Instagram Is Facebook Now
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Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all.
Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention.
Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company.
In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users.
If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part.
It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it.
Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.
Since it's not US-focused, the US execs (and boards, investors) tend to dismiss it. This explains why Whatsapp was left, relatively, untouched by FB in terms of user experience, after the acquisition - it's not shiny by any means for somebody in the valley, so no exec wants to hang that in their portofolio
Also my hunch is that Aus and NZ use WhatsApp heavily too
I live in Hong Kong and WhatsApp is pretty big here.
As far as the messenger goes, it works really well. They’ve done the best job I’ve seen at making chat history searchable or let you jump to a date instead of scrolling backwards for an hour. They also allow you to send cute stickers, and they are used constantly.
As far as other things being compromised, I’d just deauth line from my bank account.
WhatsApp was not left untouched by the way. If you are not targeting entreprise customers, what really makes money in the messaging world is payments and WhatsApp is moving hard into this market. It's just doing so in India.
2 billion of low-value users; FB users are accounted at $150 a head; out of 2 billion users it's account for, only ~100 million would part with a $1 / month to use the application - less that $12 a year per paying user. WhatsApp doesn't have any other monetisation strategy, there are no ads, and the markets they are in are extremely sensitive to fees for payments, for example.
> It's just doing so in India.
Everybody is doing so in India thanks to UPI. Google Pay, virtually unseen outside Tap and Pay in other markets, has 35% percent of the market in India - Whatsapp has a high 0.27% percent of the market in Sept 2021, up from 0.01% previously. https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/upi-top-3-retain-...
India payments competition is ruthless thanks to low barriers of entry.
what does that mean?
I don't see any alternative that would replace it, in terms of being social, everyone being present on it, and allowing long text+image+video content to be posted and spread easily.
Facebook's algorithms limit the way posts can be found way too much.
I truly don’t think so. The vast majority of people I know in Europe and Asia use Facebook, not Twitter. Only my USA acquaintances use Twitter all the time.
Another day Twitter CEO resigned and he posted a screenshot of his mail. Why couldn't he post it in a proper text format so people can reflow text and read it on different screens? Because Twitter sucks.
Well, that's you. People are different. For some people it is easier to read a thread than a blog post that might be poorly formatted too.
That's what you have screenshots for ... duh
This is why we get those god-awful "this tweet thread should've been a link to a blogpost" monstrosities =)
Twitter is only really used by journalists and politicians in Poland.
But — despite Mail.Ru Group doing its best to ruin it, it's still way better than Facebook. There's a chronological feed even! And they aren't brave enough to ruin that.
Full disclosure: I worked at VK on the official Android app for 5 years, most of that as the only Android developer in the entire company. I quit in 2016 because of growing disagreement with the management about our goals. VK still has a lot of sentimental value for me because it literally changed my life, multiple times over.
Anyway, if you do want the experience of the OG VK but without FSB and all the other perils that come with centralization, you can follow the development of my ActivityPub project: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen
100% this. So much "promoted" content (aka ads), or "suggested for you" viral content, or people I know promoting their businesses / blogs etc.
Barely anything real posted anymore by real people.
PS: They are awful for me. I miss the old Internet days.
Whatever product it is, whether a social media platform or an online learning platform, it will slowly be zombified into an attention sucking machine, whose goal has now become to keep you interacting with the app as much as possible (using ML and DL of course).
I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?), Udemy now has a notification service and an inbox that fills up with automated messages that are just a "welcome to the course" message. Everywhere I look, the pattern is the same, Product is good > Product adds social features > Product attempts to cluster user activity and make recommendations based on social features.
We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.
I'm deeply worried about the long-term effects of an industry that is booming by sending sending some of our brightest minds to scale the economy of distractions Or to innovate Ad-tech.
I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age. Where smog factories were built in the middle of cities and dusty kids were shovelling coal. We lack any sort of foresight wrt. the digital economy we're building. Maybe one day we'll find a healthy alternative to make software-products users love.
But until then, seldom are the days where I do not look at the internet with such savage despair.
it's probably the same product managers moving to new companies
We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.
In that light, I think the chance of a product being allowed to sit and fulfill it's purpose gracefully, at least for services that are major moneymakers, is essentially nil.
Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company. At least, that is, until some large public company sees a way they can "improve" on that model and either buys them up or uses their size to bully them out of market (it's not really free market competition to use billions of VC money to undercut competitors until they fold and you have all of the market).
It's all horribly broken.
This is a "Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" situation.
Not unrelatedly, I strongly support Debian and think everyone else should, too. Software in the Public Interest (https://www.spi-inc.org) accepts donations for them.
We are likely to introduce changes, over time; but these will all be completely focused on Serving our users’ needs more effectively.
Kind of refreshing. I’m working for a 501(c)(3), and we don’t need to show “growth”; just Serve our community.
I say that jokingly, but honestly, a non/not for profit is probably an really good way to structure some of these things to do an end run around both the market and people's expectations, so I sincerely wish you the best in whatever your endeavor is (and you can consider this me politely asking what it is, so you don't have to feel like you are injecting it into the conversation). :)
You can always contact me (via my Web sites), and I could talk about it a bit more.
> Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.
