Instagram Is Facebook Now

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.

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.

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.

Curtains open.... "But it's for security!"

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.