I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp.
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.
Ukraine is of course no major market for Facebook, but it's a good example that doesn't match what you describe at all. In Ukraine, Facebook is the place where you follow top journalists, anti-corruption people, activists, and other public figures. It's basically an extremely valuable addition to the media, where anyone can be lifted in popularity in a matter of hours if their content is truly important. Facebook has been an invaluable tool during the Maidan revolution in 2014 combining its social and video-streaming capabilities. It works in times where media is breaking down, being bought by oligarchs, and isn't to be relied upon.
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 has only become as popular in Ukraine as it is to fill the void created by the government blocking VKontakte. And some Ukrainians I know do still use VKontakte despite that.
Yeah, a wise decision by our government indeed. However, one of the major reasons Vkontakte is popular is due to it being filled with illegal music and video content without bothering to remove it, at least most people I know amongst its still-users keep using it exactly for that.
Oh, no, it's now kinda useless for that too unless you somewhat go out of your way. They've signed contracts with recording companies and "legalized" most of the music several years ago, killing off the public API (audio.* methods), adding ads (which I've never heard thanks to my ad blocker, but still) and imposing ever more nonsensical client-side restrictions in mobile apps (which I use an old version of) that are removed by buying a subscription.
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
Twitter literally limits the length of your tweets. What can you say in a couple of phrases in the context of activism and politics? Just link another platform? Don't get me started on twitter threads, this is abomination. My patience usually runs out after the third tweet in a thread.
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.
I despise each and every "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet. People want to use Twitter as a blogging platform and Twitter itself doesn't want to be a blogging platform.
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.
The problem is that Whatsapp is a very non-US-oriented app - its is very popular in EU and Asia/Africa/Latin America, but none of my US friends use it other than to reach us outside of the US.
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
Which countries in Asia still count it as the most popular messaging app? China is on WeeChat, Korea has KakaoTalk and LINE is everywhere else. It is pretty amazing that Meta had three messaging apps and none of them are close to something like LINE in terms of ubiquity or utility.
My understanding is that WhatsApp is pretty big in India and my experience is that WeChat is pretty ubiquitous within SE Asia. The Singapore govt uses WhatsApp now for much of its govt comms and a lot of small business uses WhatsApp. Also recently in the news, you can book an Uber via WhatsApp . I'd be curious how WhatsApp does in Japan and South Korea.
Also my hunch is that Aus and NZ use WhatsApp heavily too
Literally all of India uses WhatsApp. Non-WhatsApp users (exclusively Signal/Telegram/Mitron or whatever homegrown flavour of the day) are a rounding error.
The recent privacy notice from WhatsApp gave some boost to signal and telegram, but it got nowhere. WhatsApp has become an integral part of Indian's life, it would be hard to break up that relationship.
Not Asia, but SMS is dead pretty much in Haiti, and everyone uses WhatsApp. Internet usage is low enough to even be an alternative to phone calls in most cases (especially for the young adults category).
Asian messenger apps like LINE are really more of an “everything app.” I use LINE to chat with everyone. In Taiwan it’s a given that that anyone you meet will have LINE. Businesses have a special business line account that staff can use. You can book your hotel, vet apt, reserve a table, etc because every business has LINE. You can pay for things with it by letting someone scan your code or or pay for things online by clicking a link that opens line so you can authorize the payment.
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.
The amount of personal data left in chats would be worrying for sure. Not to mention security culture is not really tight here. I’ve had hotels ask me to send a picture of my credit card for payment a few times.
As far as other things being compromised, I’d just deauth line from my bank account.
That's not the point. Execs don't dismiss WhatsApp because it's not US-oriented enough and therefore not shiny. Large multinational companies don't have that strong of bias towards any market or they wouldn't be successful multinational in the first place. Also, who in their right mind would want to be in charge of a market leader with 2 billions users? WhatsApp is so unshiny that Will Cathcart was in Fortune 40 under 40 last year...
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.
You're right that WhatsApp really took their sweet time to copy WeChat. I wonder though whether there were mitigating factors. I know bringing WA onto the FB infra was a big job. Also had a friend that worked at WA and he was talking about India Payments over two years ago
While many are still using WhatsApp, it has taken significant reputation impact and users are dropping. Potential is only for the limited user group. It can be only changed by changing owner in general.
From my experience (Europe), not that many users actually left it. Sure, many people constantly complain about privacy issues but only a few very tech-savy left for Signal. And even they cannot leave Whatsapp as it's the de-facto standard. I don't know a single person who has a mobile phone and isn't on Whatsapp at least once a month.
Same. I prefer Telegram, and a few of my closest friends also use it, so I use it the most, but even my contact list on WhatsApp is at least 5x longer.
I doubt teenager me would not have been happy to share a social media presence with my parents aside for superficial content. So every few generations we might gain another platform regardless of its quality. I assume that Tiktok will fall as well, I hear the first people calling it boring.
