Instagram Is Over • Hacker News Board

Re: Instagram Is Over

#151

Post by kodisha » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:29 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #46

babyshake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see a major player in the space really embracing the fashion and seasonality of their products and succeeding with that strategy.

Like the CPG, dating, porn, gaming, and clothing industries? Some categories of brands can be long lived. Coca Cola and Disney. Some categories of brands are mayflies. Pop music, TV, fast fashion. My hunch is the average lifecycle of social media brands and MMORPG properties are roughly the same. Say 5-10 years?

WOW would like to have a word.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#152

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #124

arnvald wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually keep using social apps more if they stayed closer to their original versions. My Facebook feed turned from updates from my friends and family to garbage filled with politics, ads, suggested pages, and I stopped using it. My Instagram feed turned from photos of my family and friends to garbage: again ads, recommended pages, later videos. Eventually I deleted it. Twitter was close to that when they introdu…

The desire to "grow", and the lack of a defined end state for that growth, is the problem. It's not hard to build a social media service that pays for itself and then some, but they all are run by greedy people and so they want more money all the time. These people have no notion of "enough money". That's the fundamental problem behind all social media services going to shit. The fediverse won't be like that though.

Time will tell what happens with the fediverse, collapsing under the weight of moderation sounds like a probable scenario to me.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#153

Post by saurik » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

Mistletoe wrote: post #112

63 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All mine has devolved to is trying to get me to watch absurd reels posts from half naked women trying to send me to an OnlyFans. Asking around to people I know they have experienced the same. I just stopped using it. It didn’t help that I realized every post on Instagram authentic or not is really just an ad. Even for people I know, it is an ad trying to sell me that their life is different than I know it is.

So, while I 100% agree with the original premise--that Instagram is filled with ads and content farms, with relatively few "real users" to be found--this specific complaint is actually "a you thing": Instagram's feed algorithm ranks content in ways that seems to give the wrong players power (such as by giving more weight to people who merely steal and aggregate content than the ones who produce it), but it isn't entirely incompetent.

I am, thereby, going to claim that, if you are getting nothing but half naked women on Instagram on your feed, it is because you actually "wanted" to see half naked women (...maybe "merely" subconsciously! as, while I am not entirely sure about Instagram, TikTok is apparently tracking implicit watch time more so than explicit actions, and maybe you stop for just a bit longer on such content as it catches your eye).

In contrast to your experience, I recently went through a devastating breakup, and my algorithmic Instagram feed seriously has no half naked women on it: it is, instead, nothing but an intense pile of captioned voices (like, an audio with text, but not video of that person) saying pseudo-motivational quotes about relationships ("if she had wanted to make time, she would have" sort of shit) with inspirational background music overlapped with videos of people "making stuff" (such as carpentry).

It is demoralizing to experience: I go into Instagram for whatever reason, start scrolling by accident, and then a half hour later I am at the bottom of a pit of emotions crying my eyes out while clutching a pillow and I am lucky if I escape even an hour after that :(... but, the algorithm does't care about my mental health: it only knows that if it shows me videos that cluster along these axes I apparently am willing to spend the rest of my life watching ads (which make up about 1/4th of the content on Instagram).

Re: Instagram Is Over

#154

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #92

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the last report from Meta, more people on a daily and monthly basis are using Facebook and Instagram than ever both. It's more nuanced than that. If you're losing traction where it matters - in younger generations & high-value markets like the US that have higher future cash flows - it doesn't matter if you're making up for it with usage from old people or people in poor countries without good advertising i…

> in younger generations & high-value markets like the US that have higher future cash flows People in their 30s and 40s earn more money than college students and new grads in their 20s, and they are spending that money right now. Facebook groups for home decorating, design, cars, fitness, parenting, all of those are really popular. You can go on Facebook and find a large community dedicated to literally any style of…

>but at some point Facebook may have to be happy with "just"

This isn't a Facebook problem, this is a late stage capitalism problem that risks causing our current economies to collapse to the ground.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#155

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:49 PM UTC

warkanlock wrote: post #19

This 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

MAU doesn't mean much if they are losing users in primary markets and new users are from places where the ads don't pay.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#156

Post by crossroadsguy » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:49 PM UTC

And there’s no use relevant/usable alternative on the horizon. Except a few utopian (or shall I say purist) ones.

