a reel. Which has the effect of: Advertising tiktok.
jakey_bakey 4y ago
Now that TikTok has handily overthrown Meta, I vow my next company will eschew tech and sell Scalextrics or some shit with an operational moat
Gatsky 4y ago
Slighlty chilling reading these opinions, like a focus group with Christmas turkeys in November. TikTok and Instagram seem equally devoid of useful content to me, one just has more dancing. YouTube is the exception, partly because they pay creators better. YouTube creators seem to be living lives they actually desire to lead.
danielovichdk 4y ago
Stop asking Gen Z for anything. Fuck me, I don't even know what a Gen Z is. Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too. Instagram is dying ? No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream. People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything. Kylie Jenner ? Really ? I can almost taste the sugary feeling in the mouth of teenagers when they fall over the same line of self-staging freaks. Turn it off. Buy a small library. Read. Pack a suitcase. Buy a train ticket. See the world. Concentrate. Please.
- WantonQuantum 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - thefz 4y ago
    On the other hand, comments like this make me instantaneously consider less of the commenter. Besides, you are all using "boomer" wrong.
- inductive_magic 4y ago
  People ask the young generation because they are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading. Consider how many people will read your answer. How much attention of HN-audience-type-people did you just send down the drain for the righteous feeling of ranting off-topic?
  - l33tbro 4y ago
    > the young generation ... are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading. They sure can be. But young people around me in the early 2000s were into rap-metal, buying ringtones, and using ICQ or IM. These obviously were not great indicators of what would happen in the near future.
    - thefz 4y ago
      Hey, ICQ was great.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Instagram and Tiktok serve completely different purposes. Neither is dying.
The_Colonel 4y ago
A social network with 2 billion users is dying the same way as an average 20 year old is also technically in the process of dying.
usednet 4y ago
Instagram is not dying. There is no other app in the world with the same reach and installation percentage among young people. Instagram is losing at usage time sure, but I would wager that 95% of young people in first world countries have an Instagram profile and this is not. Its almost a necessity.
sytelus 4y ago
TLDR; Human wants and needs are two different things. If you only measure things like click throughs, you may end up measuring "wants" and therefore risk long term dissatisfaction as "needs" are not met. So the idea here is to engage paid human rating crew who will supposedly more focus on "needs" (because they are paid, they will presumably prefer less of garbage/controversial/clickbaits).
revskill 4y ago
Facebook products have the most complicated UX ever. Try their settings menu with unnessesary permission settings. Best UX is the product without the need of settings though.
asimpleusecase 4y ago
I find the comments in the article align with analysis from this A16z podcast on TikTok https://overcast.fm/+BlzHoDbOw https://overcast.fm/+BlzHoDbOw The point being TiKTok does a ton of labelling of videos that allows the algorithm to “see” the content - or at least qualifies lots of elements of each video. And then optimises for joy and happiness responses from users. Other useful observations in the podcast
socrateslee 4y ago
It just seems that when compared with TikTok, Instagram Reels is still much smaller as a short video platform. Where the creator communities is yet to be built, the data is probably weighted heavily on the Instagram followers, what do we do on such a new but may be potentially large platform? how do we cold start based what we already have? We snap some historically hot videos from TikTok. I think that's why videos on Reels are kind of old. A new platform is not built on a single day. Even creators found a new platform and decided the first thing they do should be re-posting their old works.
sacrosancty 4y ago
Could it be that Instagram isn't losing, but rather, they've won and they're cashing out while Tiktok is still trying to grow so that oneday it too can milk its users as hard?
hardware2win 4y ago
Will china dominate social media market? Seems very likely I bet they dont rely as hard on algos when it comes to content, but thats just a guess
idkwhatiamdoing 4y ago
I think this is a nice and interesting article, but as far as I understood they showed the participants where the videos was from. It makes the result hard to evaluate. You take a group of participants which are likely to prefer TikTok already and think of Reels as a meme and then you say "these are TikToks, these are Reels, which do you prefer?". Of course these people will probably like TikTok way more. In no way I want to defend Reels (in fact I don't consume neither TikTok nor Reels), but a blind test would have been really really important here.
SilverBirch 4y ago
> If Instagram wants to capture TikTok's magical human touch, it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper. I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram, they're not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave. Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don't have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.
- fufyekegxyf 4y ago
  I see similar arguments to this one a lot and frankly I don't see how anyone with an active social life can believe it to be true. The userbase for these platforms has massive crossover. Maybe it's a generational thing or something but I can gurantee you the socially active Gen Zers are on Insta and TikTok. If anything they'll be on both of those as well as Snapchat and Discord using each for particular types of social interaction. So the issue clearly isn't a locked in userbase. So it must be the content creators right? But this is rediculous too! Because virtually every content creator worth a damn on TikTok will have a linked Instagram! What's more, many of them will often have a Linktree or similar url either in their profile description or linked on their insta that will include everything from YouTube, to Patreon, to OnlyFans. People who understand how to make money making content on these platforms aren't one trick ponies, they're using sophisticated marketing approaches that leverage the strengths of different online platforms to compensate for the fact they often have handle their own marketing. So if the content of the knockoffs is bad or the creators arent finding the competition worth considering then the only question remaining I would argue is whether the problem is in the reccomendation system (TikTok was, and still is, famous with users for doing a solid job at this), the moderation system (TikTok, maybe because it's Chinese, is not so fixated on implementing the SJ nonsense that YouTube, FB, etc. pander to at the moderation level), or the compensation system (Again, probably because they care less about demonetizing you for wrongthink against whatever miniority or "important cause" is the pet of the week. Content competes primarily on its merits as likeable content). In short, TikTok might have had an early mover advantage but the reason no one catches up in the current environment is because they can't get their heads out of the sand enough to realize it's their own fault no one entertaining wants to produce anything but TikTok reposts for them.
