When Facebook bought it, they prioritized growth over the product itself. This kills the product.
Instagram Is Over
11–20 of 226 posts
Re: Instagram Is Over
#12Eldest son (17) and all his mates use it - very rarely do they post publicly, it's purely for messaging. I've never been sure why, there's plenty enough alternatives, but that's how it is for him and his cohort.
Re: Instagram Is Over
#13Social products all have a lifetime value and it’s incredibly short. The same thing will also happen to TikTok one day. I suspect we will learn in the coming decades that social media companies are very profitable in the short term, but not so in the long term, say 20 years, unless the keep introducing new viral social products.
This is a problem for commercial social media companies. Companies need to make profit to operate, and once they stop being able to show growth then investments start to dry up. There is also no clear revenue model aside from ads and mining of user data.
The situation is quite different in open source world. The only factors that matter for an open source platform are having enough people who are willing to develop it, run servers, and post content. Once the platform reaches enough users to be sustainable then it can exist indefinitely without need for growth or any significant funding.
We can look at Mastodon as a case study. It builds on top of all the work done by GNU Social and the OStatus protocol. GNU Social languished in obscurity for many years, but Mastodon was able to build on this work and create a much larger social network. Now, there's a whole federation of different platforms using ActivityPub protocol that grew out of OStatus. Fediverse will likely outlive every single commercial social media platform in existence today.
Re: Instagram Is Over
#14I hope not. I use it as a way to save my moments with my family, in the expectation that It will survive some good years, and therefore my kids can then watch the pics, videos, comments and get a better picture (pun intended) of the context of the photos. Much better than have it in a disk (if its survive) or printed.
This situation is increasingly a concern for me too, and I think replication and shared data ownership is the solution.
Like everyone you care about having a copy of your data, and the copy always being up to date, perhaps encrypted so only those family you want to consume the content have access to those pictures too via user control.
Anyhow it's sad that Facebook has so much of my family's lives hostage... Only there can I see what's up.
I wish I could see a 'family' feed.
Re: Instagram Is Over
#15I’m far from bullish on meta long-term, but reporting like this would have you believe that nobody uses Facebook, and that Instagram is soon to share its fate. Optimists that they are, tech reporters overweight growth to absurd extremes. Maybe reporting on youth trends brings out the insecurities in all of us—you’d rather not look clueless in front of your two cool friends in their early 20s than the 2 billion or so Facebook MAUs.
TikTok is a platform with huge growth potential. IG is perceptibly declining. But Facebook has proven itself fairly durable, mostly to people outside tech and media bubbles. It’d be wise to not call it over just yet.
Re: Instagram Is Over
#16Instagram as a social network sucks but I like sharing my photos with people who are already my friends (private account), and seeing their photos too.
Re: Instagram Is Over
#17I wonder if there’s a market for small app, limited in scope, knock off of the original Instagram. $1/month.
You end up having a cyclical problem, though:
No one uses it because no one posts > No one posts because they don't expect interaction > No one expects interaction because no one uses it
And then brands or influencers don't join because there's no potential to make money.
Part of the history of these big incumbents is that people were discovering a more user-friendly way to use the web through them; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube all were "Hey, we can now do something we could do before, much easier, in a more accessible way that I can show to my normie friends/my parents."
Alternatives that DO come up, like 500px or Vimeo, end up needing to become more for enthusiasts (people who care about fidelity, rather than novelty), turning away normies in the process. That's fine for them, as long as their goal isn't to "be an alternative YouTube/Flickr."
Re: Instagram Is Over
#18Instagram was over when all the “kids” were on Snapchat, except it wasn’t.
Maybe it is, but it will be a death by 500 million cuts, not a max exodus. There is no clear successor.
Re: Instagram Is Over
#19This is one of the biggest jibes I have ever read, given that Meta's MAU is the highest of all time (2.9b, if I remember correctly)
Instagram it's not over, and I bet will win the battle against TikTok
Re: Instagram Is Over
#20Instagram used to be about seeing what my friends were up to; now it’s all my friends resharing made-for-IG takes and re-re-re-re-re-sharing group photos I’ve already seen seven times.
I want an “OC Only” toggle.
Edit: And the above was referring only to Stories. I haven’t looked at the feed regularly in over a year.