I would agree that Facebook is practically dead but Instagram defeated by TikTok? In very young teens' maybe, that is not really my social bubble but Instagram is far more prevalent everywhere else. Speaking as a someone from Central Europe.
Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".
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.
> 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
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).
Yeah, this is the root problem. If you want to break from mandatory upgrades (this includes "cloud" stuff, where you have even less control over software), you need vendors that aren't forced to invent reasons to build them by their operational structure.
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.
I think that would be rooted in anti-racism, and anyway the next sentence after it "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." I think establishes the universality of the idea, the same idea expressed in phrases such as if voting could truly change the system it would be outlawed.
that idea being that systemic change cannot be achieved within the system that is to be changed.
on edit: I am not necessarily a believer in the idea, as I think the 'if voting' expression of the idea can be shown to be wrong by various historical examples.
Audre Lorde chose her words carefully. Her use of “master” holds clear connotations that black people are still not free and the struggle continues. You can’t tear down the master’s house when you yourself are one of his tools.
It’s powerful because it’s a personal challenge in the context of white supremacy. And whenever you use the phrase, some decent percentage of your audience will be put off by it and wonder why you’re bringing race into a conversation that’s not about race. If that’s not something you want, you shouldn’t use the phrase when not talking about issues of race.
Of course she wasn’t; she’s a poet so everything she says has multiple meanings, but context matters. The issue of race and personal marginalization is inextricable from the quote. She would have used a different word than “Master” otherwise. Context crushing it this way diminishes the effectiveness of any argument you may be using it in support of. You can choose to use whatever metaphors you want, but other people will add their own context.
It’s the same reason you can’t say things like “final solution” — the phrase has societal context and its use is distracting at best when used in another context.
> 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.
> 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.
It’s not a very satisfying answer but personally I believe that there is no material thing linking the price of a stock to the amount of money the company makes. The only thing that drives the price of a stock is whether people think that other people will want to buy the stock for more later. This kind of implies that the whole stock market is a bit of a sham. Which I think is also true. I think the stock market essentially operates as a semi-perpetual Ponzi scheme. It does suck to come to the conclusion that one of the most central systems in world finance is not based on any fundamentals, but the good news is that in no way does that mean the system is unstable in the short to medium term. Nearly the whole world, and almost everyone in power anywhere in the world is pretty heavily invested in the stock market Ponzi scheme continuing to “work”. So it probably will for quite a long time.
I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. If this were true, an investor like Warren Buffett, who has always invested by focusing on the fundamentals of the company he is investing in and focusing on real performance/value metrics, would not be able to be as consistently successful as he has been.
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.
laws of nature always win at the end of the day. fundamentals are important, so long can a software saas company make money by selling software to other vc funded saas companies.
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.
IMO fundamentals win long term, but I also think that company being hyped is often a self-fulfilling prophecy: they suddenly get crazy amounts of capital for free when they stock is high which they can use to for securing loans, transactions, salaries etc. to grow bigger and faster.
It's pessimistic of me, but I suspect that once the current crop of tech is no longer appealing for large investments some other sector will be found for the long term pump and dump.
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.
SpaceX definitely wants to make a profit. I don't think building a city on Mars is profit maximization though and this is Elon's explicit reason for not taking SpaceX public.
> According to the company, the short-term demands of shareholders conflict with his long-term ambitions.
» 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 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.
» 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.
> This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent.
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?
Almost every takeover starts with this lie. I can't imagine anyone actually falls for it, it's just repeated by marketing types because it sounds good.
Just FYI. The app that I’ve been working on is designed for a “comfortable stasis.” It may take some time to get there, but I have no interest in metrics-driven growth, or appropriation of people’s PII.
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.
Nice! Here's to hoping it's successful and provides benefit to people, and doesn't trigger some startup founder to think they can "monetize all that potential you're leaving on the table" or some such.
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). :)
I am not at liberty to discuss it, at the moment. Even when it ships, it probably won’t be mentioned here, as it Serves a very specific demographic, and probably won’t be of interest to most folks.
You can always contact me (via my Web sites), and I could talk about it a bit more.
I mean, technically you can write the goals of the company into its charter as whatever you want. It doesn't need to be money/growth/etc. And you could, technically, find investors who will back that goal with their money. And you could, provided you jump through the relevant hoops, take that company public. I'm not sure what restrictions exist on the markets, but I don't think there's anything technically stopping someone from creating a non-profit-oriented public company.
> 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.
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.
Totally agree with your comment about the cancerous need for growth. If a company is not growing, immediately it's seen as if something is wrong with it.
Please don't post generic ideological comments or flamebait to HN. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.
Probably because it was a generic ideological comment, pointing further in the direction of generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.
Socialist economies need growth or else all your citizens start leaving and you have to build a wall. That and it's cruel to not let their economy grow when everyone started out in poverty. China is obsessed with economic growth.
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.