dom96 4y ago
I feel like there is a big problem with this comparison: many of those asked to use TikTok and Reels already likely have been using TikTok for a while. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see any mention of resetting TikTok so TikTok for them would have had a major advantage as its would have been pre-trained.
- fabiankutschera 4y ago
  100% agree. Also just commented this. You could only run this experiment if you had watched exactly the same amount of videos on both platforms or if you would start from scratch on both!?
fabiankutschera 4y ago
Wait, I need to ask about the sample data & methodology here: - these 100 users they asked, were they already frequent users of TikTok and Instagram reels? This experiment makes no sense if users spent a lot of time training the TikTok algorithm, prior to running the experiment while they didn't train the Instagram Reels algorithm? Of course the results are more interesting and less generic if they had used TikTok a lot before...?
- fortym2 4y ago
  Yes, this is something important that the post is missing
fortym2 4y ago
I loved the humor of the first part of the post. IMO the problem of Instagram is not only related to Reels, but is more generalized. For the past ~5 years I have been noticing a serious decline in the quality of the interactions and of the content around. Any interaction nowadays on Instagram feels fake, for the sole purpose of getting attention. The old-style pictures that are almost sure to generate more interactions are recycled old jokes that people with common sense are now tired of reading, but somehow a lot of users still enjoy them. There are also some unexplainable phenomenas, like pictures with absolutely trash content that probably took zero effort to produce, getting thousands of likes and comments. These situations (and more...) for me have eventually taken away all the fun of using the app.
thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
I so liked to to doomscroll Instagram because it would just find nice pictures for me, but it’s ruined with Reels. First, they rig it so that on every page, there’ll be a reel. You can spot them and flag each and every one with “I don’t want to see this” and it will continue trying to show you reels. It’s definitely an explicit rule to show Reels. Each Reel it finds for me has some mildly interesting-looking footage combined with the worst sounds you can think of. Usually it’s some generic down-shifted voice that says “drop the bass” before these clipped, farting sounds come out of the phone. The best example I ran across had someone putting lubricant until a ball bearing, coupled with what seems to be a cover of a Justin Bieber song but with what sound like cartoon dog voices. In a dull moment I would like to mindlessly scroll for pretty pictures. It used to show me rockets and women. I like rockets and I like women. Now it shows me farty bass.
- rgoulter 4y ago
  Nitpick: I think 'doomscrolling' is a slightly more precise term than just aimless consumption of infinitely scrolling content. My understanding is, 'doomscrolling' is more about content which outrages (albeit, also consumed in an aimless manner, or to "not miss out").
  - thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
    Noted thx I’ll need a better word. It’s fun to say doomscroll
hopfenholz 4y ago
One of the options in the user research as to why you preferred one or the other was “better algorithm”, as an alternative to “more uplifting content” or whatever. Surely ‘better algorithm’ is just the means by which the user experience is delivered? No one uses a social media app ‘for the algorithm’!
hokkos 4y ago
Instagram is owned by influencers while TikTok is extremely successful at making emerge videos from random people that have captured insanely interesting moments, Instagram won't let the spotlight go from influencers to the common people.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  >Instagram won't let the spotlight go from influencers to the common people. Think this is one of the fundamental differences, Tiktok feel more like a level playing field and it also feels like the system actually goes out of it's way to find you an audience. It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that Tiktok almost creates invisible "Subreddits" for topics it identifies then pushes all content it detects as that topic to everyone in the group. All invisible to the end user. While tiktok helps you find an audience for your content, IG almost punishes you because you don't have one, then punishes you more if you don't do the right algorithm dance.
Nimitz14 4y ago
The gifs don't work on firefox.
uncommonshaman 4y ago
In a better world, each social app would know its place and would hone that to a fine edge. But there's no incentive to do that, there's no infinite growth there. Social apps should be narrowly focused tools that do their job perfectly, with very little overlap between. For what it's worth, I don't think any app can expand much past its original focus anyway, but the fact that they try spoils the experience.
wilde 4y ago
I like this piece, but it basically measured which app do you use more. If they wanted to really drill in, they should have had folks compare performance on new accounts. I still suspect TikTok would win? But you’d get cleaner results.
viburnum 4y ago
The sad thing is Instagram's explore tab used to give me excellent personalized content (gardening and architecture) but when they added reels it all went away. At first it was dancing teenagers and now it's random celebrities and weird sped up videos of people cleaning. It doesn't matter how many times I mark it as "not interesting", it just keeps pushing it.
logicalmonster 4y ago
I sort of like the SurgeHQ blog from a few past articles I've read on it, and this article is similarly mostly thought-provoking and well-done. But it pulls off 1 (arguably) disgusting trick IMO. It goes from talking about what users really want and then launches into some 'do you really want people to click on conspiracy theories' type of value-judgement that seems antithetical to actual user-preferences. Again, who decides what's true? Should it be the government? Should it be Mark Zuckerberg or other corporate giants? Is Mark Zuckerberg and others like him my parent who knows what's best for me? What if people actually want to see that content and decide for themselves what's true or not? Are the people to be treated as adults or children? That one thing from the article is probably not meaningful to most here, but I didn't like that specific part.
spoid 4y ago
is there a difference in how tiktok handled music and copyright strikes (or at least for a while after launch until it was big)? I assume part of tiktok's success is that people can put in current music at all without getting instastruck by a neural net

