5 ms·

I went and got my laptop to type up a reply to this: Instagram's tagging system was and is atrocious in combination with their discovery mechanisms and the inc

by kixiQu 4y ago

I went and got my laptop to type up a reply to this: Instagram's tagging system was and is atrocious in combination with their discovery mechanisms and the incentives they create. A real example, this has been true for years: I want to look at pictures of Jennifer Lawrence's makeup because she, like me, has hooded eyes and that makes useful reference. I go to instagram imagining that I will find fan accounts posting pictures. I search for #jenniferlawrence. 2.8 million posts. Nice. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/jenniferlawrence/ https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/jenniferlawrence/ Only three of the top nine pictures present there today (same on mobile for me) are of Jennifer Lawrence. This is what happens when all the engagement is counted in one big engagement bucket, all eyeballs are equal eyeballs, and all likes are equal likes. There are two gorgeous pictures of Anne Hathaway here, and I'm sure they've gotten great engagement, but they are absolute shit at being pictures of Jennifer Lawrence. So now I have to scroll through a ton of absolutely irrelevant nonsense – with attendant ads, let's not forget the ads – if I actually want to use this tag for its sole raison d'etre. For contrast, consider what happens when a picture is cross-posted on Reddit. If I upvote it in one subreddit, I am giving an engagement signal specific to that subreddit – and I as one user may choose to downvote that same picture in another if I think it doesn't fit there! This isn't limited to low-effort reposting of professional photographers' work. It happens in less egregious ways for many, many tags in many areas I've seen on IG for quite a few years now (though I can't speak for the whole history of the app). Artists tagging media they're not using, etc. etc.

errantmind 4y ago
Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide. For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for, and if you interacted with enough posts containing both of those tags you would end up seeing the content you want, you just can't do it directly by navigating to those hashtag pages individually. I used to provide this in my free hashtag suggestion app (which I kept online because it was, IMO, the best at what it did and still gets 500k hits a month). The app allows users to iteratively navigate the hashtag graph to a final set of tightly related tags. Anyway, during this refinement process users would see a grid of post thumbnails where the posts contain the desired hashtags. Facebook eventually tightened access to IGs API and blocked my ability to provide this thumbnail grid, but the rest of the app is still standing
- kixiQu 4y ago
  > For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for I mean, not to overwork it, but in this example, this isn't accurate: I just want pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, not the much smaller slice of content where the poster had her particular eye shape in mind. Also, I don't want to only "end up seeing" pictures of Jennifer Lawrence in my main feed, I want to be able to go find them when I want them. Instagram's ontology is designed to not make this possible, because everything about it is meant to facilitate tube-feeding, and that is why I feel so strongly that it is trash. (We could also talk about how similar phenomena manifested elsewhere: the #goth tag on Tumblr in my Tumblr days was unusable because of the quantity of non-goths looking at a lowkey photo and deciding that was the best descriptor – so the actual #goth content was found in .... #gothgoth. And if you're wondering if this was discovered and subsequently chased out to #gothgothgoth, You Have Understood The Problem)
  - errantmind 4y ago
    Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). You have to outrun the noise, as you described in your #gothgothgoth example
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      >Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. this, and what you said earlier >Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide. forgive my naivete but I wonder exactly what could possibly have been good about their tag system if it didn't help users narrow down to just the content they wanted?
      - errantmind 4y ago
        You ever just put a show on or pick up a book spontaneously, without really having a particular show or book in mind before you started? This is kind of like that, call it 'directed spontaneity'. You open the app to see interesting stuff, but you don't know what exactly that might be in advance. The app learns some basic stuff about you using your interactions on content then tries to guess. You either like the stuff the app shows you or you don't. The hashtag system was very good at filtering content to what you generally like in your feed and the Explore view, but it wasn't set up for you to fully guide your own experience in search of very particular content using individual hashtags.
S0und 4y ago
What the actual fuck, NON of the nine picture are of JL. Although all nine posts tagged every living actress, celebrity and they mom.
mastax 4y ago
It's funny because one of the most common arguments I see inside Reddit communities is irrelevant posts getting upvoted in a subreddit, and wanting the mods to step in - or not. People just see a post on their frontpage that they like and they upvote it, rarely stopping to look at what subreddit it's from and whether the post is a good fit for that subreddit. I suppose it probably still works better than Instagram.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  Fully agreed – it at least seems like you could tune for this in your less deterministic algorithmic sorting, too. There's no Reddit Constitution that says an upvote is an upvote is an upvote – so you could weight upvotes issued from people viewing the subreddits' pages more strongly than those from people viewing their home feeds, upvotes from subscribers' home feeds more strongly than nonsubscribers' /all feeds, etc. etc., downvotes mutatis mutandis

