Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

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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/

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.

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

> 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)

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

>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?

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.

> Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery

We agree:

> Instagram's ontology is designed to not make this possible, because everything about it is meant to facilitate tube-feeding

So as the user-directed ontology component of the IG ecosystem, it's trash, and I will die mad about it.

> every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN)

I want to distinguish my complaint here from a gatekeeper's lament. This isn't about, say, nu-goth showing up and coming to eat the fashion scene, as Tumblr did indeed instigate. I'm talking about pictures being tagged with "goth" that no one looking for "goth" content would consider relevant (a closeup of coral red lipstick, say), but which would show up as "top #goth posts" because they were highly engaged with in the other contexts people saw them. (To a lesser extent, also Etsy spam in #gothgoth, but this is more what you're talking about)

I just want to say that your comments made me laugh super hard, but truly get to the heart of why a blunt engagement metric is a trash metric. (I also study gatekeeping and intermediaries, so it’s interesting from that angle also.)

Some day some master's student is going to write a thesis on the history of the #witchcraft tag on Tumblr and how it functioned as a social space and I only hope my username does not appear. :D

We agree on the intended use of the app being more about passive consumption of a feed of interesting content, not active, thorough exploration of particular topics.

I'm not sure why you think the whole hashtag system was trash because of this one aspect. Most of the evidence I see is contrary to your statements.

To reiterate, the strength of the tagging system is the relationship between the tags you interact with, not any given individual tag. Also, individual tags are not exclusively literal descriptors for their content. They may be, or they may be used like: 'people who like #jenniferlawrence will also like #...'

> active, thorough exploration of particular topics

> discovery to the level you are describing

It is not a thorough or sophisticated search-engine-type task to "use a celebrity's name as a tag to look at pictures of a celebrity".

I'm whinging about this because I enjoy Instagram for (yes, largely passive) consumption of the kinds of things people post on Instagram, and I think we should be honest about the brave new world we're living in. Part of that means owning up to how the sophisticated engagement-driving media have made certain aspects of interacting with each other's stuff worse, not better.

> Also, individual tags are not exclusively literal descriptors for their content. They may be, or they may be used like: 'people who like #jenniferlawrence will also like #...'

This contradicts the original

> All that to say there was a lot to their system and it worked because users became aware that they were rewarded for using the most relevant tags. Using irrelevant tags was punished.

unless we are using a definition of "relevant" entirely gleaned from a tube-feeding targeted-advertising mindset, where my intent and desire at any given time is immaterial, the actual content of any particular post is immaterial, and queries can only be made via the general profile of my eyeballs' interaction patterns.

(This works really well for paid ads! It really really does, for everyone involved! The Instagram Etsy and Amazon ads I see are extremely good at showing me niche-ass things I want to buy, far better than the content recommended to me on Etsy and Amazon.)

Tags are used as vehicles for content promotion, and the race to the bottom has rendered them so useless that they're not even good for that (at one time they were valuable to catch people browsing tags, but who's going to browse tags when they're this incoherent) so it's not surprising the app has deemphasized them. I think that product choice is pretty strong evidence for my take that they weren't working well, tbh.

On TikTok, the even-more-cursed Instagram Of (Ten Minutes In) The Future, accurate tags come off as cringey and desperate, and are used either as blatantly ironic jokes (the sponsored ones, especially) or Skinner-pigeon dancing-to-attract-the-algorithm (lookin' at you, #fyp). You can see why: if people come to associate tagging with thirsty self-promoting behavior, that's not a good look on your #aesthetic videos. In many contexts, evidence of the social media hustle you're involved in is disqualifying; it's easier to feign naivete, "oh damn this blew up", if your effortful video editing was sent down to people's tubes without your particular direction.

None of this was inevitable, because deciding to rank by engagement bucketed by "users who have a general profile of liking X" instead of "users who are looking at the X tag" is not an inevitable choice, even if the knock-on effects of the incentives it creates are inevitable after that choice.

> unless we are using a definition of "relevant" ..

Yea, this is the crux. Using a particular tag in your post is a prediction that people who appreciate the content clustered around that tag will like your post. A good portion of the time that is based on accuracy, but sometimes it isn't, as I already explained (especially in the most used tags). Instagram was never set up to have the specificity of a search engine.

I agree tags are less useful now, because the feedback loop is broken after Facebook's changes, but it wasn't always like this. Every point I've made is about a particular period in time, not the present.

>To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN).

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs by Andrew Chen illustrates and details this very well: https://andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/

> And if you're wondering if this was discovered and subsequently chased out to #gothgothgoth, You Have Understood The Problem

Excellently put.

To me, it seems that the problem is that tagging is adversarial in any system where spamming can be rewarded.

Yeah – I'm not even sure we can call it adversarial where there seems to be no signal for relevancy. I'm sure there are "good" reasons for not having one (where by "good" I mean "profitable") but oof it sucks (esp. relative to the much simpler Web2.0 organization of e.g. Reddit)

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.

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

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

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