222 points by echen 4y ago

Search for yoga on TikTok and Instagram and compare the results. Guess which one returns almost all softcore pornography vs actually educational content. It's not a surprise which one teenagers would find more engaging.

flanbiscuit 4y ago

I haven't installed TikTok on my phone because of privacy concerns but I am curious to check out its content. I think there is a "safe" way of using TikTok, but I have yet to try it. 1. I have read that you can browse the site completely in the browser, and even as a PWA. So this prevents all of the concerns coming from the privileges and permissions native apps have. 2. You can even browse it without an account (supposedly). But if I do create an account, I'd create a new email for it 3. I will browse it only with Firefox for Android, with uBlock Origin installed, only in private windows (giving uBlock Origin access to private windows, which I already do) 4. Even though there is no "in-app" browser in their web client, I would never enter any personal details or log-in into anything from links I click. If I'm really into a product advertised I'd just search for it in a new tab 5. Use a VPN I know this is not fool-proof, I'm still going to be fingerprinted and uniquely identified, but this should prevent collection of the things that concern _me_ specifically like location, contacts, ability to scan phone's storage and see what other apps I have installed, reading my clipboard, biometric prints, etc. Is it worth going through these hoops just for an entertainment app? Probably not, I might get tired of it real quick. We'll see

talivision 4y ago

I am very confident the image at the top of this article is generated by any of these currently popular text-to-image models. This feels like the beginning of ignoring artworks I see online, foreshadowed by header images at the start of tech blogs.

trentgreene 4y ago
The tell for me is the nonsense in the details of the image which aren’t super noticeable in the macro. Some of the faces aren’t faces.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  Agreed, DALL-E 2 seems to have real issues with faces, hands (fingers especially), and objects inside other objects (look at the beakers the teddy bears are using) and actual 3d depth awareness of objects. Looking at these it started to get really easy to pick out the AI versus a human of the style, the humans had really good attention to details like fingers, eye placement, and other facial features.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I think its less that DALL-E has an issue with them, and more that humans are just extremely sensitive to details of faces and body parts in general. It's also extremely difficult for a human to draw a hand or face. AI images only seem different in that they draw mistakes in hyper detail so you get something that's the combination of a child's pencil drawing composition and an expert painters style.
    - yreg 4y ago
      It's both, DALL-E specifically is bad at faces (perhaps intentionally?) compared to the other models. But at the current state of things, the details are usually wrong in every subject, not only people.
mellosouls 4y ago
Likely. It appears to be part of the company's potential toolbox and has been researched by them for their blog: https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/humans-vs-dall-e https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/humans-vs-dall-e
Gigachad 4y ago
Blog pictures have always been irrelevant stock images but I agree this one is particularly bad and clearly AI generated.