I agree. However, the type of growth you're addressing here is different from the growth in social media companies. The growth in ad-tech based companies are by nature very artificial when put in economic terms. One can easily argue that these companies provide value by enhancing the reach and personalization of your marketing activities which results in increased sales and brand exposure. But at the very end of the day, how is an ever increasing of consumer spending GDP going to solve real life and death issues? Growth becomes relevant because capitalism is very focused on generating profit, you can either increase revenue or reduce cost, which one is easier? Increase revenue which then leads to, "let's get more users".
> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete'
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.
>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.
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 think you’re making the GP’s point. No one cares about how much engagement with their pants they are getting.
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.
> 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.
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
> Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression
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.
Right - if you stand still then you’re going to lose users to whatever the next cool thing is.
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.
This is putting a lot of undue blame on product managers who only have so much autonomy in a business regime set up for perpetual "growth" that is necessarily quantifiable and ultimately aimed towards economic growth.
Constant growth is the underlying objective for any investment-driven software business (pretty much any of the businesses regularly talked about on this site, and certainly ones supported by this site's operators).
"Making a great product for the customer" is necessarily secondary to investors getting a return.
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...
> Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".
"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.
Even products that don't have a mandate to become attention-sucking get ruined eventually. Developers gotta develop---so once the product is pretty much done, it becomes a feature-cram-fest to try to bolt-on every crazy thing they can think of, including the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, long-standing bugs go unaddressed, security issues crop up, quality drops, and long-time users feel more and more alienated. I've seen this pattern repeat at pretty much every commercial application job I've ever had. Nobody has any concept of a product being finished. Nobody knows what maintenance mode is. It's just "Keep developing!" forever until the product doesn't even do its core function anymore.
I once heard it said that developers are like beavers - they just instinctively keep cutting down trees and building dams. Seems accurate based on my experience.
yeah you don't just fire the PM's, gotta fire most of the devs as well; promotion driven development is the underlying theme. Just keep a group around for ops, scaling, and bug fixes. Maybe this kind of role is a 3 or 4 day a week job and becomes acceptable in a world that aligns with OP's vision.
I make a small LOB type software, user request driven feature development still happens. There is a balance, fixing bugs and actual features in one zone and top-down attention drivers in another zone
I have always been baffled at how software companies start with few developpers who have this insane challenge: build an app from nothing, get traction, conquer the world. Then the company starts hiring like crazy and engineers pile on. However, it seems like the challenge is becoming less big: you should only have to maintain the code and deliver features your users ask for.
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.
Freaking Sendgrid! Sendgrid, which I hardly use starting sending those engagement begging emails, under the guise of status reports (for me, zero messages for the last six weeks) and they started showing up daily! Now they are big and bought by Twilio be prepared for Product Optimisation via OKR (or POO)
Reminded me to close that account and finish the transition to Postmark.
>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.
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)
The fundamental issue at hand (something you neglected to mention), most of these platforms twitter, instagram, facebook and youtube are free! Now what does free entail, you being the product and thus it will always spiral down to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Basically you are getting a product that is too good for free. Someone has to bear the brunt of that cost and that person must be eventually rewarded otherwise there is no incentive to do so. So in reality the only way to solve this is a change in the users mentality of always jumping to free then crying foul about it when they end up the product. So the real problem(your problem) here is the user's mentality. You are basically just complaining about human nature from the users to the developers of said platforms.
spotify isn't free, I pay for premium. but they're hellbent on destroying user experience. finding albums is now difficult than it used to be. it auto-plays on web, all of a sudden. the web app is now more buggy than before.
Just today I went back on Facebook and it showed I have a message. So click on the link and no message. It was just Facebook saying “are you going to reply back” to a person I spoke to on marketplace. The thing was we already talked. I messaged him and he messaged me back and gave me his phone number. Our business was done but Facebook wants to put a fake “you have a message” notification to trigger some sort of dopamine hit or something. But instead it just pisses me off. I will talk to the people I want to talk to I don’t need a reminder to finish my conversation. Or the notifications about some obscure post someone I hardly know likes. So desperate to have me engage but I already engage plenty. I mostly use Facebook for marketplace now.
The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term but ultimately kill engagement. You can trick my sleepy self to stay up scrolling through ads for a while, but I can tell what’s going on. Afterwards I feel bad, and your app becomes something I am conscious of being bad for me. I try to cut back and will probably quit entirely except for a few specific uses with careful safeguards around them.
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.
Twitter has shot themselves in the foot for me. I would be happy to get notifications for people interacting with my posts, but they spam me with random crap so I went to the settings app and turned off the toggle for notifications. Now they get to send me nothing. Ubereats did the same so I just uninstalled the app and reinstall it if I ever want to order something. They lost that space on my home screen because they kept spamming me with notifications which were not my order.