I'm probably just naive or missing something obvious, but fundamentally it doesn't seem obvious to me _why_ public companies should be treated differently as investments. Ostensibly the original reason stocks had value is that when companies were making money, they'd pay dividends, but like you said, this isn't really the mentality anymore. The stock is worth something because someday if the company makes more money, someone will buy it for more money than you paid...but why? So they can sell it when the company is making even more money later? It seems like if companies don't end up eventually paying dividends at some point, there's no reason why the price of the stock should be related to the amount of money the company makes. The only other thing that shares really do is give very limited voting rights, but this seems like it's not remotely worth enough per share given how much you'd need to have to even begin to influence board elections, which in itself is a very indirect way of influencing the company.
With a public company there's always going to be a shareholder to sue you for not maximizing profit.
https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...
> According to the company, the short-term demands of shareholders conflict with his long-term ambitions.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121515/will-el...
It's hard to say though, because the market in which he made his initial chunk of capital is not the same market today, and it's impossible for me to parse out the self-reinforcing effect of "price goes up because Buffett has taken a large stake" versus the sort of fundamentals I'm referring to.
edit : Having said that, I do believe there is a class of people who are able to make money off of the stock market in a way totally unrelated to the reality of the underlying instruments - profiting on churn, market-making, small percentages on massive positions, etc. But I don't think that means the underlying instruments are actually worthless/not tied to real value.
at one point the free money being thrown around then spent on saas, cloud and marketing with fb / google will be pulled back. and then we will see who's naked. it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it will happen.
hence buying a piece of a sound business like buffet does, will win at the end of the day. it's not glamorous but it will win.
The method of Buffet/BH obviously works, but it also seems like it requires a lol it knowledge and skill and patience, otherwise it would be much more popular. Rolling a new mark (or the same marks with a game with a new name) is much easier and reliable for those with less skill.
I don't know if anyone has any chance if Stack Exchange can't stay independent. Like the product was arguably "done" years ago if you ignore monetization.
» As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (AEX:PRX) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion dollars.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-...
» Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.
» This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...
Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these are actually as oblivious as they sound or is they're self aware enough to now be using this verbage to actually be messaging the exact opposite, given how many times this has been written and shown to be false, no matter how much people want it not to be.
Does anyone actually believe that SO isn't beholden to the owning entity, and that no control will be exerted?
The focus on growth is disgusting and cancer for the real world, the environment as well as society
Edited: Downvoted without a comment, why?
Hardly any economic motivations are removed by getting rid of shareholder capitalism; you still have markets, a growing population, and you still need productivity to increase.
Oh, and eliminating growth would destroy the environment because 1. environmentalism is a luxury good 2. low-productivity technologies consume much more resources than modern ones do.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You broke more than one of them here—I'm sure unintentionally.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It's engrained in the money system (money as debt) but I guess the cause stems deeper from human nature.
As nomads, keeping things was near impossible, so aquiring was a permanent necessity. (And pollution no issue btw)
That's what we were for 300k years, and isn't easily changed with a few compliance rules.
What we need is balancing rules, that take the anthropologic reality into account. Not personal wealth maximisation.
If you have good product-market fit, then “shrinking” is growth. By “shrinking” I mean automating more, becoming more efficient, streamlining. Pay off excess staff in shares and free them up (and yourself) to work on something else.
I never look at the news feed on facebook. About the only thing I use it for is specific groups that exist for a reason, like trading bike parts or finding apartments. FB lost its entertainment appeal years ago, other than occasionally ironically enjoying a boomer meme.
That's when the promos happen and the bonuses are paid out.
> but ultimately kill engagement.
Too late. The PM's already jumped ship to the next gig.
Maybe if you give zero incentive for your people to jump ship they'd be more likely to stay and actually care about the company's long-term?
I wouldn't count FAANG pay as "shit".... and yet here we are.
The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.
I agree with the thrust of your comment and wonder how we might get there. Software companies did look more like you describe in the past, and a few like (some parts of) Apple and some game companies still do. Mostly these are companies that ship a chunk of finished software rather than a "service" -- a big release once a year, little post-hoc tracking and engagement optimization. I think there's fundamentally an incentive problem with most (all?) free-to-use software services. If revenue directly correlates to engagement time it's really hard to avoid this trap because it's a very rational path to go down to optimize the business.
So far.
I see them frequently flirting with BS tangential solutions to problems that the user doesn't care about. Like, they're hosting games on the phone app now? No thanks. And I'm counting the days until the "play something" button goes away.
In other words, we can pay with money or by allowing ourselves to be monetized (via attention to ads or other manipulations and invasiveness) *OR* we can actually have things be free. There's negligible cost to enjoying Mozart or Mark Twain, and a few orders of magnitude more stuff could be public domain if that status weren't sabotaged to support our cancerous growth-forever economic model.
Anyway, I agree with you completely about Netflix vs Instagram. And while Instagram can be described as pay-with-attention-to-ads, it's definitely valid to see it as most users are the product for the actual paying customers (the advertisers). The reason I like the "pay-with-attention" framing is to prompt everyone to always be asking "how am I paying?" and sometimes the answer is "I'm not, it's actually free, no catch" as that opens more options to consider than the binary "am I the customer or the product?"
Refuses to put the categories in a consistent order, even things like "my list" and "continue watching" move around in the UI.
Categories available for you to browse also change randomly.