MaxikCZ 4y ago

Yes, put a looping gif with no way to stop it right in the middle of the text. Thank you

pipeline_peak 4y ago
You clicked the bimbo buzzfeed headline

skilled 4y ago

I think the issue with Instagram is the “follow the money” mentality from a lot of its users. I follow around 600 accounts, many of which are artists and brands, and I definitely saw a drastic shift towards video content. I do not open Instagram and expect to look at pictures alone unless it is from friends, pretty much.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

i dont know.... i never understood "hip" things. back when orkut was all the rage, i was stuck being anonymous. then facebook, twitter, whatsapp, instagram, sarahah app, titok, youtube shorts, i could not be convinced enough to maintain an account there..... i mean i am on HN, reddit but i dont have my own name, my "social graph" isnt tied to my AFK identity, my AFK friends aren't my online friends, my location is not my location........ the original internet user

dieselgate 4y ago
I kinda feel the essence of your comment is “nobody stays at the top forever” or something - have never used tiktok but it just seems to benefit from being newer than any FB company. FB is so large they are just experiencing diminishing returns on things now
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  no.... i was saying what i said. no "network" has been able to convince me to "engage with content", any of these networks and maybe even in future.... a year or 2 ago, i got my own pleroma instance for my family. its just a few of us for now and because i don't have any b2 storage set up, i do not recommend posting media but still,

rychco 4y ago

I disagree with their premise that Reels is "performative" while TikTok is "authentic". They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite. They're both equally performative & inauthentic.

kodt 4y ago
Yes I think the real factor is that the TikTok feed was more relevant to that age group and Instagram was more relevant to 30 something parents and home owners. Also it sounds as if the users had previously spent more time generating curated feeds on TikTok.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Knowing about a dozen people who spent more time in Instagram Reels and then switched to TikToks I don't know that that's true - it seems accurate to me. Personally I used Reels and YT Shorts for a few months before TikTok but the second is far better.
thrown_22 4y ago
I mean someone who would say: >As a part of Gen Z, I relate a lot more with TikTok creators in general. Even the ads on Tiktok don't bother me as much. sounds as authentically human as an android lizard.
onpensionsterm 4y ago
>They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite. They couldn't, because it's 'the algorithm' that does the picking & Facebook's algorithm optimises for inauthentic or boomer. Cherry-picking posts isn't a standard usecase.

nemothekid 4y ago

I like that they asked actual users, and provided actual examples; it's something I've always felt off about Instagram's Reels vs TikTok. However the takeaway is that your TikTok feed is curated by hand by artisan robots vs Instagram is curated by lizards who only care about data. Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome). My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.

biotinker 4y ago
The problem with asking "actual users" in this way, is that it fundamentally ties the user's pre-existing conception of these apps to their responses. If a user had been served the same content on Reels that they were on TikTok, it's difficult to see them having the same reaction.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  But they weren't? You can't just discount Reels having worse content.
- stainforth 4y ago
  An actual scientific experiment would have like recently fallen away Amish teens compare these apps having never used them.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    or present them with the videos through some kind of neutral UI the UI itself can be tested separately
lern_too_spel 4y ago

dehrmann 4y ago

Dumb TikTok question: is the TikTok logo and branding supposed to recall old anaglyph 3D?

thrdbndndn 4y ago
Likely yes. Such effect/filter is pretty common in art anyway.

nixcraft 4y ago

Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting related shorts. I think YouTube doesn't have enough original shorts content creators, and like many of Google's side projects, it will go to /dev/null someday.

bismuthcrystal 4y ago
Shorts is really half baked. Almost all content i consume on Youtube is in english, but shorts surprisingly ignores that and show content native to my country (most of the time irrelevant). It boggles my mind how YouTube can screw up something as basic as that.
- eitland 4y ago
  For years several large web properties have been pushing machine translated content. Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original. IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
- wdutch 4y ago
  Tangentially related but when I have lived in countries where English isn't the first language I'm amazed how many big companies ignore the language set in my web requests (English) and serves me content in the county's native language. Google for example and they really hide the button to chsngethe language. I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
  - weberer 4y ago
    Google really sucks with this. It used to be a lot worse a couple years ago when you had to navigate the dumb GDPR thing before you could see the language selector. Believe it or not, its the main thing that pushed me to DuckDuckGo. Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.

raverbashing 4y ago

And instead of playing to their strengths, IG tries to jump and chase a competitor. Doesn't look like a very smart move

Gigachad 4y ago
Youtube seems to have done really well with that strategy, Shorts seems like a pretty well used feature.
- orwin 4y ago
  I really hate it, but maybe I'm old now.
danhak 4y ago
IG jumped and chased Snapchat with stories and that was an incredibly smart / successful move. The same strategy isn't panning out with reels, for whatever reason.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  I think it's because they complement better. To be fair, "stories"/snaps are not a product, they are a feature. Reels/Tktks involve a different type of content producer than regular stories. On that side, it is "closer" to YT than regular IG And that I think is the impedance mismatch between IG and the Reels side

nb_key 4y ago

Cal Newport had written a blog[0] post about the very same reason which worths reading a while ago. [0]https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pill/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pi...

bmitc 4y ago

This is the way of the figurative boomer, in the parlance of our times. In 5-10 years, something will have replaced TikTok, if trends of the past continue. It's possible, in the same way that humans broke out of evolutionary balance, that an app such as TikTok and its machine learning algorithms can break out of the evolutionary balance of what teens find intriguing or "in", but that remains to be seen. I don't know why any company would try to target the current "in" thing. That shows that not only are they behind but that they are behind a minimum of two generations of "in" apps/things. So Google and Facebook are just showing that they only know what was next and not what is actually next.

