Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri

I doubt that anyone at Facebook cares about small businesses beyond making money off them, but they do have a point here. Instagram & Facebook are at the center of a lot of small businesses/side hustles. Those depend pretty heavily on advertising to generate sales or to monetize their posts.

I'm dubious that all this tracking really is that effective for ads. But linking a purchase to an ad is undeniably important. If you can't do that then the current system breaks down. Hard to know if what replaces it will be better or worse.

but Gruber's post is certainly implying as much.

> That’s exactly what Apple is doing — giving users awareness over what is going on, and control over it.

Personally, I find basically everything about Instagram bad. The only reason I use it is because a lot of my friends share their pictures there.

Their app is full of bugs, at least on my regular Android phone, dark mode always messes up, ghost notifications, random crashes, etc.

The platform is full of bots. My profile is set to private, so everybody who wants to follow me needs to request first. On some days, I get requests from 10+ profiles trying to sell porn. And that's without following any big influencers, just friends.

The bots also invade basically every public comment section, trying to sell porn or NSFW snapchat. I don't get why they are successful, but I assume they are, given the scale they operate.

Their TikTok clone feature that basically completely spams my discover/search tab is full of content taken from TikTok or barely dressed girls trying to push their OnlyFans. Maybe that was the plan, I find it just annoying.

And now to their ads, easily one of the most annoying parts. Given how much data Facebook/Instagram is collecting, you'd assume they'd somehow manage to show interesting and relevant advertisings. At least for me and some friends I talked to, that is absolutely not the case. While it feels like every third post is an ad, there is nothing relevant at all. Basically all ads I get on instagram are trying to sell me 100k passive income online courses, cheap Chinese drop shipping products, knockoff products or trading apps (something I was never remotely interested in either).

I question the words "sucked in." Influenced is more appropriate.

Before VisiCalc was invented by Frankston and Bricklin, nobody wanted it. Many people had the problem it solved, but nobody knew it existed, so they didn't go looking to buy it.

Advertising and public relations (see PG's essay "the Submarine") influenced people to buy it. A lot of those folks were people whose businesses improved after buying it, which is why "spreadsheets" went on to become one of the most important product categories of its age.

I think the difference between "influenced" and "manipulated" has to do with informed consent. An ad, clearly marked as such, influences. Advertorials masquerading as independent opinion, paying influencers to use a product to generate faux social proof, manipulating social media algorithms to make it appear as if a preponderance of people you know share a particular viewpoint...

That's all manipulation because the recipient is either completely unaware of what is going on, or dark patterns are used to make it difficult for them to discover what is going on.

But using keywords to target people and then giving them an ad that is clearly labeled as an ad? I think that's just influence.

You're weirdly obliquely referring to political ads. Those are ads.