Autoplay while browsing and autoplay of other content when you finish a show or movie.
Images used in show/movie thumbnails are different for different users based on what they think you are likely to click on.
Mobile app has a tiktok style feed for comedy shows. I believe they are also testing or have already rolled out a tiktok style feed for kids Netflix.
HBO is happy to show me an alphabetical list of all of their content but Netflix will not.
But then they figured out there's more money in not just giving you what you'll like best.
I’d love to pay a small monthly for an app that just used their old recommendations engine. I’m guessing there is not a large enough market for that sort of thing to offset the costs of you leaving their ecosystem.
I'd love to hear from the decision makers behind such changes, whether it was an attempt to improve an already-good situation or if it was an attempt to correct a declining situation.
Blaming Product Managers chasing "impact" is a fashionable thing to think/say here, but I don't think thats entirely true for consumer apps, and especially not for social networks. If it were, you'd expect that the each successive generation of apps to be a return to form. However as we've seen with the migration from FB -> IG -> Snapchat -> back to IG -> TikTok, the core concept behind the "best" product is always changing. That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target.
Shipping stuff that turns out to just be useless clutter absolutely happens - the problem is it is hard/impossible to know the difference going in.
Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. Products are overrated, success as a business is far more complex than ticking a feature list and delivering it to the right people.
I'm not so sure about that... https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a20962322/balenci...
See: $4k sleeping bag coat https://modesens.com/product/vetements-black-and-green-vagab...
They care that the whole experience delivers them what they value: fit, trendiness, status, consistency of the experience and the product, etc.
They care about innovation only when it reliability delivers an obvious gain on any of those stats, or when the market has moved to the point where keeping up with trendiness demands it.
So many brands are “premier” because they know all of this and just relentlessly deliver that familiar experience, maintaining their market position.
Software hasn’t quite, as an industry, figured out that sweet spot of innovation and consistency to be truly lasting. We’re too familiar with disruption - which is true, by and large, and sets us apart. Except once a category is defined enough not to need it. No one’s really disrupted email, despite many attempts, because it’s too ubiquitous and the consistency of experience demands are too great. It’ll happen eventually, but only as a long term evolution of overall trends and underpinning standards. Like the move away from breeches and onto pants.
So you have two options. One is to keep iterating on features. Two is to increase stickiness, of which the easiest way is by locking people into a social network.
It's not that hard. Plenty of A/B testing is done along the way, and yet useless clutter still ships. Why? Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression, partly because everyone needs shipped product at the end-of-year review to justify bonusses/raises/promotions, partly because there are 100+ individual teams working on the product and they all think their feature will benefit users more than the next one... a multitude of localised decisions will necessarily gradually erode the product experience as a whole.
You see this most starkly in fairly decentralised companies like FB, Google, or Valve, less so in companies with centralised command-and-control over product experience (Apple, Amazon's device org, etc). But even centralised command-and-control can only hold this is check for so long at massive scale. Amazon's larger and less focused divisions, post-Jobs Apple... all on the slippery slope
That is true, but again I think it's more complicated than that. AB tests are good for measuring incremental changes, but really bad at predicting the impact of 0 to 1 type products / features, because so much of the success or failure depends on public perception and network effects. Twitter couldn't AB test "Fleets" and have any confidence as to what the product adoption would look like. So companies have no choice but to launch and see.
This is impossible for other reasons. When you are feature-developing a product, you will hire tons of employees, and then what do you with them when you are done with the feature development? Fire them? Lay off? When has that ever happened? Bugfixing, even if complicated takes less people than peak scale high growth development and nobody wants to maintain old cruft or refactor anyway. (cough HR cough). I'm willing to bet no company has ever downsized after feature development finished, they either go insolvent after they bolt on the kitchen sink or become IBM.
The real solution seems to be hiring a good, but sustainable sized team that you can maintain perpetually, but that never happens because your competitors will outgrow you if you do that. (Especially salespeople) We don't live in an economy of rational growth, because you'd be living on the streets if you tried to do that.
(Also remember if I'm not wrong GM makes most of its money from financing, it's not a problem unique to the computer software/hardware industry)
Reminded me to close that account and finish the transition to Postmark.
We might think of Web 2.1 composed by socially responsible apps.
Probably why a lot of these changes make apps less engaging for people like the author and commenters here. That random boomer photo is probably popular among the average person even though it doesn't fit into your feed. Facebook/Instagram don't care about your interaction and revenue in particular, they care about getting the most interaction and revenue in general.
Progress has to happen. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong, but you have to try.
Facebook trying to turn Instagram into Tiktok ruins the ability to use Instagram as Instagram.
It's more like Mr. Coffee saw that smoothies took off in popularity and decided to start making coffee machines that are also blenders, but now suck as coffee machines.
I like living in a world where people have ambition. I won't ever fault Mr. Coffee for trying to become Mr. Beverage, best case they succeed and give me an amazing experience, worst case it allows for a ton of new players to satisfy the people who "just" want a Mr. Coffee.
I guess some people see this as greed. I just think we should all be constantly be striving to be better, including companies. Again, sometimes you get it right like Instagram allowing video, which also allowed for pure photsharing apps, and sometimes you get it wrong.
But I get what you're saying. I just wonder though why so many people tolerate crap — simply because it's all there is right now.