tannhaeuser 4y ago
Because GOOG, FB/META need to hold up reach of their app platform, growth figures, and, ultimately, value of their shares. It's not an either/or strategy anyway, as will be seen by the insane biddings for a perceived next big thing; you can't typically innovate within an established org anyway.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

petesergeant 4y ago

If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, wait 'til you find out what a China-based company can do with detailed preference and arousal data from young people.

irq 4y ago
This is what keeps me off Tiktok. I feel like I’m losing my mind even having to make a judgement like this, but I trust Facebook more than China. Only a tiny bit, but it’s there.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  That’s because Facebook’s motives are absolutely sublime in their purity: they want you to use their product and they want you to click on those ads. The motives of a company controlled by the CCP are much much murkier.
- hackflip 4y ago
  The Devil you know
matsemann 4y ago
Well, as a non-US person I like that not all my PII is concentrated in US companies. If anything, I feel that US having something on me can have worse effects on me, compared to China, given the amount of US/western stuff I use.
colinmhayes 4y ago
I honestly don’t care if the Chinese government knows everything about me. Much more worried about the American government.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  Any entity that knows so much about you can manipulate you in ways you won’t suspect. Their government isn’t held back by the Constitution and they probably wouldn’t hesitate to influence the citizenry of their main rival on the world stage.

__t__ 4y ago

Interesting read, would be interesting to see how TikTok optimizes their recommendation algorithms and what kind of metrics they use. Like another commenter said, it may also be that Instagram had already a use case and a "spot" in peoples minds so its harder to change that mentality to the one that TikTok naturally gained and as such people tend to upload "better" content on there.

btilly 4y ago

Time to trot out http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf again. (Yes, I am one of the co-authors.) Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like. We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill. And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them. Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.

taneq 4y ago
> But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
- btilly 4y ago
  If the total value of the network is O(n log(n)) then the value per user is only O(log(n)). So comparing a 2 million user network with a 1 million user network, if the second one is on a product that is 10% better, users should find switching an improvement.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Thanks for explaining! I'd always heard that O(n^2) value for social networks but never really thought about who that value is for. Now that you mention it, the value of a network to an individual user really is only O(n) or even O(log(n)). So while the company still has a massive cash advantage, it's much harder to deepen that moat and secure your customers with it than it seemed.

smelendez 4y ago

TikTok has such a content and data advantage. More viewers, more creators, more content. Feels like it’ll be very hard for Meta, YouTube or any competitor to come back without coming up with a hugely superior recommendation algorithm, and TikTok’s feels hard to beat, or some kind of improved creation tools that give it a content library advantage. And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too when the idea of having a high quality networked camera and fun filters with you all the time was revolutionary, and Instagram was the way to take advantage of it. Now that phone power, storage space, network bandwidth, and good editing software have made watchable short video easy to shoot, TikTok is that platform.

sytelus 4y ago
Content and data are not advantage. Creators can simply re-upload their content to Insta/YouTube to increase their revenues. It's already happening. It will accelerate if Insta/YouTube provides right incentives.
zip1234 4y ago
...also Tiktok doesn't care about privacy
- midoBB 4y ago
  Does anyone? Has Cambridge Analytica not shown us anything?

drewbeck 4y ago

TikTok developed the whole contemporary mobile video style in concert with its users and it’s algorithm. I don’t think you can just copy the features and throw them at a different audience and expect things to work out. I don’t think chasing the current hot thing is necessarily a terrible idea but I think pivoting your app constantly to chase the hot thing is. “Be willing to cannibalize your user base” doesn’t mean “force new things on your user base”!

yosito 4y ago

I'm one of the olds, but I wish Instagram would just go back to simple photo sharing with friends. No video, no sponsored posts, no ranking algorithm, just show me what my friends are up to, damn it!

carlivar 4y ago
Yep. I uninstalled it. Can we go back to Flickr?
criddell 4y ago
Same here. The addition of Reels and how hard they push it is really annoying. If I wanted to use Tik Tok, I would use Tik Tok. I'm on Instagram because I want to use Instagram.
acomjean 4y ago
Me too. Its interesting, I work with a group of visual artists (about 300). Instagram was by far the most popular way for them to share what they were working on. It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)

iJohnDoe 4y ago

Instagram isn’t dying. It’s the default app while commuting, bored, taking a dump, “looked at all my other apps and I’m bored, mindless app surfing, etc. Also, Instagram adds value as an app that people truly enjoy from a consumption standpoint. It’s not going anyway.