Re: Uber Eats, now they also mark those notifications as "time sensitive" in the current version of iOS, including asking you to rate your meal or knowing that your delivery person says thanks for the tip. Even if I'm OK with getting those notifications, they are by definition NOT time sensitive
Supposedly it is in the guidelines. Someone provided a link to them last time it came up. Seems like it’s just unenforced. I wish they’d either enforce that, or give users some tools to filter them. Give me a naive bayes filter to train, regex, even string match. Anything.
If you are wondering why you are seeing more of these it’s because apple changed their policy on this from a “no ads in notifications” policy last year. This change in policy is a net negative for users but it’s really hard for a marketing department to resist temptation.
Raising pay in the lower pay brackets will increase loyalty (but not enough to compensate for otherwise poor treatment) but once you get above 'comfortably well-off' pay grades, increasing compensation might also be necessary but it's not the answer, and all of the problems with product design here stem from the top. The only real answer is to hire people who drink the kool-aid, who genuinely believe in what you're doing for its own sake and aren't just there to pump their own careers and then cash out.
I don’t think it is fair to say Instagram has shifted from building functionality to increasing engagement. I don’t think you can separate these things at all.
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.
> it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month"
The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.
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.
Not a great example. Phones became general purpose(-ish) computing devices without losing the ability to function as a phone.
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.
Haha I hear you. I think your point is exactly what I am getting at. Instagram wants to be more than "just" Instagram. My point is that sometimes you get that shift right, i.e. iPhone being more than "just" a phone, and sometimes you get it wrong.
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.
Ha ha, Luddite here, I wish we had declared the phone done back with flip phones. And personal websites were better before Geocities (you know, when they were hand-rolled).
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.
In many ways Geocities was peak internet. I don't see a lot of stuff nowadays that is an improvement over it - so much so that I cannot think of a single example.
Can't agree more. I want products to be completed. I hate this constant change "because we have these people working full time and they need to be doing something to justify being paid". I want tools that empower me. I don't want a "service" bundled with everything either. I want products that don't need any form of ongoing support.
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.
> Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".
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.
Netflix seems good at not destroying their product... though inherently the vision is kind of a scaled distraction machine.
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.
Netflix isn't the worst but their site does have some annoyances. After I finish watching something, I have to close the tab as fast as possible because there is no possible way to have the tab open without it auto playing annoying clips with sound. Everything has a hover effect with sound.
It was a really really good one, but I think it has more to do with the shift in business model than anything. When they initially set it up they had you rate almost any content in the world that was available and could recommend that because it was just dvds. Now they have to license any content they stream and are making their own content.
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.
> Netflix seems good at not destroying their product.
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.
I understand, and that's what I meant. However, we need to get past that adage. It suggests to people that we can't have actually free things ever. But there are tons of examples of things that really are free from natural resources that are abundant to the sorts of software that are trivial enough for some volunteers to make and distribute without compromises.
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?"
I'm not entirely sure what you've described is the case. I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases the for-the-worse changes aren't done when a site is at the top of their game, but are instead reactionary attempts because they noticed downward trends for sign-ups or engagement or whatever that aren't necessarily apparent to the users yet. People don't necessarily need a good reason to stop using something besides they don't think it's cool anymore.
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.
Humans do this with pretty much everything where there's a manager to please and bonuses to justify. Compare McDonalds with In-n-Out (which presumably at one time in the past made similar quality burgers).
In short, see 80/20 rule. Once you've hit 80 you probably should look at growing horizontally.
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..
I agree this is a problem, but IMO it's pretty specific to social media, or other free online services. Typically a business can reach 1.0, then seek to expand their market, or release the next big version, get people to pay for a bigger plan etc etc. All the normal ways a company grows once it has "made it."
This is just business in general though. It's why I am buying toilet paper and IP addresses from the same company. No company is happy just existing and solving one specific problem, they always feel the pressure to expand and grow as much as possible (from shareholders) even if it really doesn't make any sense.
There are plenty of software products out there that people love. Blender, OBS, Sublime Text, and Procreate are a few that come to mind. We don't need to come up with any new culture or methodology -- if we pay attention, there are already plenty of examples for us to follow if we want to.
> 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.
Why? I do not consider it self evident that such developments are necessarily bad.
Note though, the goal isn't quite to keep you interacting with the app as possible. The goal is to get the most people interacting with the app to get the most revenue.
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.
Entropy is an unstoppable force. The churn to save our past ways is the problem.
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.
I don't understand Instagram language. My GF uses it. It is full of digital influencers, people who make money because they are digital influencers. Young people with sometimes funny but generally pointless and most often ridiculous dancing moves to an equally ridiculous repetitive song. People buying expensive things, doing idiot things talking about uninteresting details of the uninteresting lives of equally uninteresting people...
I met one of the most brilliant people in my life. Smart, passionate about art, culture, politics. Brilliant student, top of her class from elementary through college. Fluent (as in certified) C2 in English and German. Terrific career as a public servant in foreign politics already in her late 20s.
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.