Cable TV with all its commercials was crap, so I nixed it over 20 years ago. I didn't tolerate it until something better came along, I just did without it.
"Free" platforms are a dead-end, and will inevitably be ruined by the irrational demand for infinite growth.
The future is decentralization* and open protocols/standards. Anything controlled by a single company is bound to turn into a growth/engagement zombie.
*Real decentralization, no blockchain bullshit.
I think OG Twitter sent you an SMS every time someone you follow tweeted.
But its refreshing to hear of notable exceptions to this! In my field of music tech, Ableton is one of these, for instance, having semi-famously refused significant outside investment to be able to focus on making a great product: https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...
That gamification is a relevant feature to someone.
As a ADVERTISER
I want ATTENTION
So that MORE MONEY
I don't use Facebook but I'm under the impression they've done this somewhat with local market places, games & video streaming.
It sounds to me that you're sick of common abused marketing tactics or maybe it's just that I am & therefore that's how I read your post. Gamification, Deadly Sins, Reciprocity, etc..
To many it happens after hitting 40.
We don’t need industrial pipelines for everything.
Centralize logistics of biological necessity, privatize self exploration.
We should only industrially build industrial machines we need, and personal gadget fetishism can go in the bin.
Our wealth is a mathematical quagmire. No one knows who owes what really, and Dick Cheney was saying the quiet part out loud before Trump: deficits don’t matter.
It’s an emotional boondoggle. Future people will renegotiate or blow ourselves up.
Software devs need to start thinking seriously about the world they're building. "Just doing my job" isn't an excuse. The only way to a sane future I can see is to quit and start using federated services for everything.
Why wait? Like you it disgusts me now.
Why? I do not consider it self evident that such developments are necessarily bad.
To me, it seems like the team size should actually follow more this trend:
Early: small | Growth: big | Mature: medium
As an anecdote, I just downloaded Windows 11 and it truly feels like a product invented to keep designers and engineers busy. It has a nicer UI, yes, but was it really worth the investment compared to Win 10? Probably not.
The internet is interesting in that it can bypass a lot of consumer protections that have been hard fought in government.
One that I recently saw on here was the government (not sure which level, federal I think) declaring that click to sign up, call to cancel is illegal.
There is so much user hostile behavior online it's crazy, generally speaking it seems we all need to find our way back to morals.
Hang in there with the despair.
end of day, it's all the same shit.
At any stage of a business (which product is part of) you focus only on those things that contribute to your business model. All the metrics you’ve listed: engagement, retention, MAU — all of these are parts of the startup’s unit economy. Every single new feature is mapped against one of these metrics, especially at early stages of the product/business, when there are not many features, and resources to develop new ones are scarce. These metrics actually _drive_ any new features. That’s product management 101.
Back to Instagram, they’ve rolled out huge chunk of functionality this year: Reels. It’s basically another app inside the old one. All done seamlessly. Imagine amount of design and decision-making work that had to went into this. Even for very mature product like Instagram “building functionality” phase never stops.
Best example for me: Revolut. The app and product as a whole was so simple and good.
One year ago (or maybe 1.5 years ago) it started going downhill, fast. The app got so complicated that I often simply cannot find what I'm looking for (my card or the balance in a specific currency). Everyone I know using Revolut has the same complaint, especially older people like my parents or in-laws.
I don't get it and it makes me sad.
IMO modern mainstream operating systems are also a good example of this. An operating system has basically three jobs: abstract the hardware from application software, provide libraries for commonly used functions, like GUIs, and provide the user with some kind of environment/shell to run their applications in. But somehow, this shitshow of an industry has converged on needing to release a major update every year. Imagine being forced to come up with new features for, and release a major update of, a feature-complete product every time the planet completes a lap around its star just because the marketing department exists and demands that it so happens because reasons. Oh, and what if you run out of feature ideas? Then of course you redesign the UI! UI redesigns never get old.
I don't understand the hypnotic effect it has.
In a way it's also a bit of a social substitute; When you live alone, and spend a lot of time alone, it can be nice to just listen to some human voices in the background as if you were not alone.
It shows that HN is a very particular sample of the population.
She would never, ever, miss a single episode of a “reality” about dating in tv, a show famous in Italy as “trash tv”. It was unwatchable, worse than Jersey shore.
I asked her why such an intelligent and smart person couldn’t miss an episode of something so terrible and lame and she answered me “I know it’s awful, but for an entire hour I’m able to be lobotomized and not have a single thought, I can completely detach from reality and relax”.
My current SO does the same with Instagram. Whenever she needs to detach from her thoughts she zombifies on Instagram. Might be cats or fashion bloggers but she tunes out completely and she does that intentionally knowing that’s the effect it has on her.
It’s not for me but a lot of “dumb” shows can be appreciated with an open mindset.
I know a couple people (plus myself at one point) who absorbed high-quality entertainment while being professionally unfulfilled. Activities included reading literature, watching artistic films, reading a middle-brow magazines like the New Yorker, and reading lots of New York Times articles. These took a lot of energy and gave a sense of achievement that could've been spent in accumulating career capital/developing career-relevant skills.
This wouldn't imply that entertainment is guaranteed to take away focus and energy from career development (plenty of counter-examples with historical figures), but it is possible for some people. So, I don't see low-quality entertainment as worrisome, so long as people have the main efforts of their life worked on, in tandem. Low-quality entertainment would be a problem, however, if it does distract from time spent on real, helpful work, versus as a stress reliever.
