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Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

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Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#301

Post by xeromal »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #225
ethbro wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more cogent comparison would include total available markets at the time. 75m MAU in 2008 is very different than 2.6b in 2020.

I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive comparison, but each individual contributes inertia to the market regardless of the total size of the market (see 1 below) The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that: 1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social pr…

Yeah, Facebook is more akin to Google/Microsoft than it is to Myspace.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#302

Post by bobthepanda »

spanhandler wrote: post #200
sjg007 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t use snap chat but apparently it’s very popular!

I'm not sure if I'm just turning into an old man prematurely or what, but "social" sites and apps usually turn too confusing for me to use around their second or third iteration. Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then). Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follo…

The "genius" of Instagram is that it's social media as advertising where people are mostly advertising photos of themselves.

This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#303

Post by bobthepanda »

ethbro wrote: post #139
alehul wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say the UX challenges get any easier as you grow from social networking "super app" to generalized "super app." If anything, it would become more challenging, and the top comment would make more sense as to how it appears intuitive. On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to s…

We used to call "super apps" portals. Mistaken valuations of their stickiness generally led to the first cratering of internet company values.

AOL and Yahoo eventually died because there were individual sites that did the individual parts that they had better, and then they became less than the sum of their parts. Similar to how massive industrial conglomerates in America fell apart, or department stores when specialized fashion retailers became a thing.

East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#304

Post by hn_check »

jimbob45 wrote: post #146
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…

Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine. The blinding fact is that Twitter has never once made a shrewd business movie in ~15 years and is piloted by nimrods. Even now, they could bring Vine back and compete with TikTok toe-to-toe but they’re evidently allergic to making sound business decisions.

"Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine"

The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it.

Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#305

Post by anunnymouse »

sjg007 wrote: post #202
spanhandler wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I'm just turning into an old man prematurely or what, but "social" sites and apps usually turn too confusing for me to use around their second or third iteration. Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then). Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follo…

Yep I agree. I find FB the easiest of them all but I had to log off b/c of the politics. I'd rather be ignorant.

You're are not any more ignorant for avoiding political content on Facebook, it is a bunch of strawman echo chamber trash.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#306

Post by mypalmike »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #101
dilap wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.

Yeah it really feels like IBM in the sense that it had some really amazing engineers that built the company up, and after they left, they have just been resting on those laurels ever sense. What have they truly innovated recently?

When I worked at Twitter, we just had a lot of competent engineers fixing the scaling problems left by the amazing engineers.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#308

Post by kovvy »

alangibson wrote: post #36
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 used Instagram for the first time 6 months ago because I'm old, and I was shocked that an app with such a rep for elegance is such a hodge podge of features. It really feels like they just glued a bunch of 'me too' functions onto the original core app.

Instagram insists I'm a bot and immediately blocks any account I make. Using Instagram without an account is a rather dismal experience since it blocks viewing any posts, or scrolling too far through previews of posts. I also deal with businesses that post all their updates on Instagram.

User experience doesn't seem to be a priority for Instagram.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#309

Post by wmeredith »

switch11 wrote: post #307

hats off to Facebook for being absolutely shameless and zero ethics they don't even pretend to be honest (unlike Google) and it's a miracle so far they haven't had to pay damages for all the 'inspiration' they have found from other people's products

I'm sure 'Zuck is very sorry.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#310

Post by namelosw »

alehul wrote: post #68
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…

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.

Actually those features WeChat wants people to use as new users are pretty intuitive and straightforward. For other functionalities, those are intentionally 'hidden'. Those advanced or experiment features are for those who look for those features or just spreading by friends.

On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.

Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.

PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:

* Buy everything, or course.

* Pay for electric, gas, and water.

* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.

* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.

* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.

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