Instagram Is Facebook Now • Hacker News Board

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#161

Post by daxfohl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

rgbrgb wrote: post #68

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 "servi…

Netflix isn't free.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#162

Post by daxfohl » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

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…

As they say, if something is free you're not the consumer you're the product.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#163

Post by kylehotchkiss » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

rmrfslashbin wrote: post #89

Can we talk about the "personal newsletter" aspect of this post? Feels like the dawn of the blogs back in the 2000s. Everyone had one, then we got twitter, facebook, and instagram. Now we're done with those and going back? Lovely. Hope I still know how to LAMP stack.

No need for LAMP! Just use next.just or gatsby to build your static site and upload to cloudfront.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#164

Post by annexrichmond » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:12 AM UTC

thebean11 wrote: post #4

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

tangentially, I'm not a fan of headline case; it just creates unnecessary ambiguity. Sites with normal casing (like a typical sentence) for titles I find much easier to read and process.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#165

Post by kylehotchkiss » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:13 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #103

epolanski wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RuneScape still exists?!? Talk about an enduring company.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#166

Post by kamranjon » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

ssalazar wrote: post #149

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'…

Another good example is Craigslist. I always wonder about how great it would be to work there.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#167

Post by panic » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

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…

There are plenty of software products out there that people love. Blender, OBS, Sublime Text, and Procreate are a few that come to mind. We don't need to come up with any new culture or methodology -- if we pay attention, there are already plenty of examples for us to follow if we want to.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#168

Post by 0fuchs » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

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…

Entropy is an unstoppable force. The churn to save our past ways is the problem.

We don’t need industrial pipelines for everything.

Centralize logistics of biological necessity, privatize self exploration.

We should only industrially build industrial machines we need, and personal gadget fetishism can go in the bin.

Our wealth is a mathematical quagmire. No one knows who owes what really, and Dick Cheney was saying the quiet part out loud before Trump: deficits don’t matter.

It’s an emotional boondoggle. Future people will renegotiate or blow ourselves up.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#169

Post by aleksiy123 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:18 AM UTC

SrslyJosh wrote: post #150

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.

While I think this may be solution for a controlling entity to ruin a platform. I don't think it does anything for when the users themselves begin pushing advertisements through content. Which is what I believe really ruins platforms.

For example a lot of Fitness Instagrammers start of by just posting of them working out or their daily lives. As they get popular, they start a clothing line, offer training, write ebooks, get sponsorships. Their instgram is now mostly for pushing those products on people.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#170

Post by rtpg » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

rib3ye wrote: post #27

rtpg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, im a pretty early adopter of instagram along with loads of friends and like 95% of content has become stories. Turns out Snapchat was what most of us wanted but without a purposefully obtuse interface

The fact that they succeeded in spite of a purposefully obtuse interface is a pretty clear validation for the concept.

I think the general belief was that the concept was a thing for "kids"/"young people", but now I'm very convinced that that was because of Snap's branding + general incomprehensibility.