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Instagram Is Facebook Now

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Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#211

Post by wilsonnb3 »

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 has a fair amount of BS that has been accumulating for a while.

Refuses to put the categories in a consistent order, even things like "my list" and "continue watching" move around in the UI.

Categories available for you to browse also change randomly.

Autoplay while browsing and autoplay of other content when you finish a show or movie.

Images used in show/movie thumbnails are different for different users based on what they think you are likely to click on.

Mobile app has a tiktok style feed for comedy shows. I believe they are also testing or have already rolled out a tiktok style feed for kids Netflix.

HBO is happy to show me an alphabetical list of all of their content but Netflix will not.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#212

Post by Juke_Ellington »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #137
freeflight wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't really describe it as "blink of an eye", Facebook hasn't been popular with the younger crowd for many years. That was one of the reasons FB acquired Instagram, as most younger users started flocking there instead of FB.

For what it’s worth, I started noticing kids not caring about Facebook around 10 years ago. It was gradual, but evident for quite some time.

And Facebook bought Instagram about 10 years ago. They know where the wind blows.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#214

Post by afavour »

epolanski wrote: post #65
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…

It’s also a social thing. My partner and her friends watch the same reality shows, follow the same Instagram celebrities. They talk about the reality shows, what the celebrities have posted (in all honesty they seem to fill the exact same void). In that context I don’t think it’s all that much worse than, say, a group of people gathering to talk about last weekend’s football game.

I find video games fill that same “mindless” void for me. Prior to the pandemic I’d barely played any in a decade but now I’ll fire up Call of Duty every couple of days to play a few rounds. It’s dumb, I learn nothing from it and I achieve nothing. But it’s nice to switch my brain off.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#216

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Juke_Ellington wrote: post #212
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, I started noticing kids not caring about Facebook around 10 years ago. It was gradual, but evident for quite some time.

And Facebook bought Instagram about 10 years ago. They know where the wind blows.

Oh, you’re right. I recall a lot of people thinking Facebook was in a major decline trying to stay relevant. $1B for Instagram?! What a joke!

Well… it worked out for them alright.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#217

Post by saghm »

kbenson wrote: post #46
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…

> 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 We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. G…

> We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

> Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.

I'm probably just naive or missing something obvious, but fundamentally it doesn't seem obvious to me _why_ public companies should be treated differently as investments. Ostensibly the original reason stocks had value is that when companies were making money, they'd pay dividends, but like you said, this isn't really the mentality anymore. The stock is worth something because someday if the company makes more money, someone will buy it for more money than you paid...but why? So they can sell it when the company is making even more money later? It seems like if companies don't end up eventually paying dividends at some point, there's no reason why the price of the stock should be related to the amount of money the company makes. The only other thing that shares really do is give very limited voting rights, but this seems like it's not remotely worth enough per share given how much you'd need to have to even begin to influence board elections, which in itself is a very indirect way of influencing the company.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#218

Post by dls2016 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #50
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.

> This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform. Who claims that?

Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection?

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#219

Post by Gtex555 »

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…

The fundamental issue at hand (something you neglected to mention), most of these platforms twitter, instagram, facebook and youtube are free! Now what does free entail, you being the product and thus it will always spiral down to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Basically you are getting a product that is too good for free. Someone has to bear the brunt of that cost and that person must be eventually rewarded otherwise there is no incentive to do so. So in reality the only way to solve this is a change in the users mentality of always jumping to free then crying foul about it when they end up the product. So the real problem(your problem) here is the user's mentality. You are basically just complaining about human nature from the users to the developers of said platforms.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#220

Post by eloisius »

Gigachad wrote: post #132
airstrike wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think Apple needs to start making this as part of the review process and reject updates which set marketing spam as time sensitive.

Supposedly it is in the guidelines. Someone provided a link to them last time it came up. Seems like it’s just unenforced. I wish they’d either enforce that, or give users some tools to filter them. Give me a naive bayes filter to train, regex, even string match. Anything.
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