Separately, I would also separate low-quality produced entertainment limited by episodes from social media. They're very different, as social media is better optimized for infinite scrolling and outrage, while shows are more episodic (assuming a weaker, less-optimized pull for binge consumption).
In addition to not requiring thinking, I remember he also mentioned that it's harder to get "hooked" and end up binge-watching episodes.
The perspective is plausible to me. I do feel more drained or emotionally spent absorbing intense television series, or even accomplished for understanding them, when I could've spent that on real work. That said, I do think low-quality media affects the way I think and write in a negative way (by contrast, when I spend a lot of time absorbed with high-quality writing, it actually does positively affect my speech and writing for the next few days).
I find video games fill that same “mindless” void for me. Prior to the pandemic I’d barely played any in a decade but now I’ll fire up Call of Duty every couple of days to play a few rounds. It’s dumb, I learn nothing from it and I achieve nothing. But it’s nice to switch my brain off.
Disclaimer: I do both, it's alright. I'm more worried about people who have 8 hours of phone screentime on Instagram/TikTok.
Why is it trash also? I'm sure there's a lot of interesting psychology to unpack there. It's just trash if one thinks we need to dedicate ourselves to "higher purposes" and anything else is "lowly" and "denigrating". As if whatever one chooses to do in their free time, that doesn't hurt anybody, and is just a little human drama in a watchable package that maybe we miss during day to day, as so much of a job life is dry, and that makes us connect to our inner humanity is "trash".
That's why it's trash - it's a pseudo-relational avoidance of both the greatest rewards of connection but also - crucially I suspect - of its most painful liabilities (i.e. no one's heart is broken if a pseudo; relationship ends).
And since humans are naturally biased more towards avoiding loss than seeking gain, social media takes over the world and online becomes the default place to hang out.
A world which in aggregate no one wants becomes a reality because of narrow preferences repeated over and over again and at scale.
The app has been making this way of using Instagram more and more difficult. It's not surprising because my way likely doesn't generate any revenue.
(By the way, my main messaging apps are Signal and Telegram, but I also have LINE, for my contacts related to Japan, and iMessage, mostly for family. So many apps...)
I hate that it's owned by Facebook.
I genuinely do not understand why people like so much watching photos. I can spend a few minutes watching photos or drawings of things I enjoy but I tire really quickly. I can't even think of something I like enough to spend one hour watching photos of it.
Who claims that?
No, the opposite: § 230 exists to protect platform’s (and user’s, to the extent they have control of these things) ability to pick and choose when to promote, demote, or outright block third-party content—based on their view of what is worthy or objectionable or somewhere in between—and how to present the content they do present, without being exposed to either publisher liability for what they present or how they present it or any liability for the decisions they make to block content based on their view of what is objectionable.
It exists to enable the polar opposite of neutrality by all parties involved.
> No, the opposite
As an illustration of this point, when Florida recently adopted a law intended to impose the kind of neutrality requirement you ascribe to § 230 on to social media providers, the federal court order preventing enforcement of that law found that it was invalid for several reasons, but the first one cited was that the the Florida law violated the protections in § 230.
https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NetChoice-v...
Here in Uruguay, the most useful feature I found in there and the main reason why I kept coming back to it was Events, and lately they seem to have dropped the ball on that too, only recommending the most anodine, generic things possible.
Friends with bands and tiny galleries have complained that their events just don't get that much people in anymore. The boringest, most astroturfed events just get to eat their lunch instead, and as a consequence even that is getting unusable this days.
-minor side rant- Also, Instagram has been Facebook For Teens for a while already, hence actual teens escaping to places like tiktok and wattpad. Whatever algorithmic choices FB is making, they don't seem to be working that well on them.
Speaking of algorithmic feeds, I will always lament what could have been - for a short time, you got what was promised on the box: follow creators you like, see the event flyers they post, put the event on a calendar. Utopia.
Then they pushed “organic reach” onto the world, and my musician friends with 5000 followers started to be informed that their event flyers would not be delivered unless they paid a fee for different levels of reach.
since then, i’ve regularly been informed of events the day after they happen, because that’s when facebook decided a post was popular enough to show me. how many missed connections occurred because facebook was squeezing small creators for ad revenue? so much for connecting the world
Turns out Snapchat was what most of us wanted but without a purposefully obtuse interface
In my country we have different levels of tertiary (?) education, as far as I can tell, lower levels of education have way more Snapchat use than Instagram. For most students of higher levels Snapchat is only used to share your night out with friend groups, but pretty much nothing else, while Instagram is used way more.
Stories are only partly chronological. The stories are grouped per user and in these groups they are chronological. However these groups are not chronological.
Secondly, posts are not for old people. Posts serve a different purpose than stories. The barrier to post is a lot higher, and they are definitely not used (anymore) to share that you are going to a restaurant/movie/etc, because stories took over that niche. However something like a (single!) post with (multiple) photos of your last holiday (with at least the first one including you) and some fun caption is still totally done.
If you’re a big insta user you’re already “two generations” out of date (snap and TikTok).