wintercarver 4y ago

I think this quote from a recent New Yorker article[1] sums up a subtle difference that’s easy to overlook. Topic has been on my mind a bit lately[2]: “Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.”” [1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-fall-of-the-social-media-giants https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-an... [2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/ https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/

aaron695 4y ago

foobarbecue 4y ago

It's the app cycle. People always think the shiny new thing is better. The new thing is definitely way cooler than the old thing your parents are on.

eric4smith 4y ago

Been running some Facebook Lead ads recently. The ads are designed to run on both Facebook and Instagram. (Facebook owns Instagram) The lead reports show where they are coming from. Overwhelmingly from Instagram. I think we got about 20% of leads from core Facebook and the rest from IG. The core old timey Facebook is actually dying pretty quickly. All the traffic is going elsewhere. And all the bugs on Facebook.com is not helping matters. Especially on desktop. We really started to examine all of this and it’s startling the quick decline.

jakey_bakey 4y ago

Can we finally agree that 'currently cool' is no longer a moat, and stop giving insane 10x price/sales valuations to social media companies on the promise of eternal future growth / profitability.

throwaway_4ever 4y ago
You're talking about companies other than Facebook, right? Because Facebook is 3.6x price/sales with double digit growth still.

bluehorseray 4y ago

I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn't really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them. But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.

altacc 4y ago
I agree. There's something to be said for app/services that decide that medium sized is good enough and they'll stick to doing their one thing well. Flickr springs to mind (although is much past its hey-day). I know people who left facebook for Instagram because of the changes to facebook but the changes just followed them to Instagram.
zimpenfish 4y ago
It's also stopped me uploading video to Instagram because now "your video will be uploaded as a Reel" and controlling the "share to Facebook" permissions for Reels isn't possible via facebook.com, you have to use the iOS app (which I do not have installed.) Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
Aissen 4y ago
It's their Google+ moment (as a reminder, Google+ destroyed Buzz, Reader, and heavily damaged Talk, YouTube and generally Google's reputation; I liked it, but it went too far on so many things). Or dare I remember when every app was integrating a "story" feature to compete with Snap ? Their are probably other examples of this.
charcircuit 4y ago
>I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app)

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

Am I part of an aged, dying userbase no one cares about? I barely endured my third decade and yet I do not want to watch reels, TikToks or any other video that contains text, adhd and "fun" content. I just want to look at the photos and videos people I personally know uploaded, preferably ordered by how long ago they got posted.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> I just want to look at the photos and videos people I personally know uploaded, preferably ordered by how long ago they got posted. "on a platform we paid money for" - none of you.

alkonaut 4y ago

Why would Instagram even try to be TikTok to begin with? Why show a firehose of short videos that just makes everyone who made your platform what it is, hate it? How will you tell who is leaving the platform because it's suddenly TikTok (like me) vs who's leaving the platform for TikTok?

okasaki 4y ago

I've tried to sign up for instagram, but it always said "email is already used", including for emails that I had just created. Maybe they're losing users because nobody can sign up? Or maybe the web sign up doesn't work, and you're only allowed to sign up with a facebook account (now they have your data) or the mobile app (they also have your data). If so that's the kind of abject dishonesty that might also lose you users.

saaspirant 4y ago
Same thing happening to me as well. But it happens only to my throwaway email not my main one. Maybe they found out that mine is a throwaway a/c.

technion 4y ago

You know I just had a look at Reels and of the four on my screen, three have a tiktok logo. People are making "reels" already by just taking someone elses popular video and uploading it as a reel. Which has the effect of: Advertising tiktok.

jakey_bakey 4y ago

Now that TikTok has handily overthrown Meta, I vow my next company will eschew tech and sell Scalextrics or some shit with an operational moat

Gatsky 4y ago

Slighlty chilling reading these opinions, like a focus group with Christmas turkeys in November. TikTok and Instagram seem equally devoid of useful content to me, one just has more dancing. YouTube is the exception, partly because they pay creators better. YouTube creators seem to be living lives they actually desire to lead.

danielovichdk 4y ago

Stop asking Gen Z for anything. Fuck me, I don't even know what a Gen Z is. Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too. Instagram is dying ? No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream. People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything. Kylie Jenner ? Really ? I can almost taste the sugary feeling in the mouth of teenagers when they fall over the same line of self-staging freaks. Turn it off. Buy a small library. Read. Pack a suitcase. Buy a train ticket. See the world. Concentrate. Please.

WantonQuantum 4y ago
[flagged]
- thefz 4y ago
  On the other hand, comments like this make me instantaneously consider less of the commenter. Besides, you are all using "boomer" wrong.
inductive_magic 4y ago
People ask the young generation because they are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading. Consider how many people will read your answer. How much attention of HN-audience-type-people did you just send down the drain for the righteous feeling of ranting off-topic?
- l33tbro 4y ago
  > the young generation ... are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading. They sure can be. But young people around me in the early 2000s were into rap-metal, buying ringtones, and using ICQ or IM. These obviously were not great indicators of what would happen in the near future.
  - thefz 4y ago
    Hey, ICQ was great.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Instagram and Tiktok serve completely different purposes. Neither is dying.