We are humans. We need social connection, we need soap operas, "trash TV" is just human drama basically. Our brains were not made for studying math 24/7 but they were made for social interaction 24/7. Social interaction is like driving on autopilot. It fulfills us. Doing science, solving hard abstract problems, being engaged in political events is tiring. Sometimes we just want to do what our brain is made for as its default, resting activity.
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".
Social media ≠ social connection, for the most part (i.e. the proportion of time spent messaging vs. passively viewing is skewed towards the latter).
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.
Another anecdote: an undergraduate at a top university I knew, with publications, leadership positions, and strong research experience at the time, was also into reality television, and specifically avoided dramas/prestige television (e.g. Mad Men, Breaking Bad).
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).
It’s also a social thing. My partner and her friends watch the same reality shows, follow the same Instagram celebrities. They talk about the reality shows, what the celebrities have posted (in all honesty they seem to fill the exact same void). In that context I don’t think it’s all that much worse than, say, a group of people gathering to talk about last weekend’s football game.
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.
I do the same with RuneScape. Doing virtual fishing for an hour. It's just stimulating enough to not be boring while trivial enough to not be stressful.
Yeah surprisingly its not only just existing, but the rate of new content and updates is probably the best is ever been. Some fun stuff happening right now for the 20th year anniversary.
I don’t really watch those shows but I get the appeal. It’s a lot of people drama and it’s fun trying to see what’s going on in the minds of the contestants on the show. Sometimes someone does something and it doesn’t make sense, and it’s fun.
It’s not for me but a lot of “dumb” shows can be appreciated with an open mindset.
But that’s besides my main point which is the fact that low quality entertainment is actively seeked by people actively wanting to forget about life. It’s the intentional zombification that worries me, especially when coupled with 24/7 availability and per-user engagement optimization. Socials, especially passive ones where you consume awfully more than you interact are just those escape hatches from stress, thoughts and boredom.
As a counter-point, I don't see this as worrisome. Your friend who is a public servant sounds professionally and intellectually fulfilled, and far better off and stable than others who've "failed to launch"/have unfulfilled ambitions due to failing to put in the hard work required (not necessarily due to laziness).
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).
I use Discord for the same purpose. Just mindlessly chatting with strangers can be very relaxing and I find it to be way more addictive than facebook and similar platforms.
There are a few seasons of US Big Brother which are genuinely great, intelligent and deep TV. You have to look past the production a bit and get in their heads. At the end of the day, it’s people trapped inside a TV show. It’s a psychological experiment. It’s a real competition for real money involving deception and alliances. Same with Survivor. These shows are often bad but there are some gem seasons out there.
Are you referring to the season where a doctor said everything he was going to do to everyone, then did it, and won? I'm trying to find that season, I think it's early 2000s but I may be wrong.
It's television for the current generation. I've noticed my parents and inlaws cannot exist without having the television on. I mean they can, but pick a random day, show up at their house and the TV is on some show that they are remotely interested in but watching because they had nothing else to do. That's instagram/facebook/snapchat/etc.
I consider it like white noise, having something running in the background somehow helps me better focus on what's in-front of me.
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.
My way of using Instagram was that I only follow people I have talked to in real life. No influencers, no news outlets, no brands, no businesses, no "young people making popular dance moves" unless that's made by young people I know and have talked to in real life.
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.
That's how I (try to) use Instagram as well. It's still working more or less fine for me, but what bothers me is that it has also become an essential messaging app for me. I don't use Facebook or WhatsApp, so Instagram is the only way to stay in contact with some of the people in my life. I guess if I wanted to leave, I could ask them for phone numbers or email addresses. I should probably do that even before I actually leave.
(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 have an Instagram account where I post about modding retro game consoles. Turns out there's a huge community of very supportive people who do the same thing. It's not all TikTok influencers, there are niches on every platform. It's just like real life, there are good and bad people, places to go, etc. I love Instagram and some of the communities I've discovered within it.
It's basically a porn site. Perhaps there's no nudity, but it's as soul-sucking and a waste of time as erotic pornography. The behavior of the user, the emotional high, and the business model really aren't so different.
Certanly, though I still argue that apps like Instagram are more closely designed around the model of voyeurism and dopamine-chasing that come to mind with porn.
Same here. My wife spends hours On IG every day. I have asked some people how this is possible and their reply was : 'I thought I would not be addicted but when I installed the app I got hooked'.
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.
This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform. When you start inserting content into my feed based on some engagement algorithm you become responsible for what content goes viral.
> Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection?
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.
> > Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection?
> 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.
Facebook's unique brand of algorithmic bias is probably the one thing they will end up being remembered for once they manage to sunset themselves. Even Google will recommend some odd, interesting things from time to time to find out if your bubble is in need of expanding, while FB for whatever reason just can´t and defaults to showing you the most handsomely paid for, boring spam available.