I know early, early Facebook employees, like from when the company was just a handful of people. A lot of these people are incredible impressive, capable, creative, risk-tolerant, etc... it's actually intimidating and I don't want to make it sound like I'm at their level at all. Also, we don't keep up anymore - and they haven't worked there in ages - but I back then, I knew them well enough to have insight into the "ethos" of Facebook.
What I don't think the people see is how much making something "cool" is literally the essence of Facebook's DNA. Maybe not in the managers, directors, the employees, etc... but at the top, with Zuck, it is 100% the case. Unfortunately, Facebook has become incredibly uncool, as Zuck has tried to impress the grownups, while being way too confident in his ability to continue replicating early Facebook's coolness.
For example, I kind of think Zuck was really jealous of Instagram, and this really poisoned their partnership. The same goes for WhatsApp. He doesn't like platforms with different ethos' to outshine his mid-2000's baby. A consequence of this, and this is purely speculative by the way, is that there is a certain willingness to destroy these platforms in the pursuit of user engagement.
Like, what doesn't exist in this ethos is thoughtfulness towards what makes each platform special. All that matters is that room full of his friends, and the shared excitement of building one of the first of a new generation of billion dollar companies. It seems that this ethos is basically of accepting others - and obviously Instagram and WhatsApp are super different in terms of their design.
So just bear this in mind. Every time you see news about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, it should always be understood through this lens. That "building cool stuff" (that's vague, I know but it's really the most concise way to articulate it), I.e. Facebook's absolute core, is gone, it will never come back, and you can expect proportionate reaction from its founder, who wields an outsized influence over the company, due to their corporate structure.
I imagine from the inside it must have been an amazing high to be part of Facebook Twitter YouTube.
Trying to recapture that high of being the absolute crest of the wave of the future makes sense as a motivation for someone who has it all.
A month or so ago instagram deleted my account permanently because their system falsely flagged it as "suspicious activity". My account was never compromised or spammy. It was simply because I used the web interface from a few locations as well as the mobile app. Really frustrating. I don't actually miss it though, I thought I would.
Granted, that's only a handful of people.
[1]: https://matrix.org/
[2]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#threads
Edit: maybe an answer to my own question is PixelFed but I’m still searching for a mobile app that supports it
With an algorithmic feed there's essentially no end in sight, people will scroll way more in hopes of seeing new content, which gives them the opportunity to include more ads.
For the first weeks, or months, people just sort of deal with the new algorithms, because Facebook, Instagram and so on is part of their rutine. Engangement goes up, because people stay longer, as they can find anything. Over time, engagement then decreases, as users are increasingly annoyed. They starts to use the platform less and less, because the content they originally came for is hidden away. At that point the platform has moved on and is no longer seeing users leaving as a result of some change made months ago.
I'd be extremely surprised if Facebook has the attention span to tracking changes to their platforms over longer periods of time. As a result they focus on sort term improvements, because that's what they reward internally, without considering what the cost will be next year.
For a good long time IG was the only place I could reliably see actual user-generated content. Moreover it was actual friend-generated content, and mostly they posted their actual (best, happy) lives.
With culling of the slideshow preachers, the media re-grammers, and the vacuous influencers, an honest social media experience can still be enjoyed-ish. But ads and re-designs will continue to chip away at the creative sharing and interactions that used to be the core UX until it's fully unusable for its original purpose.
Instagram now wants you to watch and scroll, not capture and share. Soon I'll need to take my creative sharing elsewhere, but where?
Once upon a time, youtube did the same until it got enough (semi professional) content creators.
No algorithmic mess.
But separately, if professional brands really do take over IG over user-generated content between friends, the runner-up is Pinterest. A February 2021 study of social media usage shows that Instagram usage among US adults is 40% [0], with Pinterest at 31% usage. Beyond Pinterest, the runner-ups for (high-quality, artistic) creative content are platforms like Adobe's Behance or Dribbble, but the users for these are primarily creative professionals.
For user-generated content between friends (day-to-day stuff), Snapchat isn't a bad replacement (25% usage, according to the same survey). I would guess that most content remains user-generated (via photos that delete themselves sent to other friends). I would also guess it's less less harmful to mental health for certain groups, as it doesn't feature Likes or Comments.
To be totally honest, though, I wouldn't regret the loss of user-generated social media content. Exchanging messages, having video calls, and seeing people in-person feels a lot more enjoyable and helpful for strengthening relationships.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...
That or you'd remember it as the other photo filter app in 2011.
Chronological, completely distributed... it feels a bit like rediscovering ancient technology in some science fiction or fantasy universe. "An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age."
I only use it on my PC though. I really don't like the app, and imgur has purposely ruined the mobile web version to push me there.
I sort of recall the moment where imgur straight up disabled functionality of the mobile web site. I think it was that you can't post content via the mobile website anymore.
That was when I just stopped using it on my phone and exclusively use it on the PC. Yeah I could switch to desktop mode on my phone to keep posting, but it wasn't worth the hassle. Much less use by the way.
I can understand why a publicly traded company engages in short term profit maximization to satisfy the shareholders and eventually declines, but since Zuck still owns 50+% of the company, I really don't understand why.
You're right to clarify, but it's “Just” the only thing that matters.
> Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders.
