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Instagram Is Facebook Now

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101–110 of 396 posts

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#101
post #7

At this point, Instagram decided it wants to be a TV and just show me what it wants me to see, not my carefully curated feed. I'm letting my account die.

This is why I eventually gave up on Instagram.

I’d carefully curated my feed to what I was interested in, following a load of really good abstract and generative artists, until it would suddenly decide that what I really wanted to see was nailcare tips or whatever.

After a few days of me actively pruning content the feed would settle down, but it happened more and more frequently until I couldn’t be bothered anymore.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#102

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 t…

I make a small LOB type software, user request driven feature development still happens. There is a balance, fixing bugs and actual features in one zone and top-down attention drivers in another zone

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#103

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…

I do the same with RuneScape. Doing virtual fishing for an hour. It's just stimulating enough to not be boring while trivial enough to not be stressful.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#104
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "servi…

Netflix isn't the worst but their site does have some annoyances. After I finish watching something, I have to close the tab as fast as possible because there is no possible way to have the tab open without it auto playing annoying clips with sound. Everything has a hover effect with sound.

There's a setting for that! Used to bother me too but there's a setting to disable auto-play, and also to disable playing when your mouse hovers. gl!

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#105
post #7

At this point, Instagram decided it wants to be a TV and just show me what it wants me to see, not my carefully curated feed. I'm letting my account die.

Delete it instead. I’ve been deleting any but text medias and I just can’t believe how much time people spend on it. For reference, Instagram lets you see how much time you spend on the app, daily and on average. I was shocked when I found out I averaged almost 18 minutes per day. I just didn’t feel like I spent so much time on it, but then you start realizing all of the pauses and voids it filled here and there and…

Wow 18 minutes per day? How did you recover from this shock?

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#106

I abandoned my account some weeks ago when they where forcing me to add my phone number in order to log in.

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

It's for bot prevention. Phone number verification is the most effective anti bot tool around. It just sucks for privacy and legitimate alt accounting.

I have a grandparent who lost their password to skype, microsoft rejected the password/email reset request, but also blocks them from creating a new account because the phone number is attached to the previous account.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#108

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…

The problem is not that they seek to grab attention, is what they decide to do with that attention.

We might think of Web 2.1 composed by socially responsible apps.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#109
post #91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' Blaming Product Managers chasing "impact" is a fashionable thing to think/say here, but I don't think thats entirely true for consumer apps, and especially not for social networks. If it were, you'd expect that the each successive generation of apps to be a return to form. However as we've seen with the migrat…

>That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target. Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. P…

> shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades.

I'm not so sure about that... https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a20962322/balenci...

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#110

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…

Twitter has shot themselves in the foot for me. I would be happy to get notifications for people interacting with my posts, but they spam me with random crap so I went to the settings app and turned off the toggle for notifications. Now they get to send me nothing. Ubereats did the same so I just uninstalled the app and reinstall it if I ever want to order something. They lost that space on my home screen because the…

Re: Uber Eats, now they also mark those notifications as "time sensitive" in the current version of iOS, including asking you to rate your meal or knowing that your delivery person says thanks for the tip. Even if I'm OK with getting those notifications, they are by definition NOT time sensitive
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