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
The system design is fundamentally pernicious Infrastructure needs to be monetized but not in a fashion that undermines a fundamental socially beneficial function like connecting musicians with people who love music
If you follow any Young People™ you'll notice that they're all using Stories now, which still have ads, but are at least chronological. Posts (the original product) are for "Old People" (28+).
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.
I liked Snapchat, but I don't like stories. To me, the beauty of Snapchat was that I could share a funny moment with a couple of friends who I thought would find the same thing amusing. I can't do that with stories. It's like being forced to tell a in-joke to all of my friends at the same time. I'd rather just not tell the joke at all.
I think the general belief was that the concept was a thing for "kids"/"young people", but now I'm very convinced that that was because of Snap's branding + general incomprehensibility.
Single European datapoint, I'm currently in university.
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.
Posting from a throwaway account to avoid any backlash.
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've posted thousands of photos to my instagram over the last decade and generally loved being a user of it (although it did give me FOMO and jealousy).
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.
Can we talk about the "personal newsletter" aspect of this post? Feels like the dawn of the blogs back in the 2000s. Everyone had one, then we got twitter, facebook, and instagram. Now we're done with those and going back? Lovely. Hope I still know how to LAMP stack.
That was the part that captured me too. I really want to create a "personal feed" or newsletter out of a Matrix [1] group chat with threads [1] enabled, where I can post once a week or so and my friends can react/reply.
Is there a a federated Mastodon-like that replicates Instagram decently? I know you could just share photos on Mastodon, but I think the photo centric design and stories are what’s fun. At this point I don’t care about the network effects, if I could share bike trip pictures with 5 friends with something that works like IG stories I’d quit IG today.
Edit: maybe an answer to my own question is PixelFed but I’m still searching for a mobile app that supports it
Seems like something an algorithm could be modified to take into account ~ a given users proclivity to rewatch/review the same content. After a few recommendations of seen content, if that particular user isn't engaging, decrease their "rewatch recommendation" parameter.
Well, you're right of course. And I experience the same thing as well. My point really was that it seems like something that would be straight forward enough to implement in an algorithm. Whether they actually do is another question....
If they just showed you a chronological feed you'll be able to tell when you've reached the end of the new posts and stop there.
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.
All social media-ish platforms are increasingly awful. FB, Twitter, Reddit, IG - all aggressively trying to make you create account and log in, hiding/clobbering content if you're not. Less and less content from people I explicitly followed, and more from "we think you'll like this tweet from someone that is followed by Bob" (not even liked or retweeted by people I know!).
The changes to Instagrams algorithms are, just like those of Facebook, to optimize "engagement". Where I believe most platforms fail is how they measure their improvements.
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.
Yeah, it feels like an evil cycle. And since no one reverts anything because ego and stuff, they just keep digging their hole. "The numbers started going down... We need to throw even more random shit to catch users' attention and make them stay longer" (just my theory, maybe I'm wrong)
Instagram has slowly been deprioritizing content creation and promoting content consumption. This was clearest to me when they recently moved the Post button up to the top, out of the way, to make room for more consumption buttons within thumb reach.
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?
As a counter-point, IG recently made it much easier to upload content directly from a desktop operating system. It finally added a button for users upload posts from a web browser from a desktop OS (before, you had to switch the browser's user agent to identify as a mobile device, then refresh).
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.
On Instagram, I've seen VSCO links as the "link in bio" (the url in the user's profile) for a few acquaintances I follow. Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon [0] at play; I believed I never heard of VSCO before, but just saw a link in bio, and remembered a couple other appearances.
I got rid of my account and started a blog instead. Much more fun to learn about Jekyll, CSS, and improve my long form writing skills anyway. There's federated blog networks like Micro.blog out there, but personally I've just backpedaled to good old RSS myself. If a blog provides it, it's a strong sign they're producing content from a passionate place, rather than trying to collect email addresses and followers for monetization.
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."
Check out Imgur's usersub. Lots of crap, but isn't art just screwing around with crap?
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.
Glass.photo is trying to fill a gap for actual photographers (not really a social network for selfies). Paid, but ad free. They’re close to sustainably profitable too.
So Meta wants to kill their last relevant product? They really do want to become the next Yahoo! right? Facebook has yielded much more profit than Amazon but their user base has remained stagnant and aging for years, and their recent PR stuns (Libra a few years ago, now the “Metaverse”) don't really sound like their perspective will improve.
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.
Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) and Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. In terms of the rebrand they committed $10+ billion a year to VR development and promoted the head of VR to CTO so it's a pretty bold PR stunt.
> Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights)
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.
The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter?
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.
> The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter?
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.
I'm reading a lot of posts here of people who have just decided to drop Instagram. As someone who deleted Facebook only two months ago, and never looked back, I am really hoping this is the beginning of the end for Meta/Facebook/whatever stupid name they call themselves.