The_Colonel 4y ago

A social network with 2 billion users is dying the same way as an average 20 year old is also technically in the process of dying.

usednet 4y ago

Instagram is not dying. There is no other app in the world with the same reach and installation percentage among young people. Instagram is losing at usage time sure, but I would wager that 95% of young people in first world countries have an Instagram profile and this is not. Its almost a necessity.

sytelus 4y ago

TLDR; Human wants and needs are two different things. If you only measure things like click throughs, you may end up measuring "wants" and therefore risk long term dissatisfaction as "needs" are not met. So the idea here is to engage paid human rating crew who will supposedly more focus on "needs" (because they are paid, they will presumably prefer less of garbage/controversial/clickbaits).

revskill 4y ago

Facebook products have the most complicated UX ever. Try their settings menu with unnessesary permission settings. Best UX is the product without the need of settings though.

asimpleusecase 4y ago

I find the comments in the article align with analysis from this A16z podcast on TikTok https://overcast.fm/+BlzHoDbOw https://overcast.fm/+BlzHoDbOw The point being TiKTok does a ton of labelling of videos that allows the algorithm to “see” the content - or at least qualifies lots of elements of each video. And then optimises for joy and happiness responses from users. Other useful observations in the podcast

socrateslee 4y ago

It just seems that when compared with TikTok, Instagram Reels is still much smaller as a short video platform. Where the creator communities is yet to be built, the data is probably weighted heavily on the Instagram followers, what do we do on such a new but may be potentially large platform? how do we cold start based what we already have? We snap some historically hot videos from TikTok. I think that's why videos on Reels are kind of old. A new platform is not built on a single day. Even creators found a new platform and decided the first thing they do should be re-posting their old works.

sacrosancty 4y ago

Could it be that Instagram isn't losing, but rather, they've won and they're cashing out while Tiktok is still trying to grow so that oneday it too can milk its users as hard?

hardware2win 4y ago

Will china dominate social media market? Seems very likely I bet they dont rely as hard on algos when it comes to content, but thats just a guess

idkwhatiamdoing 4y ago

I think this is a nice and interesting article, but as far as I understood they showed the participants where the videos was from. It makes the result hard to evaluate. You take a group of participants which are likely to prefer TikTok already and think of Reels as a meme and then you say "these are TikToks, these are Reels, which do you prefer?". Of course these people will probably like TikTok way more. In no way I want to defend Reels (in fact I don't consume neither TikTok nor Reels), but a blind test would have been really really important here.

SilverBirch 4y ago

> If Instagram wants to capture TikTok's magical human touch, it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper. I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram, they're not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave. Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don't have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.

fufyekegxyf 4y ago
I see similar arguments to this one a lot and frankly I don't see how anyone with an active social life can believe it to be true. The userbase for these platforms has massive crossover. Maybe it's a generational thing or something but I can gurantee you the socially active Gen Zers are on Insta and TikTok. If anything they'll be on both of those as well as Snapchat and Discord using each for particular types of social interaction. So the issue clearly isn't a locked in userbase. So it must be the content creators right? But this is rediculous too! Because virtually every content creator worth a damn on TikTok will have a linked Instagram! What's more, many of them will often have a Linktree or similar url either in their profile description or linked on their insta that will include everything from YouTube, to Patreon, to OnlyFans. People who understand how to make money making content on these platforms aren't one trick ponies, they're using sophisticated marketing approaches that leverage the strengths of different online platforms to compensate for the fact they often have handle their own marketing. So if the content of the knockoffs is bad or the creators arent finding the competition worth considering then the only question remaining I would argue is whether the problem is in the reccomendation system (TikTok was, and still is, famous with users for doing a solid job at this), the moderation system (TikTok, maybe because it's Chinese, is not so fixated on implementing the SJ nonsense that YouTube, FB, etc. pander to at the moderation level), or the compensation system (Again, probably because they care less about demonetizing you for wrongthink against whatever miniority or "important cause" is the pet of the week. Content competes primarily on its merits as likeable content). In short, TikTok might have had an early mover advantage but the reason no one catches up in the current environment is because they can't get their heads out of the sand enough to realize it's their own fault no one entertaining wants to produce anything but TikTok reposts for them.

dom96 4y ago

I feel like there is a big problem with this comparison: many of those asked to use TikTok and Reels already likely have been using TikTok for a while. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see any mention of resetting TikTok so TikTok for them would have had a major advantage as its would have been pre-trained.

fabiankutschera 4y ago
100% agree. Also just commented this. You could only run this experiment if you had watched exactly the same amount of videos on both platforms or if you would start from scratch on both!?

