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Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

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141–150 of 274 posts

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#141

Can we finally agree that 'currently cool' is no longer a moat, and stop giving insane 10x price/sales valuations to social media companies on the promise of eternal future growth / profitability.

You're talking about companies other than Facebook, right? Because Facebook is 3.6x price/sales with double digit growth still.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#142

Stop asking Gen Z for anything. Fuck me, I don't even know what a Gen Z is. Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too. Instagram is dying ? No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream. People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything. Kylie Jenner ? Really ? I can almost taste the sugary fe…

People ask the young generation because they are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading. Consider how many people will read your answer. How much attention of HN-audience-type-people did you just send down the drain for the righteous feeling of ranting off-topic?

> the young generation ... are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading.

They sure can be. But young people around me in the early 2000s were into rap-metal, buying ringtones, and using ICQ or IM. These obviously were not great indicators of what would happen in the near future.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every generation makes the same mistake you're making right now by writing off whatever the younger generation is focusing their time on. You can find quotes from 1000 years ago with the same exact sentiment as your comment. Every single time they were wrong.

Yeah, scrolling photos of big butts, breasts and yachts plus a lot of ads it's really pushing forward society as a whole, is hard to believe the staggering similarity of when books became mainstream and old people worried the young would become dumber given they wouldn't have to memorize.

How about the TV and zapping?

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#144
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorts is really half baked. Almost all content i consume on Youtube is in english, but shorts surprisingly ignores that and show content native to my country (most of the time irrelevant). It boggles my mind how YouTube can screw up something as basic as that.

Tangentially related but when I have lived in countries where English isn't the first language I'm amazed how many big companies ignore the language set in my web requests (English) and serves me content in the county's native language. Google for example and they really hide the button to chsngethe language. I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating…

Google really sucks with this. It used to be a lot worse a couple years ago when you had to navigate the dumb GDPR thing before you could see the language selector. Believe it or not, its the main thing that pushed me to DuckDuckGo.

Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#146
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a millennial I can tell you exactly why TikTok is better: 1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work. 2. Reels are often…

> 1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work. OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you wat…

It's the dreaded "more of the same shit" algorithm that people confuse with deep learning and AI. The sad reality is that recommendation teams in these companies maintain some ugly gobbled together if .. else logic rather than a proper recommendation engine. Proper recommendation engines are hard. That's why recommendations change dramatically if you just use a vpn or travel. The IP address based geo location trumps everything else they might know about you. That's because there's a big if else around whatever other logic they have.

Add promoted content/ads to the mix that they are paid to promote and you end up with a mix of content that is primarily based on where you are, what they want to pimp in that region, and more of the same shit you were clicking on anyway; more or less in that order. The exact same shit quite often actually. Even filtering that out seems hard.

They are incentivized by ad clicks, not by your amusement. That's the business mistake that allows Tiktok to prosper because they are still trying to grow at the expense of their competition which means that they are in fact incentivized by your amusement as observed through your addictive behavior in the form of content clicks.

Instagram was like that once. And then Facebook bought them and started messing it up. Facebook was once like that until Facebook became an advertising company. The mistake that gets made over and over again in this space is that at some point they think they've won and start milking their network for revenue. The process of doing that destroys and erodes that network and something else pops up that is more interesting for users.

Tik Tok is doomed to go there too. Just a matter of time. It's irresistible for shareholders and advertisers. They'll get dollar signs in their eyes and they'll mess it up.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#147
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every generation makes the same mistake you're making right now by writing off whatever the younger generation is focusing their time on. You can find quotes from 1000 years ago with the same exact sentiment as your comment. Every single time they were wrong.

I really think that a video of a girl dancing, her clothes changing every time she claps her hands, made for a platform that prizes sucking out teens's attention for the chance of showing them an ad and collecting data on them, will be written off in a few years. Besides, everything is safe until it is not and research is increasingly pointing towards the toxicity of social media on the young mind. Even doctors smoke…

Plenty of video games, movies, TV shows, graphic novels, books, plays, songs, have little to no staying power, entertainment value or cultural relevance of any kind.

Does the fact that ET the video game was produced, or Bram Stoker apparently wrote a book so bad were still dunking on it 100 years later invalidate either of their mediums? Does the fact that twerking exists and is labelled invalidate the cultural impaxt of dancing?

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#148

Stop asking Gen Z for anything. Fuck me, I don't even know what a Gen Z is. Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too. Instagram is dying ? No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream. People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything. Kylie Jenner ? Really ? I can almost taste the sugary fe…

100% agree

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#149
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, scrolling photos of big butts, breasts and yachts plus a lot of ads it's really pushing forward society as a whole, is hard to believe the staggering similarity of when books became mainstream and old people worried the young would become dumber given they wouldn't have to memorize.

How about the TV and zapping?

It depends on what they are watching, are they watching "mythbusters" or "the Kardashians"? The problem start when the giant majority uses the medium to consume garbage, the drop in intelligence in the US and it's politicians is likely directly related to that.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#150
post #37

Time to trot out http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf again. (Yes, I am one of the co-authors.) Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and d…

Has there been research done on negative value from scaling, the uncool participants effect? Where teenagers/young adults leave (or reduce their activity/start looking for other networks) when mom and grandpa join?

I'd love to see actual research on "the uncool participants effect" but anecdotally it feels like a real thing that's impossible to avoid. Any social network will start to favor a specific culture - enforced either by the algorithm or by its participants.

Once that culture starts to go out of fashion (which is inevitable) either the algorithm will have to shift to meet the culture (because the existing participants are probably not going to be fast enough to change) or new users will find another platform to start using. That's why even though people are saying Instagram will die if they start to prioritize Reels, I feel like they're going to die if they don't and this is a last ditch effort.

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