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Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

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Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#61

Post by holler »

Besides the complaints of the author, I noticed recently that:

- They stopped displaying the name of the account under the stories circles at the top, so you don't know who's story you're clicking on unless you memorized their profile photo. Since I only want to click on stories of people I know closely, I now choose not to watch any stories at all.

- They moved the activity (heart) from the main bottom icon navigation and up to the top right next to the dm icon, signifying they're giving it less relevance than it's new replacement, the shopping icon!

- They're pushing shopping in seemingly half the posts showing up in the newsfeed now.

The combination of shopping and forced watching of video reels has me ready to cancel my account entirely. I don't use instagram to watch videos or shop, but even if I did decide to do one of those, which I never would, I don't want it forced on me.

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#62

Post by lopis »

Twitter has also been doing this since a few months ago. And there's no way to disable it, no matter how often I tell it to "see this less often". Sometimes half the posts I see on the feed are recommended posts from people I don't follow nor care about. Not to mention the "notifications" bell has been useless for years now because all my notifications are suggested posts from people I follow. It's a total perversion of UX to try to hijack our habits for the sake of engagement. For people with attention deficit that just visit these websites sporadically with specific goals, this trend is really disgusting.

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#63

Post by happymellon »

winternett wrote: post #58
princevegeta89 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to quit tech. You need to find a position that helps solve real problems for the greater good. If you think about it, companies like Apple are very pro-privacy and don't make money by selling data or tracking folks. Or look into other companies like those non-profits like Mozilla or Signal. Your pay will go down but you'll be content. Or maybe, you could look into building your own company. Facebook is…

If apple is pro privacy, they wouldn't be putting lidar scanning on their phones. Whether it's enabled or not, Lidar is military-grade tech that has no place on most cell phones, Let's not act like the entire industry isn't heavily invested in data collection... It does damage to real discussions about privacy and consumer protection for everyone.

Lidar is not military grade. Where did you pull that from?

You can get Lidar on all sorts of civilian applications, from height mapping on drone photography, to driving assistance on cars. The lidar on phones is over-kill, depth mapping in photos or cheap crappy AR are not great use cases, but that doesn't make it a privacy problem.

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#64

Post by happymellon »

winternett wrote: post #60
bobkazamakis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lidar is military-grade tech encryption is military-grade tech too.

Yeah, but encryption is purposed as a security feature, Lidar is a data collection feature. https://www.opentopography.org/blog/iphone-lidar-application...

So is the camera on your phone purely a data collection feature that should be removed?

How about the touch screen/keyboard?

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#65

Post by [deleted] »

atoav wrote: post #22
gsatic wrote: post #2

Is the Tucker Carlson story few days back, about the tiktok algo promoting edu and wholesome content within China, but twerking and gender transition in the west true?

You mean the story by the guy that (successfully!) used this legal defense in court: > The "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.' and > Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amou…

[deleted]

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#66

Post by nicbou »

jondwillis wrote: post #13

TikTok and Facebook’s antics (existence?) have me seriously considering quitting tech. I feel like no matter what I do, I am feeding one of these societal cancers by implementing tracking for whoever is paying me currently, lifting dark patterns, etc, using the API of Google… I tried to avoid doing these things for awhile but nobody pays me to be ethical. My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty…

It doesn't have to be that way. You can make your own software, or make your own line in the sand. Wherever you go, software development skills will have some use. They're not going to waste.

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#67

Post by gsatic »

citizenpaul wrote: post #54
ineedtoknowmore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Many of these business models have been subsidized by governments. - I'm not sure, though the reasoning may be that their future existence is ultimately more valuable as a population control system than merely an ad network. - Some have argued that online ads are in a bubble. I don't know. - A free market does not seem to exist though. Thoughts?

I think its less an ad bubble and more like something similar to government use it or lose it spending. There is a sort of global hot potato/musical chairs thing going on. No one wants to be the first or last one to cut their ad spending so its a stand off. I've looked at some ad spending stuff at companies in the past and while their official numbers always "added up" there always seemed to me to be huge logic gaps…

This doesn't happen enough. Past 10-15 years or so, thanks to tech overwhelming them, Marketing depts have lost their way. Its not their fault. They get all their training from google, youtube, fb etc on how to think about these systems and when things dont work out the usual reaction is, but we are just doing what Google/FB told us to do.

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#68

Post by nicbou »

lopis wrote: post #62

Twitter has also been doing this since a few months ago. And there's no way to disable it, no matter how often I tell it to "see this less often". Sometimes half the posts I see on the feed are recommended posts from people I don't follow nor care about. Not to mention the "notifications" bell has been useless for years now because all my notifications are suggested posts from people I follow. It's a total perversion…

> For people with attention deficit that just visit these websites sporadically with specific goals

An ad blocker can block a lot more than just ads. Mine removes anything that isn't goal-oriented, including most recommendation elements.

Re: Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok

#70

Post by classified »

jondwillis wrote: post #13

TikTok and Facebook’s antics (existence?) have me seriously considering quitting tech. I feel like no matter what I do, I am feeding one of these societal cancers by implementing tracking for whoever is paying me currently, lifting dark patterns, etc, using the API of Google… I tried to avoid doing these things for awhile but nobody pays me to be ethical. My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty…

This weapon-grade PsyOps stuff should be illegal. But that will never happen, it's just too profitable.
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