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Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

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Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#81

Post by fdewrewrewf »

evouga wrote: post #75

It's almost impossible to overstate how significantly social media altered the fabric of the Internet. From "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" to everybody having seen multiple photos of your dog. From a decentralized web of special-interest fiefdoms to digital sharecropping. And now, the era of social media is over. Instagram's death leaves Twitter as the last relevant social network, and Twitter's prospec…

>content distribution platforms serving a large audience that passively consumes the content of a small cadre of creators.

Given the rise of TikTok-style endless scrolling through short video content, there is a surprisingly apt comparison - channel-hopping through hundreds of channels when you know it's all crap.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#82

Post by rchaud »

jcfrei wrote: post #39

The rise and fall of all social networks is inevitable. Like many things they follow this dynamic where they go out of fashion when too many use it. Currently everybody is moving to TikTok and there's lots of good content there. But that platform too will fade eventually and another one appear.

It's not at all inevitable.

Only US-centric ones are failing after years of dominance, and even then, most have accumulated enough money to pivot into something even more horrifying.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#83

Post by exabrial »

bedast wrote: post #11

Instagram is one of the last social media platforms I use. It's mostly about my dogs. I follow mostly greyhound people. My feed is about half greyhounds and half ads. Increasing ad load from that? I guess it's time to retire my Instagram account. This might be the thing that gets me to bite the bullet and actually check out Pixelfed.

Pixelfed looks incredible, but we need all of the "influencers" to install it for it to matter

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#85

Post by RamblingCTO »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #65

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…

> I like instagram, in the same way that I like drinking. I know it's generally bad for me, but I enjoy it.

I agree so much, really dig the analogy :D

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#87

Post by bobthepanda »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #44
ledauphin wrote: post #10

i check Instagram maybe a couple of times a year and it's almost exactly like watching your college friends' kids age from afar. Each time you see them, the sensation of how much they've grown is so overwhelming that you can hardly resist saying something along the lines of "I can't believe how big they've gotten!". except with Instagram it's, "this is so much less usable than the last time I tried it. Why does anybo…

Personally, I think the future is in messenger apps. Why login to Instagram or Facebook to see updates when you can have a family/friends group in Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal (pick your poison).

There’s not really money in that, though. Messenger and Whatsapp are not pulling its weight in revenue, though not for lack of trying.

Also, it’s worth noting that HN isn’t exactly representative of the population at large.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#88

Post by stanford_labrat »

foobarian wrote: post #71

There has got to be a saturation point in apps like this. Kind of like Knuth's Tex codebase, at some point it is finished and you just need bugfixes. So subjecting a product like that to indefinite mandatory revenue increases is bound to ruin it sooner or later. It makes me wonder, what would it take to run a social network in steady state? It sounds like it would need to be a non-profit or at least private organizat…

Makes you wonder what the steady state features would be. DM/group chat, chronological/activity based feed, friends, personal profile, maybe group pages? Seems pretty simple and honestly a lot like early facebook.

I would definitely pay for something like above if it meant 0 ads, I despise ads and go out of my way to avoid them when I can.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#89

Post by RamblingCTO »

random42_ wrote: post #38
323 wrote: post #15

75% of the normal Instagram feed (not the stories) is now account promotions and recommendations. It's impossible to browse it and look at what you followed anymore.

At least on Instagram for iOS, you have the option to tap the Instagram logo on the top left corner and choose "Following". It will only show posts from the accounts you follow and, at least for me, there are barely ads there.

I just tried it, so different to the regular stream, wtf!

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#90

Post by nradov »

foobarian wrote: post #61
datadata wrote: post #54

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…

The mechanism is called Visionary CEO and good luck with that.

In this case the CEO's stated vision is to dominate the AR/VR market. So in that context it makes sense for Meta to treat legacy properties like Instagram as cash cows and maximize short-term revenue at the expense of long-term growth. That revenue can be used to finance new AR/VR products.

We'll find out in 10 years if Mark Zuckerberg was a visionary genius or an idiot.

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