There's a famous smoking cessation book (that I cannot remember the name of) with one core theme which is supposedly very powerful in the eyes of smokers. The idea that you gain nothing from smoking. That's my realisation when I quit Facebook.
Meta/Facebook will crumble as more people come to realise that.
In what seems like a blink of an eye, Facebook, is now considered the old people platform, according to kids these days. It took me a while to grasp it but it looks like FB has a huge problem in there hands and it's interesting to see how they tackle their image.
FB has had a big problem for years. Zuckerberg, notwithstanding everything else, to his credit has demonstrated he is intimately aware of it through his acquisition strategies. If it's in a blink of an eye, it's your eye. To others it's been the case ever since the Instagram/Whatsapp acquisitions.
That was actually nice for a while - I mean, you do want to keep up with them.
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.
Serious consideration: they are embracing this reality as their primary long-term strategy, anticipating their becoming the defacto “metaverse” virtual world that older people wish to be plugged into.
I can clearly see a future in which users can sign over all current and future retirement funds and financial assets, and in exchange be plugged full-time into a “facebook disneyland” to live out the rest of their years in digitally augmented bliss as an avatar alongside friends and family.
> plugged full-time into a “facebook disneyland” to live out the rest of their years in digitally augmented bliss as an avatar alongside friends and family.
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?
I haven't really seen it, but I also don't scroll Instagram endlessly.
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.
Yeah, I’m exactly the same. I would have thought that they would notice that I literally never scroll past there (except every now and then by accident, then I wonder why my feed is full of crap) and stop showing it… I guess not enough people stop scrolling there? Or maybe they do and Instagram is just trying to ram it down everybody’s throats to show more ads?
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…
I'm not doubting the main thrust of the article. But it's a big pet peeve of mine when Tweets are used in the body of an article as supporting evidence and they have all of half a dozen likes/retweets. It's as if 3 or 4 people on Twitter mention something and that's collected as hard-cutting facts. /rant
I used to have a really nice, tailored experience on Instagram. All I saw was genuinely good photography and art that I was interested in.
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.
There’s a “sensitive content control” option in account settings. Set to “limit even more” and this type of content will actually stop showing. My search screen is just airplanes and Turkish construction videos now.
Thanks for the tip which I will try. I agree with the OP and parent, IG used to be an enjoyable experience if you were careful about who you follow, but it seems that it's now in the process of being destroyed by bad ideas borrowed from FB.
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.
Agreed, Google also added YouTube shorts and those are similarly overfit to whatever is the most “engaging” content for some broad demographic, so since I work out I just get nonstop videos of ripped 18-24 year old women doing squats to show off their butts - and I’m not into any of it but they’ve already decided that’s what I want to see, forever.
There was some stat I saw a while ago that Gen Z doesn't visit free porn sites, finding themselves sated by regular social media. I wondered why. Now I see!
> Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn.
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.
This is my exact problem with it. I only follow comic book artists, friends, and local businesses. Yet my reels are full of semi nude women gyrating to music. I don't want that there.
It defaults to that, but there's a few things it'll still show you instead if you force it - rabbit accounts is one. Maybe because they all follow each other.
Pressing the menu button on the post and then hide I got the choice to hide suggested posts. Though in true Facebook fashion only for 30 days and not permanently.
Wow. That is probably one of the more underhanded things I've heard about them.
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?)
It's for bot prevention. Phone number verification is the most effective anti bot tool around. It just sucks for privacy and legitimate alt accounting.
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.
God I hope it all dies. Deleted FB months ago. All feed "algorithms" are awful! Whether it's YT, Instagram; they give terrible recommendations/content. But, we all know what the algorithms are really optimizing for (it's what happens when you're the product in a service, not a true user).
Personalization and algorithmic sorting/filtering needs to be outlawed. This is the only way that our country can finally stop dividing and come together.
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.
I dunno. Until the recent changes, Instagram has been very very much a net positive for me. I've connected with artists I love, learned how to improve my work, and paid a particular woodworker north of $1k for a couple pochade boxes I absolutely adore. Without Instagram, my life would be significantly less fulfilling.
Caveat though: I'm very good at clicking 'not interested' for content that isn't right in my particularly desired niche.
Companies don't listen to complaints about functionality much. Facebook has an even bigger problem of privacy and that their platform is actively harming society. None of these matter, Zuckerberg is not trying to fix the problem. Rather he is trying to hide it from public view. The recent change to Meta is just that. They want Oculus to be face of the company and get some cover/distraction from the problem they aren't willing solve.
Reddit started doing this too over the summer - aggressively showing me content from other subreddits in my feed taking any interaction with the posts as proof that I should join them as well. I find it annoying too since curating a list of my favorite subreddits was always a fundamental part of using the site.
that's why I use reddit clients like sync for reddit ..no recommendation bs just get the feed from subreddits I subscribed for .. imo you should try it
The one thing that keeps reddit going for me is their detente policy with third-party clients and browser add-ons. I can use RES + old reddit redirect on my desktop browsers and Narwhal on my phone, and I can completely avoid ads and scummy behavior that's seeping into the site in general. Unlike, say, Facebook, who literally spent thousands and thousands of (wo)man hours figuring out how to beat ad blockers in the News Feed.