by kixiQu 4y ago

errantmind 4y ago

Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide. For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for, and if you interacted with enough posts containing both of those tags you would end up seeing the content you want, you just can't do it directly by navigating to those hashtag pages individually. I used to provide this in my free hashtag suggestion app (which I kept online because it was, IMO, the best at what it did and still gets 500k hits a month). The app allows users to iteratively navigate the hashtag graph to a final set of tightly related tags. Anyway, during this refinement process users would see a grid of post thumbnails where the posts contain the desired hashtags. Facebook eventually tightened access to IGs API and blocked my ability to provide this thumbnail grid, but the rest of the app is still standing

kixiQu 4y ago
> For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for I mean, not to overwork it, but in this example, this isn't accurate: I just want pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, not the much smaller slice of content where the poster had her particular eye shape in mind. Also, I don't want to only "end up seeing" pictures of Jennifer Lawrence in my main feed, I want to be able to go find them when I want them. Instagram's ontology is designed to not make this possible, because everything about it is meant to facilitate tube-feeding, and that is why I feel so strongly that it is trash. (We could also talk about how similar phenomena manifested elsewhere: the #goth tag on Tumblr in my Tumblr days was unusable because of the quantity of non-goths looking at a lowkey photo and deciding that was the best descriptor – so the actual #goth content was found in .... #gothgoth. And if you're wondering if this was discovered and subsequently chased out to #gothgothgoth, You Have Understood The Problem)
- errantmind 4y ago
  Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). You have to outrun the noise, as you described in your #gothgothgoth example
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    >Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. this, and what you said earlier >Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide. forgive my naivete but I wonder exactly what could possibly have been good about their tag system if it didn't help users narrow down to just the content they wanted?
    - errantmind 4y ago
      You ever just put a show on or pick up a book spontaneously, without really having a particular show or book in mind before you started? This is kind of like that, call it 'directed spontaneity'. You open the app to see interesting stuff, but you don't know what exactly that might be in advance. The app learns some basic stuff about you using your interactions on content then tries to guess. You either like the stuff the app shows you or you don't. The hashtag system was very good at filtering content to what you generally like in your feed and the Explore view, but it wasn't set up for you to fully guide your own experience in search of very particular content using individual hashtags.

S0und 4y ago

What the actual fuck, NON of the nine picture are of JL. Although all nine posts tagged every living actress, celebrity and they mom.

mastax 4y ago

It's funny because one of the most common arguments I see inside Reddit communities is irrelevant posts getting upvoted in a subreddit, and wanting the mods to step in - or not. People just see a post on their frontpage that they like and they upvote it, rarely stopping to look at what subreddit it's from and whether the post is a good fit for that subreddit. I suppose it probably still works better than Instagram.

kixiQu 4y ago
Fully agreed – it at least seems like you could tune for this in your less deterministic algorithmic sorting, too. There's no Reddit Constitution that says an upvote is an upvote is an upvote – so you could weight upvotes issued from people viewing the subreddits' pages more strongly than those from people viewing their home feeds, upvotes from subscribers' home feeds more strongly than nonsubscribers' /all feeds, etc. etc., downvotes mutatis mutandis