fabiankutschera 4y ago

Wait, I need to ask about the sample data & methodology here: - these 100 users they asked, were they already frequent users of TikTok and Instagram reels? This experiment makes no sense if users spent a lot of time training the TikTok algorithm, prior to running the experiment while they didn't train the Instagram Reels algorithm? Of course the results are more interesting and less generic if they had used TikTok a lot before...?

fortym2 4y ago
Yes, this is something important that the post is missing

fortym2 4y ago

I loved the humor of the first part of the post. IMO the problem of Instagram is not only related to Reels, but is more generalized. For the past ~5 years I have been noticing a serious decline in the quality of the interactions and of the content around. Any interaction nowadays on Instagram feels fake, for the sole purpose of getting attention. The old-style pictures that are almost sure to generate more interactions are recycled old jokes that people with common sense are now tired of reading, but somehow a lot of users still enjoy them. There are also some unexplainable phenomenas, like pictures with absolutely trash content that probably took zero effort to produce, getting thousands of likes and comments. These situations (and more...) for me have eventually taken away all the fun of using the app.

thatjoeoverthr 4y ago

I so liked to to doomscroll Instagram because it would just find nice pictures for me, but it’s ruined with Reels. First, they rig it so that on every page, there’ll be a reel. You can spot them and flag each and every one with “I don’t want to see this” and it will continue trying to show you reels. It’s definitely an explicit rule to show Reels. Each Reel it finds for me has some mildly interesting-looking footage combined with the worst sounds you can think of. Usually it’s some generic down-shifted voice that says “drop the bass” before these clipped, farting sounds come out of the phone. The best example I ran across had someone putting lubricant until a ball bearing, coupled with what seems to be a cover of a Justin Bieber song but with what sound like cartoon dog voices. In a dull moment I would like to mindlessly scroll for pretty pictures. It used to show me rockets and women. I like rockets and I like women. Now it shows me farty bass.

rgoulter 4y ago
Nitpick: I think 'doomscrolling' is a slightly more precise term than just aimless consumption of infinitely scrolling content. My understanding is, 'doomscrolling' is more about content which outrages (albeit, also consumed in an aimless manner, or to "not miss out").
- thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
  Noted thx I’ll need a better word. It’s fun to say doomscroll

hopfenholz 4y ago

One of the options in the user research as to why you preferred one or the other was “better algorithm”, as an alternative to “more uplifting content” or whatever. Surely ‘better algorithm’ is just the means by which the user experience is delivered? No one uses a social media app ‘for the algorithm’!

hokkos 4y ago

Instagram is owned by influencers while TikTok is extremely successful at making emerge videos from random people that have captured insanely interesting moments, Instagram won't let the spotlight go from influencers to the common people.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
>Instagram won't let the spotlight go from influencers to the common people. Think this is one of the fundamental differences, Tiktok feel more like a level playing field and it also feels like the system actually goes out of it's way to find you an audience. It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that Tiktok almost creates invisible "Subreddits" for topics it identifies then pushes all content it detects as that topic to everyone in the group. All invisible to the end user. While tiktok helps you find an audience for your content, IG almost punishes you because you don't have one, then punishes you more if you don't do the right algorithm dance.

Nimitz14 4y ago

The gifs don't work on firefox.

uncommonshaman 4y ago

In a better world, each social app would know its place and would hone that to a fine edge. But there's no incentive to do that, there's no infinite growth there. Social apps should be narrowly focused tools that do their job perfectly, with very little overlap between. For what it's worth, I don't think any app can expand much past its original focus anyway, but the fact that they try spoils the experience.

wilde 4y ago

I like this piece, but it basically measured which app do you use more. If they wanted to really drill in, they should have had folks compare performance on new accounts. I still suspect TikTok would win? But you’d get cleaner results.

viburnum 4y ago

The sad thing is Instagram's explore tab used to give me excellent personalized content (gardening and architecture) but when they added reels it all went away. At first it was dancing teenagers and now it's random celebrities and weird sped up videos of people cleaning. It doesn't matter how many times I mark it as "not interesting", it just keeps pushing it.

logicalmonster 4y ago

I sort of like the SurgeHQ blog from a few past articles I've read on it, and this article is similarly mostly thought-provoking and well-done. But it pulls off 1 (arguably) disgusting trick IMO. It goes from talking about what users really want and then launches into some 'do you really want people to click on conspiracy theories' type of value-judgement that seems antithetical to actual user-preferences. Again, who decides what's true? Should it be the government? Should it be Mark Zuckerberg or other corporate giants? Is Mark Zuckerberg and others like him my parent who knows what's best for me? What if people actually want to see that content and decide for themselves what's true or not? Are the people to be treated as adults or children? That one thing from the article is probably not meaningful to most here, but I didn't like that specific part.

spoid 4y ago

is there a difference in how tiktok handled music and copyright strikes (or at least for a while after launch until it was big)? I assume part of tiktok's success is that people can put in current music at all without getting instastruck by a neural net