Oculus is a “market leader” in a really narrow niche. Is FB marketplace really a market leader? I didn't even know that was the thing actually (it may very well depends on your country). FB groups is just Facebook, it's like the only feature to be still significantly used. That's pretty much true for Whatsapp, but they've already started to dynamite it up earlier this year with their monetization attempt: a third of my phones contacts now have signal including one neighbor and my plumber (and also a random lady I had a car crash with last year, I should really tidy my contact list up), they have severely damaged Whatsapp position with this move, and now they are doing the same with instagram.
FB marketplace has a billion monthly active users. That's more than Amazon and eBay combined. Anecdotally I know people who hated FB before it was cool that have returned because of Marketplace. The feed, Facebook video, birthdays, events and a host of other features are still significantly used.
VR is a rapidly growing narrow niche which Oculus is dominating. I am a Signal fan and I actively push my contacts to use it but I don't see it surpassing WhatsApp anytime soon.
Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.
Zuck has all power needed to decide if he wants those extra billions. I argue that he has no valuable reasons to want them and he's destroying his company's future by getting them. Amazon would never have become what it is now if Bezos managed it this way, and Facebook would be much, much more powerful if Zuck managed it the way Bezos did.
> Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.
Being relevant ≠ having users. Yahoo! had hundred millions of users long after it stopped being relevant. Like Yahoo! Facebook is now running almost exclusively on its inertia, and every year short-profit guided decisions are actually harming Facebook's position.
Meta/Facebook will crumble as more people come to realise that.
You are probably thinking of Alan Carr's Easy way to stop smoking. For me it really worked.
That was one of the reasons FB acquired Instagram, as most younger users started flocking there instead of FB.
Well… it worked out for them alright.
the tech for this is essentially sci-fi though. We have no way of uploading the brain, nor "plugging it in" without ensuring bodily functions. Is Facebook gonna go into the aged care business, hiring nurses and doctors to take care of their customer's lives while they have a headset on for the rest of their life?
But in the last few years, every interaction with any of them on my FB account has been either conspiracy theories or them trying to send me messages in the replies of random other peoples' posts. It seems that being on it too much was bad for them.
I've noticed I get a lot of "You might also like..." posts if I start scrolling past the point where Instagram has new content for me to see. That's usually my cue that I've gone too far and there's no more interesting content from the people I follow.
It really sucks that you can’t turn it off. The worst bit is when you see “You’re all caught up”, click the ‘View older posts’ link, and then see posts that I don’t remember seeing from friends that I follow and want to see posts from. Makes me so annoyed! But these friends are only posting on Instagram (or Instagram and FB, which is worse) so there’s not really any good options for seeing these posts I want to see except fighting Insta’s stupid interface…
Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn. Not sure what I’ve done to get the algorithm all hot and heavy—perhaps just being an 18-35 male is enough—but it’s rather embarrassing to the point where I don’t always feel comfortable opening the app in public anymore.
The annoying thing is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to say “stop showing me stuff like this” for Reels without actually opening them. In fact I’d disable it entirely if I could, I’m not interested in a shitty TikTok clone.
My explore page used to be hit-and-miss, but generally somewhat relevent. Over the last few days it has been filled with revolting photos of fake-tanned idiots. No amount of attempting to swat then with "Not Interested" seems to work.
I had this problem with Reels too - I think you're right that it's just kind of "what we show dudes by default." But under the three-dots menu there's a "Not interested" option. Tell the algo that a couple times and you won't see that stuff anymore.
So they hope that you will forget, and in reality I'd bet most people do. Basically the same as a "Free 30 Day Trial" and then they take your credit card number. Of course most people don't remember and get charged anyway. (Which was deemed illegal in a court of law? Or am I just being hopeful?)
I have a grandparent who lost their password to skype, microsoft rejected the password/email reset request, but also blocks them from creating a new account because the phone number is attached to the previous account.
For the last century or so, we all had a consistent sense of shared ideals because traditional media presented all the same news and ads to everyone. This, it turns out, is a good thing for society - especially one with hundreds of millions of people.
Social media, however, manipulates everything that you see. I understand why - following just a few dozen accounts which post multiple times a day - on any service - and soon you will literally need to be doing nothing but scrolling all day to see all the posts. And most people are following hundreds of people. The math doesn't add up, so the algorithms try to increase engagement by bubbling interesting content to the top.
It turns out that the most engaging content is hatred and demagoguery - both in recommendations and advertising ("Let's Go Brandon t-shirts! Just $9.99!). Obviously not good, but what can we do since, for the most part, all that hatred is legal free speech.
The only way we can solve this is not by trying to limit free speech, but by limiting who doesn't see/hear it. Ads and suggested content need to be the exact same for everyone on an information service, and all sorting and filtering needs to be explicit.
Facebook KNOWS they are killing civil discourse and they KNOW the cause. They are too greedy to care. Which is why we need a law.
Caveat though: I'm very good at clicking 'not interested' for content that isn't right in my particularly desired niche.
A feature they have but I haven't used yet is the ability to follow feeds from social media platforms. I might try that.
Someone at Reddit is still looking out for power users, giving us ways to beat the system and still use the site. And it's remained the only (non-HN) social media I can stand for years as a result. Whoever you are, thank you!
Should be a network for professionals talking about careers, it’s half people discussing Facebook things (squid game was a popular topic a month ago…), and its another half of attention seekers.
