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Instagram Is Facebook Now

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Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#141

Post by SrslyJosh »

motoxpro wrote: post #125
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…

I'm glad we didn't declare the phone "done" at the Razor flip phone or that we didn't declare personal websites "done" with Yahoo Geocities. Progress has to happen. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong, but you have to try.

Not a great example. Phones became general purpose(-ish) computing devices without losing the ability to function as a phone.

Facebook trying to turn Instagram into Tiktok ruins the ability to use Instagram as Instagram.

It's more like Mr. Coffee saw that smoothies took off in popularity and decided to start making coffee machines that are also blenders, but now suck as coffee machines.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#142

Post by Fordec »

jaequery wrote: post #129

In what seems like a blink of an eye, Facebook, is now considered the old people platform, according to kids these days. It took me a while to grasp it but it looks like FB has a huge problem in there hands and it's interesting to see how they tackle their image.

FB has had a big problem for years. Zuckerberg, notwithstanding everything else, to his credit has demonstrated he is intimately aware of it through his acquisition strategies. If it's in a blink of an eye, it's your eye. To others it's been the case ever since the Instagram/Whatsapp acquisitions.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#143

Post by presentation »

drexlspivey wrote: post #105
epolanski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

LOL seriously kids these days spend like 5+ hours per day on these apps.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#144

Post by SrslyJosh »

rightbyte wrote: post #121
rgbrgb wrote: 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 has started to hide away "continue watching" for their algo feed crap for me.

Netflix on AppleTV has done this for a long time, and it sucks. =(

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#145

Post by adolph »

thebean11 wrote: post #4

Ha, for a second I thought they were changing the name to “Facebook Now”.

I've been thinking the same until I got this far down in the comments. The article doesn't seem to address the service's name, just bla-bla-bla average grade navel gazing.

I first started using the app in earnest my final year of college, and look back wistfully at how I artfully chronicled my life for the subsequent six years, weaving together pictures of concerts and coffee shops with mirror selfies and delicious meals into an effortless pointillist tableau of my 20s. I still post on the app occasionally, but basically left a little over a month ago in favor of a personal newsletter, where I feel less pressure to be constantly documenting my consciousness.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#146

Post by presentation »

deergomoo wrote: post #92

I used to have a really nice, tailored experience on Instagram. All I saw was genuinely good photography and art that I was interested in. Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn. Not sure what I’ve done to get the algorithm all hot and heavy—perhaps just being an 18-35 male is enough—but it’s rather embarrassing to the point where I don’t always feel comfortable opening th…

Agreed, Google also added YouTube shorts and those are similarly overfit to whatever is the most “engaging” content for some broad demographic, so since I work out I just get nonstop videos of ripped 18-24 year old women doing squats to show off their butts - and I’m not into any of it but they’ve already decided that’s what I want to see, forever.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#147

Post by adolph »

epolanski wrote: post #51
athenot wrote: 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…

> For reference, Instagram lets you see how much time you spend on the app, daily and on average.

Does HN have this feature?

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#148

Post by SrslyJosh »

fullshark wrote: post #96
AlexandrB wrote: post #39

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.

They are publishers, they just use algorithms as editors and publish billions of unique personalized webpages every day.

Calling something an "algorithm" doesn't absolve the authors of responsibility for what it does.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#149

Post by ssalazar »

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…

This is putting a lot of undue blame on product managers who only have so much autonomy in a business regime set up for perpetual "growth" that is necessarily quantifiable and ultimately aimed towards economic growth. Constant growth is the underlying objective for any investment-driven software business (pretty much any of the businesses regularly talked about on this site, and certainly ones supported by this site's operators). "Making a great product for the customer" is necessarily secondary to investors getting a return.

But its refreshing to hear of notable exceptions to this! In my field of music tech, Ableton is one of these, for instance, having semi-famously refused significant outside investment to be able to focus on making a great product: https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#150

Post by SrslyJosh »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #111

Anyone else think this is part of the natural life cycle of social media? Once something becomes big enough, even the users begin to monetize the content itself (meme pages, influencers). This is the beginning of the end. Everyone's just trying to milk it before it dies. I don't see any ways to address this. Once enough attention is captured it will be inevitably used by someone to sell something. Developers want to…

Federation instead of centralization.
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