61–70 of 189 posts
It seems so obvious to us that this is a short term win at the expense of the long term. I wonder if data driven companies like this are locked into local minimums via tons of short term optimizations to boost metrics. In optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent, some form of entropy (crucially temporarily decreasing fitness) or exploration (having parallel evaluations of the fitness function) is nece…
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I have the absolute opposite take. Facebook/Instagram were good tools for staying in touch with friends and sharing photos with them. Then TikTok came on the scene, and it was much less about connecting with friends as it was seeing short form entertainment. I view TikTok as much closer to YouTube than I do Instagram. So FB tried to chase TikTok, and ended up (a) making it much harder to follow and connect with your…
I feel like the smart play here is de-politicizing Facebook. No more politicians, no more political groups, no more political ads. Bring it back to being about people and connections.
This is great news. The faster Meta can decline and people can reclaim their time the better.
It is worthwhile if you can avoid the traps of attractive people dancing, casual outrage politics, cute animals, and people doing stupid things.
Edit: regarding the article adding the new advertisements, I hope they don't mess up some of the reels that are perfectly looped. I recently discovered those and some are incredible. Reminds me of the lions in kenya flash video that looped perfectly.
For me Instagram ads are nonrelevant and sort of deranged. Probably some of the worst that I regularly see. For example, I just checked Instagram and got an ad for Amazon. In that ad they were trying to sell me a log splitter, a peanut butter squirrel feeder cage, 25lb sack of peanuts, and a aluminum garbage can you would find in a park. These things aren’t even remotely relevant to me.
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because I want to know what my friends from college are up to? being in a messenger app group represents a much closer social relationship
So, voyeurism for curated updates. Personally I don't get it, and if old friends matter to me at all I'd message them to ask anyway.
The real change that drove all those billions in ad money was simple: under no circumstances can the user's scroll experience end due to the inventory of scrollable blocks ("content") running out.
The user doesn't know right away that the software will scroll infinitely. Email has an end, your IMs have an end. With social media, you have to tell yourself it's time to stop. Most people still won't do that until they reach a state of boredom.
The machine, having learned that, is tossing away old-fashioned images and text, and is switching to video to go even further to distract you, in hopes of keeping you for a few seconds longer, so you can see relevant advertising about some Wish.com gizmo.
It seems so obvious to us that this is a short term win at the expense of the long term. I wonder if data driven companies like this are locked into local minimums via tons of short term optimizations to boost metrics. In optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent, some form of entropy (crucially temporarily decreasing fitness) or exploration (having parallel evaluations of the fitness function) is nece…
Merely having statistics won't lead you to local optima, it's the incentive structure. Public companies need to have a positive second derivative on their revenue, which trickles down to PMs and directors doing anything in their power to improve the quarterly numbers at long-term costs.
I like instagram, in the same way that I like drinking. I know it's generally bad for me, but I enjoy it. There is a surprising amount of high quality posts about tech, science, history, music, and probably whatever you are interested in. Many of which would be worthy of the hn front page if they were a short blog instead of a short video. It is worthwhile if you can avoid the traps of attractive people dancing, casu…