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Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

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Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#91

Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate: They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. Keith Rabois (top VC), mentioned that FB has always prioritized optimization over…

Definitely can't be helping.

I saw an ad on LinkedIn a few months ago for Coinbase and applied out of curiosity. Was very intimidating as a British 'commoner' who went to a very average university to be being grilled on Leetcode/Hackerrank questions by fresh male-Asian Stanford/MIT/top-US-university graduates (not being stereotypical - this was true!). Didn't stand a chance really as I don't do well with algorithmic questions although the interviewers were friendly enough and I did somehow manage to stumble to the last stage of 1 recruiter interview and 3 coding interviews. One answer I was expected to answer the complexity of my code to which the answer was something involving logarithms which I genuinely don't have a clue. I consider myself to be a pretty good developer and constantly get praise/compliments from my colleagues.

Dodged a bullet really after all the news I've seen recently about staff having their applications revoked due to hiring stoppages.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#92

Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate: They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. Keith Rabois (top VC), mentioned that FB has always prioritized optimization over…

I could believe that leetcode ability is not correlated with creativity but I have a hard time believing it's inversely correlated.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What creative culture? A billion user beast does not know, need or want creative or culture. It wants profits and more of them, every quarter. TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos. Instagram isn't losing to TikTok's 'creative culture', it's losing to American elite's favorite move - throwing money at a problem until everyone else quits, at which point you give ta…

>TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos TikTok has at least done three innovative things. One is the frictionless sign in that doesn't require an account, secondly the well done video editing tools and most importantly abstracting away the social graph. And on the finance site this doesn't check out either. TikTok is on track to triple revenue this year alone and t…

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Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#94
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. I don't think this is necessarily true because the people designing products are not the same people creating/implementing them. Even…

>there's some code out there that is a work of art and can inspire awe in everyone. and the people who wrote it didn't spend thousands of hours memorizing the same stupid leetcode exercises to pass lame interviews for 6 figures job, they worked on real projects tell me the fast inverse square root from Carmack would have been praised in an interview...

Perhaps if you spent more time with books, you'd know that John Carmack didn't invent the fast inverse square root algorithm associated with his name.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#95
post #4

Maybe it'll show up in their usage numbers. I stopped using IG because it's near impossible not to prevent the sound from blasting from accidentally scrolling or clicking on a reel. I feel like a product team that gave any shit whatsoever would give people a mute button that stays put. People use their phones in lots of different locations (with other people around). And phones are constantly blasting music at random…

What boggles my brain is when someone wants to show me a video on Instagram, but there is no way to play it from the beginning. So have to wait for it to loop around.

Typically the "solution" is to scroll up/down to the next/previous video and then back to the desired video. Though that only works for reels, not non-reel videos (whatever those are called).

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#96
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think Google have a failure to innovate? Obviously search was their first, core innovation, but over the years they’ve delivered so many other successful products (many acquired, true, but even those they’ve evolved really well). Off the top of my head: - Maps - AdWords - Gmail - YouTube - Analytics - Translate - Calendar - Sheets - Docs - Drive - Meet - Slides - Drawings - Forms - Trends - Alerts I’m sure…

Did you intentionally make a list of google acquisitions as a joke?

Many of these started as acquisitions, but they massively transformed them. For example, they acquired some products in the mapping space, but none of them remotely resembled what Google Maps have become.

Taking some starting point, hugely evolving it/transforming it, and growing it into a dominant market leading product, I personally consider that innovation.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#97
All of social media is broken right now.

Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. Last night a photo from my step daughter flickered briefly and then was lost. I couldn't find it again until this morning. I literally can't find their content anymore without scrolling and dodging videos that keep popping up.

Youtube broke entirely a few months ago. The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent. Several content creators I follow have their business dying from sudden drop in ad revenue due to the changes.

Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home. Stuff appears from friends or family days after posting, now at the top of my feed.

Twitter is, surprisingly, the least broken, at least I mostly still see the people I follow. I still miss stuff because of the algorithm, but it's not, yet, forcing a ton of stuff I'm not actually following down my throat. And the ads are still clearly ads.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#98

Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate: They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. Keith Rabois (top VC), mentioned that FB has always prioritized optimization over…

I mostly agree with you here. The other big thing is that Zuckerberg is really good at seeing the business value in other people's ideas. He chases financial value by copying what other companies do. Instead companies like Amazon and Apple are obsessed with generating real world value for the customers and let financial value follow. Without a doubt Zuck sets the business culture, people that think like him and solve…

> Instead companies like Amazon and Apple are obsessed with generating real world value for the customers and let financial value follow.

While I would argue that even Apple is mostly about execution not innovation (many of Apple innovations had been around for a while, but apple took execution to a different level), but Amazon?! What are the big Amazon innovations? The one click checkout? Having pushed selling books online (arguably failing to become profitable for a long time)? I would say amazon is of all these companies the example which shows that you don't need to innovate anything as long as you have enough finances to push massively into any market you want.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#99
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products. I don't think this is necessarily true because the people designing products are not the same people creating/implementing them. Even…

Don’t fall in the trap of thinking creativity nescessarily applies accross borders. Being creative with coding is not the same as being creative with painting or inventing new products. Of course smart and well trained techs can be creative, it just may not apply as well to creating new products line other types of creative minds.

I disagree. Creativity != art.

Re: Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

#100
post #36

You know what? I love the new instagram changes. And everyone I know has been using it more and more over the years. Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. Data doesn't lie. TikTok copied short form videos from.. vine. I mean youtube YLYL videos. I mean... newgrounds. Shit's been around, and both facebook and google are going to lap tik tok. Keep up :)

>Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it.

You're jumping the gun there. The people who hate it and use it are the people who were using it before the change and want it to go back. They were strongarmed into it and they're not about to abandon their userbase/followers overnight - they'll try and advocate for change and then migrate elsewhere.

But these changes are so relatively new that there hasn't even been time for any of that to play out yet.

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