Tech Twitter and HNs are the only socials I read to find interesting content and read everyday, plus few selected subreddits on sports I care for as soccer or formula 1, but step out on some other subreddits and its bigocy and cringe.
Probably good for society. Let Facebook do their mistakes.
I don't see any ways to address this. Once enough attention is captured it will be inevitably used by someone to sell something. Developers want to get their ROI before someone else does and I don't blame them.
For example a lot of Fitness Instagrammers start of by just posting of them working out or their daily lives. As they get popular, they start a clothing line, offer training, write ebooks, get sponsorships. Their instgram is now mostly for pushing those products on people.
> The economics of building a social network: focus only on growth until the old people move in, then monetize aggressively as it slowly dies.
https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/32983572490604134...
“Leave it to another GenZ author.”
Because if Instagram acts like Facebook, it's ruined.
I had noticed the last few months (and I'm not a heavy user at all), that literally every 4-5 pictures was an advert video. It made me sick to my gut to use it.
What also makes me sick is the amount of people just doomscrolling this thing non stop, they actually don't even stop, the scrolling is like in perpetual movement, and when they like something it's a double tap and instant scroll. What kind of consumption is that?
Also: ad-blockers seem to work on safari iOS. It’s all around a less predatory experience, though the creation tools are basically non-existent.
It's all just a huge mess now, and I have no idea how anybody is supposed to navigate it and just simply keep in touch with people.
At least a few people have moved to other messenger services.
I wish we could force advasarial integration on social media like we did with telephones. Imagine only being able to call and talk to only other people on the Sprint network.
Let the tech companies compete on UX and what they do with your data. Don't hide my friends and family away from me
Weirdly, however, because I don't follow that many people, it all seems a bit quiet and bit boring. I hate myself for it, but a (small) part of me wants to disable it just to get back to the random noise. Yikes.
I first started using the app in earnest my final year of college, and look back wistfully at how I artfully chronicled my life for the subsequent six years, weaving together pictures of concerts and coffee shops with mirror selfies and delicious meals into an effortless pointillist tableau of my 20s. I still post on the app occasionally, but basically left a little over a month ago in favor of a personal newsletter, where I feel less pressure to be constantly documenting my consciousness.
I genuinely don't understand why they do this. Sure, keep the ads, whatever, but make it chronological. Too many busy bodies I guess?
actual post from friend, friend actively liked a post from a business, ad from a business a friend previously liked
Essentially posts from unknown accounts look less out of place this way
$
This is surprisingly disciplined and extreme. Kudos (i think? Can't quite tell if you're missing out due to ideology or holding good ground).
> any algorithm to show me stuff is a mistake, full stop. I only want to see my friends stuff chronologically, nothing else on the app matters for me.
> I genuinely don't understand why they do this
Unfortunately, it seems like you're probably in the minority there. Algo feeds are way easier to ensure the user always sees something new (which is somewhat important), and you can still make it only people you follow (so still only your friends).
I don't think it's extreme as it's passive not active (I'm not focusing on NOT using it). I just don't care. I care about the feed as much as you care about mastering Nunchaku: very close to 0.
>Unfortunately, it seems like you're probably in the minority there. Algo feeds are way easier to ensure the user always sees something new (which is somewhat important), and you can still make it only people you follow (so still only your friends).
Time to raise $X billion for "Instagram, but with no algos". What I would like is an orange bar delineating where my feed last updated, like slack and discord. That way I can click a button to scroll me to the bottom of all the new posts, and I can scroll up until theres nothing left. That would be fantastic.
For reference, Instagram lets you see how much time you spend on the app, daily and on average.
I was shocked when I found out I averaged almost 18 minutes per day. I just didn’t feel like I spent so much time on it, but then you start realizing all of the pauses and voids it filled here and there and it was almost 20 minutes per day. I started watching the time my SO spent on it, almost two hours per day. Commuting? Instagram. Before falling asleep? Instagram. After coming home from work? Instagram. That’s 15% of her day, of her life, spent on that.
I cannot but have a grim outlook on all of this. Do yourself a favor and set some examples. This whole culture of attention seeking has to die.
I thought or felt I was just checking it few times, not even everyday, and yet that wasn't true.
So imho averaging 18 minutes on something you're actively trying to limit or avoid is quite telling of the time sink it is without you realizing.
Does HN have this feature?
I don't want to use social media to interact with total strangers - I follow people I know IRL, or businesses I frequent, or just generally people/accounts that I've been recommended from sources I trust.
This "HEY YOU MUST MEET THIS STRANGER" thing that FB pioneered and that Instagram seems big into now is the root of so many problems. It encourages the kinds of negative interactions that define the FB experience (rude/abusive comments on one's posts from rando strangers? Hello!)
There's been much said about the coarsening of discourse post-social-media, and I have to say this constant drumbeat of getting everyone to talk to every stranger is one of the primary causes of it.
I’d carefully curated my feed to what I was interested in, following a load of really good abstract and generative artists, until it would suddenly decide that what I really wanted to see was nailcare tips or whatever.
After a few days of me actively pruning content the feed would settle down, but it happened more and more frequently until I couldn’t be bothered anymore.
Feed consumers are not the paying customers.
It means they can get a direct notification (if they'd like), on a self hosted platform (my Matrix server), with any client they choose.
[1]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#element...