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Instagram Is Over

theatlantic.com

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Re: Instagram Is Over

#131

Post by evo »

Animats wrote: post #86

"To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be." That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This…

I feel like there’s a natural adoption curve to social media:

1. The growing social media platform balances the needs of two user groups: the consumer’s need for fresh content and the neophyte producer’s need for a slowly ramping trickle of validation. This is possible because the people don’t know how to produce content in the new format yet.

2. The mature social media platform has picked winners. We know who the successful youtubers are, the successful twitch streamers, etc., and they know how to create the optimal media for their platform. At this point we’re maximally satisfying consumer demand, but we’re actively repelling the neophyte producers because the bar is now too high. They form a growing untapped market for the next social media platform.

3. Decay. A competing platform has stolen the limelight by restoring the dynamism of the consumer/producer balance. The successful producers of the platform start flexing out to the new upstart, though they’re unlikely to repeat their successes there, they’re too late to the game and bound to old habits. Chasing feature parity with the new platform does nothing because now you’re just upsetting the existing balance but that’s not suddenly going to pull new people into the game, they’ve already written you off.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#132

Post by iLoveOncall »

63 wrote: post #107
Animats wrote: post #86

"To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be." That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This…

This isn't my experience with Instagram at all. I only follow people I know personally, check in once or twice a day and see posts and stories from them and really nothing else. No sponsored posts, no reels, etc. Maybe some ads. I don't use the discover page and stop scrolling my feed once I get through all the new posts so maybe that's it.

I am in the same situation as you but as soon as you have caught up with the posts from friends (which if you only have a few hundreds and check everyday goes very quickly), it's literally only sponsored posts.

I just checked right now, I scrolled through 10 posts of accounts that I follow, which took 30 seconds, before getting "You're all caught up" and having literally only spam posts.

And I don't even go on Instagram every day.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#133

Post by seydor »

nightski wrote: post #89
throwaway82388 wrote: post #15

I’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…

It takes a second to open an app, become a MAU, and then close it in disinterest. I'll admit this is my relationship with Facebook. I never see anything on there I am remotely interested in. Just old relatives spewing nonsense. But I guess I count as one of those 2 billion MAUs. I wonder how many are in the same spot.

You keep opening it though

Re: Instagram Is Over

#134

Post by pelasaco »

ncr100 wrote: post #14
pelasaco wrote: post #9

I 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 the…

> Anyhow it's sad that Facebook has so much of my family's lives hostage... Only there can I see what's up.

I'm not the social media kind of people, but I have some friends and family members, that my last words were through facebook. So as a communication tool, I see its value. Said that, I don't have the app installed anywhere. Just messages notifications via email.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#136

Post by saiya-jin »

Animats wrote: post #86

"To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be." That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This…

This is 100% my experience with facebook. It used to be bearable, but once covid and WFH hit globally, they changed ratio of adverts massively overnight, making the use of product a sufferfest for people like me who are allergic to ads. Unfortunately not even ublock origin can handle all of their embedded ads.

Well, I certainly will never ever miss FB but those contacts would be nice to preserve somehow...

Re: Instagram Is Over

#137

Post by brian-armstrong »

phillipcarter wrote: post #84
denton-scratch wrote: post #77

> something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever. There seems to be a thing that some people hate "fedoras". I think it's to do with the "Fedora guy" meme. The hat Jerry Messing appears in is not a fedora; it's a trilby. A trilby is a hat with a quite narrow brim, and stiffened; it's often woven and patterned. It can be made of just about anything (such as leather). You ca…

This comment is imperceptible from a parody of a hacker news comment.

It perfectly captures the original characterization of the meme. I really hope they are in on the joke.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#138

Post by throwaway82388 »

nickthegreek wrote: post #116
throwaway82388 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is remarkable how hard it is for a business to simply last a decade. To do it at the scale of the incumbent apps is astounding to me. While TikTok is growing quickly, we still don’t know its long term potential, how ‘sticky’ it is. I’d predict it has a trajectory more like Twitter and less like Snapchat. But it could well become a YouTube. All we can do is wait and find out.

TikTok has a creator fund that incentives and rewards their creators. It is much closer to YouTube than Twitter or Snapchat. And I’m pretty sure it’s DAUs are way greater than both of those as well.

I regretted the Twitter comparison as soon as I reread my comment. I was thinking in broader terms — apps where the bulk of users follow creators and not personal contacts tend to grow and sustain very differently. But it’s so obviously most similar to YouTube, from a user perspective, it’s an accelerated YouTube experience.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#139

Post by system16 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #126

Instagram, like many social networks, is what you make of it and who your friends are. Pick friends and who you follow well and it's a great experience. Pictures and video are equally supported, discovery is good, search is the best of any social network IMO. And pro-tip: if your discovery is too full of stuff you don't want, click stuff you don't want and click "not interested". It'll then remove similar posts from…

That's hardly the case anymore and it's one of the main points the article is making. It doesn't matter who you follow when well over half your feed is composed of ads, suggested reels, and two week old TikTok reposts from random strangers.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#140

Post by matheusmoreira »

Animats wrote: post #86

"To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be." That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This…

It's how everything on the internet dies. Advertising infects and ruins pretty much everything. Even normal websites are just as bad, they even have the exact same escalating ads problem. By now the web is unusable without uBlock Origin and Instagram's problem is we can't install an ad blocker on it.

There should be a way to speed up this cycle to make them fail faster. These corporations are making way too much money selling off our attention to the highest bidder as if it was their property.

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