Do we have a name for tech that encourages compulsive use over any kind of deeper value? Candy tech? Sugar tech?
Yes, there's even a book about it: "Hooked" by Nir Eyal.
When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
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Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#52I'm not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy. Companies need to be willing to cannibalize themselves or someone will do it for them. I don't know if Zuck had the foresight at the time, but Instagram has obviously been an amazing hedge against apps like Snapchat. People like Instagram and Snapchat partly because they are less formal than Facebook, most users…
> I don't know if Zuck had the foresight at the time, but Instagram has obviously been an amazing hedge against apps like Snapchat.
I wish all of us have the "foresight" to give away a "free" data-security VPN app to "protect" browsing and keep the user "safe". You can then surreptitiously use the traffic to for competitor intelligence and buy them off [0].
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#53I'm not on FB. I also haven't used Instagram for a while. How has Instagram changed in the last few years?
More ads, more "influencers" doing it professionally, more people sharing text-based images and motivational quotes and memes, older crowd base of users, timeline now filtered by algorithm and not sequentially.
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder when this picture was taken. The iPhone design in the simulator, the old Gmail favicon, the old OS X scrollbars all indicate this being several years old. Wouldn't be surprised if this code has been rewritten multiple times since.
Their code is using manual reference counting so it must have been taken before ARC was introduced on WWDC 2011.
Not necessarily; for the same reason many companies haven't jumped on Swift (specifically, not wanting to run all your hundreds of thousands of lines of code through a potentially buggy translator all the time), people didn't immediately jump onto ARC either. If I recall, that migration was far from painless. I remember some serious regressions introduced when I bit that bullet. Since all your code changed at once, tracking it down was hardly entertaining. IMO could have been anywhere from 2012 to 2013...
This code also appears not to be using automatically synthesized properties. On the left screen, they're directly accessing Ivars and their Ivars have trailing underscores rather than leading (the default when synthesized). I suppose they could be doing this anyways, though it wouldn't exactly be standard industry practice.
On the right Xcode screen, though, the code does use property syntax, so potentially ARC, although one doesn't imply the other.
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#55"Mark Zuckerberg was asked if Instagram could have hit one billion users if it had not been bought by Facebook. Probably not, he said. At least, not as quickly. [...] Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, had a slightly different answer to that question. Perhaps. Eventually. We will never know who was right." What if, Instagram had merged with Snapchat instead?
Facebook would have leveraged its user base and clout to smother them in the crib. This is why they ought to be one of the first targets for anti-trust regulation. Any company that can leverage its market size to kill competition, irrespective of the quality of their product, needs to be taken down a peg. Google and Amazon should be close behind. And Apple needs to be put on notice. It's not even that those 3 compani…
While you're not wrong from a regulatory standpoint, I think consumer product-wise both Instagram and Snapchat were among the strongest challengers to Facebook as far as insurgent social media networks went. If they had merged- well, the leadership would be dysfunctional, but it would have been very entertaining to see Facebook on the defensive.
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#56Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol at the flak being hurled at this guy like we wouldn't all do exactly the same thing, were we in his position.
Not true, I would have stuck it out for another year for the extra $850 million.
I mean, that's a lot of zeroes. I was going to say commas but that doesn't really reflect the magnitude right :P
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#58I'm not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy. Companies need to be willing to cannibalize themselves or someone will do it for them. I don't know if Zuck had the foresight at the time, but Instagram has obviously been an amazing hedge against apps like Snapchat. People like Instagram and Snapchat partly because they are less formal than Facebook, most users…
"Companies need to be willing to cannibalize themselves or someone will do it for them." --> This. exactly what Steve Jobs said when the iPhone was launched and there were questions about if the iPhone would cannibalize the iPod.
"Oh no, a more expensive, higher-margin product that we own will cannibalize a less expensive, lower-margin product that we own." -- nobody ever
This kind of "cannibalization" is a modest tactical concern about the details of your financial forecast. If someone cannibalizes their more expensive, higher-margin products with a less expensive, lower-margin product, strategically and intentionally as part of a big plan, then quote them as a visionary.
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#59Side note: For anyone interested, the third picture down[1] in the article is a fairly high resolution photo of a computer monitor where you can see Xcode and some very neat Objective-C code. [1]: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/09/25/business/25INSTAG...
I wonder when this picture was taken. The iPhone design in the simulator, the old Gmail favicon, the old OS X scrollbars all indicate this being several years old. Wouldn't be surprised if this code has been rewritten multiple times since.
Let's see - the Simulator is running, at the latest, iOS 6. As such it was probably taken before iOS 7 GM (September 18, 2013). Based on the scroll tracks on Xcode, it also looks like it was running Snow Leopard; Lion was released in Mid-2011, so maybe even earlier.
Between iOS and macOS, and given the acquisition was in 2012, I'd imagine these photos were taken around then.
Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed
#60I'm not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy. Companies need to be willing to cannibalize themselves or someone will do it for them. I don't know if Zuck had the foresight at the time, but Instagram has obviously been an amazing hedge against apps like Snapchat. People like Instagram and Snapchat partly because they are less formal than Facebook, most users…
You dont want to cannibalize your own product if you might have to spin-off the product due to antitrust concerns.