Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

Post by Avtomatk » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #57

dleslie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What lesson would that be? Facebook is hugely successful.

Facebook is always there for people but it is not the talk of the town any more. A decade ago you could have everyone on it for their entire lunchbreaks, deep-stalking their mates. But nowadays people are not engaged with it compulsively. Younger people don't use it because their parents are on it. Content isn't made by people for Facebook because it won't show in their friends feeds. Advertisers that are small to me…

Post by asutekku » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

Miner49er wrote: post #109

alehul wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American who looks at WeChat and sees a massive, unintuitive jumbled mess, you've explained in this comment how that could possibly be so popular in China! I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app. By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.

It's not a mistake in the short-term, but in the long-term it'll hurt growth. New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?

Post by asutekku » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #87

snowwrestler wrote: post #38

I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry. At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service --Tik…

Ever heard of redesign? Vine needed it. TikTok didn't win against Vine because of it was new. It had better UI, UX, better features better strategy overall. Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.

Post by Swizec » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

thekyle wrote: post #39

OzzyB wrote: post #9

Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time: " Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served b…

I think the trouble is that it's really hard to start a new social network from scratch, so when Facebook wants to compete in a new segment they just tack on the feature to one of their existing social products. However, as you pointed out this leads to feature creep and pushes users to simpler platforms. What I would do to solve this problem if I were at Facebook is to start new features out on an established platfo…

Post by baby » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

euix wrote: post #80

zelphirkalt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new". I wish I could get a handful of my friends to use something like Signal. Best even something not requiring a phone number. It's stupid that Signal wants a phone number. What has my phone number to do with chatting via Internet? Any advice how to get your friends to switch, when they do not care much about their privacy and have a…

I find good friends often share similar technological viewpoints right down to the basic level. The people I have on signal are pretty much all cut from the same cloth in that regard. I.E. they tend to avoid big internet corps whenever possible and hack their own solutions. For people I consider casual acquaintances or just outside of the "inner circle" so to speak, I just use SMS.