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!
The switch to highlight “suggested posts” is disastrous. It’s the worst kind of garbage. Just interesting enough to keep you scrolling, but almost completely devoid of value.
I abandoned Instagram few weeks ago since it's absolutely hostile towards its' users. Opened an app, noticed that I got into another god awful AB-test (snapping posts to top of the feed instead of a normal scrolling) and just couldn't force myself to use it.
It's awful. I have it on one account, and not on my other one. The result of the snapping is I stop scrolling and close the app much sooner when browsing that account.
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.
LinkedIn has the same "engagement-driven" toxicity that Facebook and Instagram suffer from. That's because "a network for professionals talking about careers" and content limited to work and employment doesn't drive engagement. Squid Game probably does.
This will be the end of Instagram and Facebook to an extent. People have already left FB, and some deleted it entirely. Next will be Instagram, if they do the same thing there.
Probably good for society. Let Facebook do their mistakes.
Anyone else think this is part of the natural life cycle of social media? Once something becomes big enough, even the users begin to monetize the content itself (meme pages, influencers). This is the beginning of the end. Everyone's just trying to milk it before it dies.
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.
While I think this may be solution for a controlling entity to ruin a platform. I don't think it does anything for when the users themselves begin pushing advertisements through content. Which is what I believe really ruins platforms.
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.
Personally, I use Instagram to see what my friends are doing and I’m not interested in the random addictive feed. So I just use Instagram from the web (safari on mobile) and use AdGuard to block the search feed thing. I even waste less time now
Well I guess there is a market opening for ChronoPic then, a new photosharing platform with comments, tags and likes... In chronological order!
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?
I fucking HATE the Instagram algorithm. Literally random order of stupid shit from 3-7 days instead of the newest releases. Whoever was in charge of this should get banned from programming or product design.
I wish music streaming services were as pervasive as FB/Instagram algorithms, for example, here's the album that the artist liked that you follow. Spotify is trying to fill this with ID playlists but that should be an ongoing stream rather than a carefully picked set of songs. On the other side I wouldn't expect artists to be genuinely happy that their actions are mirrored to basically the whole Internet
I haven’t noticed this, but I only use Instagram on mobile web, which I think skips most of the new features on the news feed. I haven’t seen one of those reels horizontal carousels since I switched to the webapp 6 months ago.
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.
Every time a social networking site makes any change at all we hear all this Chicken Little stuff about how they're running the product and users will abandon it, and almost every time everyone has forgotten in a month or two. A lot of times it is even obvious later that the change was for the better. My money is on this one being the same.
Have you tried making a discord server? My server is my social media entirely now and I love it. The hard part is getting non gamers into it.
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
If all you care about is messaging and viewing stories of people that you have messaged lately, I would suggest you to look into Threads. It's basically messenger but for instagram and there are no ads when viewing stories.
This is the first time I ever heard of Threads. Just downloaded it, and the first thing I see is a message that says "Threads will no longer be available, starting December 2021", as in, today.
I recently started using the "Tweak New Twitter" add-on, and it has been amazing. Twitter now functions the way I expect it to. I see ONLY tweets from people I explicitly follow. No trending, no random tweets.
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've been thinking the same until I got this far down in the comments. The article doesn't seem to address the service's name, just bla-bla-bla average grade navel gazing.
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.
tangentially, I'm not a fan of headline case; it just creates unnecessary ambiguity. Sites with normal casing (like a typical sentence) for titles I find much easier to read and process.
At this point, Instagram decided it wants to be a TV and just show me what it wants me to see, not my carefully curated feed. I'm letting my account die.
Delete it instead. I’ve been deleting any but text medias and I just can’t believe how much time people spend on it.
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.
This really is the worst part of Facebook's approach to products - it's constantly trying to inject "recommended" content into my experience, which ultimately IMO is the precise problem with this form of social media.
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.
Exactly. I just use instagram to msg people who aren't on Telegram and other services as I don't have FB. I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads. I never watch stories either. It's a dumpster fire, and 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. Sure, keep the ads, whatever, but make it chronological. Too many busy bodies I guess?
> I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads.
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).
>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).
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.
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.
Social media companies are trying too hard. People just want a chronological feed of things they followed. Nothing more. Stop trying to add shit people don't want.
Hacker News is not representative of the population at large. If people in fact do not like this, engagement will drop, and they'll stop doing it. It turns out most people in the silent majority actually do like this, or are at least more engaged/addicted because of it.
On the theme of the personal newsletter mentioned in the article, I really like the idea of using a group chat on Matrix with threads [1] as a personal newsletter - where I can post something say once a week and my friends can react or add comments if they wish.
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.
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.