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When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

nytimes.com

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Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#91

Post by relyio »

eksemplar wrote: post #78
40acres wrote: post #20

I'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 saw some usage data in a quartz article, that I can’t find, earlier this week. Facebook was the most popular social media platform across teenagers, millennials, generation x and baby boomers. The real interesting data was in teenagers though, their most popular platform is Snapchat, but none of the platforms had managed to make more than 40% of teenagers create an account with them. I think this is interesting bec…

>I saw some usage data in a quartz article, that I can’t find, earlier this week. Facebook was the most popular social media platform across teenagers, millennials, generation x and baby boomers.

It's really surprising to me. I don't see anyone around me using Facebook (or only to meme on large private groups). Messenger is still prevalent but more for legacy reasons than anything else and can be displaced. It reminds me of MSN messenger. Wizzz!

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#92

Post by ImprovedSilence »

aetherson wrote: post #58
victor106 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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,…

I mean, Kodak invented the digital camera, said it was too expensive to ever be viable, and then let it kill them because film was their "high margin" cash cow.... It happens. Short term blinds long term more often than you would think.

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#93

Post by rconti »

relyio wrote: post #90
40acres wrote: post #20

I'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…

>'m not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy It's a stupid strategy. All my friends (early 20s) are hardly active on Facebook, if at all and instead prefer the likes of Instagram and Snapchat for a simple reason: you can actually share your life with your friends and see theirs. Speaking for myself, I hardly care about my Facebook account. My feed is plaste…

This comment seems to be all about your network. Just because your network on IG is different from your network on FB doesn't mean that the platform is fundamentally different. I'm ~15 years older than you, and was in college when FB came out. Hence, almost all of my friend are on FB. On FB, I regularly see photo albums and status updates.

I enjoy IG, but I see just as many obnoxious posts with 20 lines of .

.

.

.

.

.

.

so a boring post can contain 30 lines before 500 hashtags you don't care about and will never click on. And I will never want to watch a video on FB or on IG, so the platform doesn't matter.

If anything, it sounds like a more common usage of IG is to follow "influencers" which is code for "people you don't care about". Again, garbage in, garbage out.

It sounds like you've followed crappy people on FB, and that colors your view of the platform. The same way I've never been able to make Twitter work for me. It's not always about the platform.

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#94

Post by ImprovedSilence »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #46
louwrentius wrote: post #4

It's a lot easier to stand for your principles and say no to $850M if you already own billions...

Anyone with say ~$2M (give or take a magnitude) could easily say no to more money and be pretty happy, but humans being what they are...

Hell no, are you crazy! The average Joe needs at least 2.5-3M to retire by 65, let alone 20s or 30s. That number needs upped an order of magnitude.

And I'm sure there's plenty of people that would say my number needs upped an order of magnitude too.

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#95

Post by relyio »

rconti wrote: post #93
relyio wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>'m not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy It's a stupid strategy. All my friends (early 20s) are hardly active on Facebook, if at all and instead prefer the likes of Instagram and Snapchat for a simple reason: you can actually share your life with your friends and see theirs. Speaking for myself, I hardly care about my Facebook account. My feed is plaste…

This comment seems to be all about your network. Just because your network on IG is different from your network on FB doesn't mean that the platform is fundamentally different. I'm ~15 years older than you, and was in college when FB came out. Hence, almost all of my friend are on FB. On FB, I regularly see photo albums and status updates. I enjoy IG, but I see just as many obnoxious posts with 20 lines of . . . . .…

>On FB, I regularly see photo albums and status updates.

I don't disagree with you as much as you think. That's my point, no one in my extended circles of friends actively uses Facebook. I only follow a couple pages but my feed is 90% recommendations from "Pages I might like" and the rest are likes or comments on content my friends follow.

Yes, you could say "you have the wrong friends" but I will counter that "maybe" they consciously made the decision to optimize for engagement and that the feed curation reflects that: over-exposing third-party content over the one produced by your social network.

And maybe we are using two different websites, it's not impossible that Facebook would turn into a different product depending on your age and location.

I suspect you might be in the opposite situation wrt. Instagram. I have never seen a single post from "influencers" since I don't follow any, that is to say beside the promoted content that is being shoved down my throat since a few months.

>like a more common usage of IG is to follow "influencers"

The bulk of the usage around me seem to be Instagram stories. People still post photos but now the trend is to put them+videos in your story, sometimes along with polls, weird filters, or Q&A (you have a little box to reply). It's actually pretty fun to use!

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#96

Post by etatoby »

java_script wrote: post #33
40acres wrote: post #20

I'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…

> my girlfriend is always shocked (and a bit annoyed) when I tell her. Is this is a 50 First Dates type of situation?

It's more likely to be such an insignificant (if annoying) detail to common people that they easily forget about it in less than a day.

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#97

Post by wruza »

leothekim wrote: post #8
princekolt wrote: post #5

Side 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...

Heh. The "shouldShowAlertForRequest" function is checking if a userInfo.message key equaling "Not authorized to view user". I would have expected something a little less dependent on a string isEqual check against an English phrase.

ASIHTTPRequest is one of those libraries that seem cool and easy, but lack a formal description on how to handle non-succesful paths. It likely just ends up there with generic error, and there is no way to check for a specific condition unless you use [isEqual:] on one of non-standard userInfo keys you found experimentally. Moreover, that string could go from a server error response, not from a request library. It is all text down the way due to how web is designed. Nothing here that would not pass a review, I think.

Re: When Zuckerberg Asserted Control, Instagram’s Founders Chafed

#100

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #83
tomjakubowski wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the same time as these there was another app that made you drag a depiction of your photo around a mock darkroom to "develop" it with those "filters".

Wasn’t that the app that had the genius idea to make your photos more “important“ by charging you an in app purchase for “film“ so you would only take pictures of things that mattered?

[deleted]
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