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Instagram Is Facebook Now

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361–370 of 396 posts

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#361

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…

Can't agree more. I want products to be completed. I hate this constant change "because we have these people working full time and they need to be doing something to justify being paid". I want tools that empower me. I don't want a "service" bundled with everything either. I want products that don't need any form of ongoing support.

IMO modern mainstream operating systems are also a good example of this. An operating system has basically three jobs: abstract the hardware from application software, provide libraries for commonly used functions, like GUIs, and provide the user with some kind of environment/shell to run their applications in. But somehow, this shitshow of an industry has converged on needing to release a major update every year. Imagine being forced to come up with new features for, and release a major update of, a feature-complete product every time the planet completes a lap around its star just because the marketing department exists and demands that it so happens because reasons. Oh, and what if you run out of feature ideas? Then of course you redesign the UI! UI redesigns never get old.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's television for the current generation. I've noticed my parents and inlaws cannot exist without having the television on. I mean they can, but pick a random day, show up at their house and the TV is on some show that they are remotely interested in but watching because they had nothing else to do. That's instagram/facebook/snapchat/etc.

I have always had stuff to do. This sounds like mental torture.

most people do not have the energy, drive, or motivation to constantly be doing things. i guess it's both a blessing and a curse if you do.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#364

I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp. Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all. Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It…

I doubt teenager me would not have been happy to share a social media presence with my parents aside for superficial content. So every few generations we might gain another platform regardless of its quality. I assume that Tiktok will fall as well, I hear the first people calling it boring.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#365
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Whatsapp is a very non-US-oriented app - its is very popular in EU and Asia/Africa/Latin America, but none of my US friends use it other than to reach us outside of the US. Since it's not US-focused, the US execs (and boards, investors) tend to dismiss it. This explains why Whatsapp was left, relatively, untouched by FB in terms of user experience, after the acquisition - it's not shiny by any mea…

Which countries in Asia still count it as the most popular messaging app? China is on WeeChat, Korea has KakaoTalk and LINE is everywhere else. It is pretty amazing that Meta had three messaging apps and none of them are close to something like LINE in terms of ubiquity or utility.

Literally all of India uses WhatsApp. Non-WhatsApp users (exclusively Signal/Telegram/Mitron or whatever homegrown flavour of the day) are a rounding error.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is Instagram. But you just mean that Netflix uses a paywall model whereas Instagram uses a pay-with-attention-to-ads.

I mean the old adage "if something is free then you're the product". For Netflix you're the customer, for Instagram you're the product.

I understand, and that's what I meant. However, we need to get past that adage. It suggests to people that we can't have actually free things ever. But there are tons of examples of things that really are free from natural resources that are abundant to the sorts of software that are trivial enough for some volunteers to make and distribute without compromises.

In other words, we can pay with money or by allowing ourselves to be monetized (via attention to ads or other manipulations and invasiveness) *OR* we can actually have things be free. There's negligible cost to enjoying Mozart or Mark Twain, and a few orders of magnitude more stuff could be public domain if that status weren't sabotaged to support our cancerous growth-forever economic model.

Anyway, I agree with you completely about Netflix vs Instagram. And while Instagram can be described as pay-with-attention-to-ads, it's definitely valid to see it as most users are the product for the actual paying customers (the advertisers). The reason I like the "pay-with-attention" framing is to prompt everyone to always be asking "how am I paying?" and sometimes the answer is "I'm not, it's actually free, no catch" as that opens more options to consider than the binary "am I the customer or the product?"

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#367

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…

> Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn.

I had this problem with Reels too - I think you're right that it's just kind of "what we show dudes by default." But under the three-dots menu there's a "Not interested" option. Tell the algo that a couple times and you won't see that stuff anymore.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#368
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. If this were true, an investor like Warren Buffett, who has always invested by focusing on the fundamentals of the company he is investing in and focusing on real performance/value metrics, would not be able to be as consistently successful as he has been. It's hard to say though, because the market in which he made his initial chunk of capital is not the same market today, and it…

laws of nature always win at the end of the day. fundamentals are important, so long can a software saas company make money by selling software to other vc funded saas companies. at one point the free money being thrown around then spent on saas, cloud and marketing with fb / google will be pulled back. and then we will see who's naked. it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it will happen. hence buying…

It's pessimistic of me, but I suspect that once the current crop of tech is no longer appealing for large investments some other sector will be found for the long term pump and dump.

The method of Buffet/BH obviously works, but it also seems like it requires a lol it knowledge and skill and patience, otherwise it would be much more popular. Rolling a new mark (or the same marks with a game with a new name) is much easier and reliable for those with less skill.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#369
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…

> Shipping stuff that turns out to just be useless clutter absolutely happens - the problem is it is hard/impossible to know the difference going in. It's not that hard. Plenty of A/B testing is done along the way, and yet useless clutter still ships. Why? Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression, partly because everyone needs shipped product at the end-o…

> Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression

That is true, but again I think it's more complicated than that. AB tests are good for measuring incremental changes, but really bad at predicting the impact of 0 to 1 type products / features, because so much of the success or failure depends on public perception and network effects. Twitter couldn't AB test "Fleets" and have any confidence as to what the product adoption would look like. So companies have no choice but to launch and see.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#370
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter literally limits the length of your tweets. What can you say in a couple of phrases in the context of activism and politics? Just link another platform? Don't get me started on twitter threads, this is abomination. My patience usually runs out after the third tweet in a thread. Another day Twitter CEO resigned and he posted a screenshot of his mail. Why couldn't he post it in a proper text format so people ca…

> Twitter literally limits the length of your tweets. This is why we get those god-awful "this tweet thread should've been a link to a blogpost" monstrosities =)

I despise each and every "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet. People want to use Twitter as a blogging platform and Twitter itself doesn't want to be a blogging platform.
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