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Instagram Is Facebook Now

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Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#61

Post by taneq »

andrew_eit wrote: post #35

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/reten…

> 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"

The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#62

Post by batman-farts »

littlestymaar wrote: post #45

So Meta wants to kill their last relevant product? They really do want to become the next Yahoo! right? Facebook has yielded much more profit than Amazon but their user base has remained stagnant and aging for years, and their recent PR stuns (Libra a few years ago, now the “Metaverse”) don't really sound like their perspective will improve. I can understand why a publicly traded company engages in short term profit…

The best part of the name change is that if profits ever start to stagnate, we can say that they’ve entered Meta-stasis!

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#63

Post by ravenstine »

littlestymaar wrote: post #45

So Meta wants to kill their last relevant product? They really do want to become the next Yahoo! right? Facebook has yielded much more profit than Amazon but their user base has remained stagnant and aging for years, and their recent PR stuns (Libra a few years ago, now the “Metaverse”) don't really sound like their perspective will improve. I can understand why a publicly traded company engages in short term profit…

Zuckerberg is an alumnus of Young Global Leaders, an initiative of the World Economic Forum to identify "exceptional" individuals who can enact their vision of "positive change". These actions of Facebook seem to align more with the WEF's vision of global society than anything that makes any real sense in the immediate.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#64

Post by daveslash »

0xdeadb00f wrote: post #8
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they got their inspiration from the youtube recommendation engine.

Except at least in my case, I do rewatch YouTube videos a lot.

Seems like something an algorithm could be modified to take into account ~ a given users proclivity to rewatch/review the same content. After a few recommendations of seen content, if that particular user isn't engaging, decrease their "rewatch recommendation" parameter.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#65

Post by epolanski »

marcodiego wrote: post #32

I don't understand Instagram language. My GF uses it. It is full of digital influencers, people who make money because they are digital influencers. Young people with sometimes funny but generally pointless and most often ridiculous dancing moves to an equally ridiculous repetitive song. People buying expensive things, doing idiot things talking about uninteresting details of the uninteresting lives of equally uninte…

I met one of the most brilliant people in my life. Smart, passionate about art, culture, politics. Brilliant student, top of her class from elementary through college. Fluent (as in certified) C2 in English and German. Terrific career as a public servant in foreign politics already in her late 20s.

She would never, ever, miss a single episode of a “reality” about dating in tv, a show famous in Italy as “trash tv”. It was unwatchable, worse than Jersey shore.

I asked her why such an intelligent and smart person couldn’t miss an episode of something so terrible and lame and she answered me “I know it’s awful, but for an entire hour I’m able to be lobotomized and not have a single thought, I can completely detach from reality and relax”.

My current SO does the same with Instagram. Whenever she needs to detach from her thoughts she zombifies on Instagram. Might be cats or fashion bloggers but she tunes out completely and she does that intentionally knowing that’s the effect it has on her.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#66

Post by daveslash »

monkeybutton wrote: post #36
keyle wrote: post #26

Well I guess there is a market opening for ChronoPic then, a new photosharing platform with comments, tags and likes... In chronological order! Because if Instagram acts like Facebook, it's ruined. I had noticed the last few months (and I'm not a heavy user at all), that literally every 4-5 pictures was an advert video. It made me sick to my gut to use it. What also makes me sick is the amount of people just doomscro…

What you want is SMS group chats. No ads. No sign up. Sorta ephemeral. Always chronological.

The beauty of an open, distributed system.... as opposed to a walled garden.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#67

Post by pembrook »

marcodiego wrote: post #32

I don't understand Instagram language. My GF uses it. It is full of digital influencers, people who make money because they are digital influencers. Young people with sometimes funny but generally pointless and most often ridiculous dancing moves to an equally ridiculous repetitive song. People buying expensive things, doing idiot things talking about uninteresting details of the uninteresting lives of equally uninte…

I'm almost certain you could make the same argument about this site.

We're all here clamoring to post overly analytical and smart-sounding things in response to news headlines in the hopes that we'll get meaningless upvotes from strangers.

When looking down on the things that other people like and do, it pays to look in the mirror first.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#68

Post by rgbrgb »

andrew_eit wrote: post #35

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/reten…

Netflix seems good at not destroying their product... though inherently the vision is kind of a scaled distraction machine.

I agree with the thrust of your comment and wonder how we might get there. Software companies did look more like you describe in the past, and a few like (some parts of) Apple and some game companies still do. Mostly these are companies that ship a chunk of finished software rather than a "service" -- a big release once a year, little post-hoc tracking and engagement optimization. I think there's fundamentally an incentive problem with most (all?) free-to-use software services. If revenue directly correlates to engagement time it's really hard to avoid this trap because it's a very rational path to go down to optimize the business.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#69

Post by taneq »

1024core wrote: post #60
eloisius wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term but ultimately kill engagement. You can trick my sleepy self to stay up scrolling through ads for a while, but I can tell what’s going on. Afterwards I feel bad, and your app becomes something I am conscious of being bad for me. I try to cut back and will probably quit entirely except for a few specific uses with careful safeguards arou…

> The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term That's when the promos happen and the bonuses are paid out. > but ultimately kill engagement. Too late. The PM's already jumped ship to the next gig.

Yep, the real root cause of the rot is that the people making the decisions no longer have the long term trajectory of the product at heart.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#70

Post by ryandrake »

andrew_eit wrote: post #35

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/reten…

Even products that don't have a mandate to become attention-sucking get ruined eventually. Developers gotta develop---so once the product is pretty much done, it becomes a feature-cram-fest to try to bolt-on every crazy thing they can think of, including the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, long-standing bugs go unaddressed, security issues crop up, quality drops, and long-time users feel more and more alienated. I've seen this pattern repeat at pretty much every commercial application job I've ever had. Nobody has any concept of a product being finished. Nobody knows what maintenance mode is. It's just "Keep developing!" forever until the product doesn't even do its core function anymore.
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