I guess one reason could be - even if someone wants to give it a shot they pretty much know that one of these behemoths will copy and drive them out, or buy them out but for that they need to have audience which is locked in vast corporate silos.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#157

Post by imbnwa » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:51 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #114

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #81

On the topic of social media in decline, TikTok also appears to have peaked in content already. Following people isn't that interesting since most content creators that hit it big are One Hit Wonders. After they hit that big growth spike, they either follow the herd with the latest dance or trend, or they keep doing the same thing that made em famous with slight variations. How long can you milk the same dance routin…

You have to commend YouTube and Twitter's longevity as social networks. YouTube has better and more content than ever. Twitter also has the best and most relevant content, provided you curate your feed. All the stuff happening on academic Twitter, for instance, is hard to find elsewhere. Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy. The content is increasingly mediocre and hivemind-ish.

> Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy. The content is increasingly mediocre and hivemind-ish.

If you're just looking at the 'popular front page', sure, but there's a reason people now search Reddit from Google: there's value in a 'centralized hub' for communities versus Twitter's loosely coupled social graphs.

Reddit replaced all vBulletin-backed forums. You could argue Discord might usurp Reddit but Discord isn't searchable from the web and is logged in a terribly inconducive format.

I follow MMA, and the MMA reddit is the biggest forum for MMA on the English-speaking internet, especially for live events, there's no substitute, and I'm sure its like that with a lot of niches.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#158

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:51 PM UTC

syllablehq wrote: post #56

I think the key to a massively successful new social network will be a fallback API of just email/text. Why not let your shiny new social network UI parse any dumb input into a fancy thread format? Zero adoption friction. Federation baked in. Example: You run a mastodon-like service that can receive email. When it gets an email, it publishes a twirt with the contents. Truncates as needed. If it's a new email address,…

Have you ever ran a mail server?

When you're blocking 99.93% of incoming messages as spam you'll learn to be more selective.

Re: Instagram Is Over

#159

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 8:56 PM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #141

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to commend YouTube and Twitter's longevity as social networks. YouTube has better and more content than ever. Twitter also has the best and most relevant content, provided you curate your feed. All the stuff happening on academic Twitter, for instance, is hard to find elsewhere. Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy. The content is increasingly mediocre and hivemind-ish.

Reddit always had a hive mind, it's just the hive mind no longer agrees with you so you think it's irrelevant? Nope, frankly given how long reddit's been around and how it continues to gain in popularity I expect it will outlive everything on that list except for youtube. It's the webs default forum and there will always be a demand for a forum on the web.

[deleted]

Re: Instagram Is Over

#160

Post by throwaway82388 » Sat, Dec 03, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

joshenberg wrote: post #130

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…

Durable isn't a great word for what Facebook has become. It's been LinkedIn-ified - the entire notifications category is filled with useless recommendations and suggestions rather than meaningful updates from connections. And they still put notification dots up for it. Even if there's an opt out option and I could 'filter that' I haven't seen anything else relevant in 1+ year.

That sounds like a bad experience, but it’s not universal. It’s challenging to understand a platform from our individual vantage points (without access to internal dashboards), particularly on a network with between 2–3 billion MAUs. And if your personal interests are elsewhere, and your generational cohort is underrepresented. I’m an ‘elder millennial’ who got Facebook when it was still only for edu domains, and I’ve grown older with the service. I just briefly checked in with mine and within the last 24 hours I can see at least a dozen updates (all with decent engagement) from family and friends, some distant and others close. Babies being born, kids doing kid stuff, holiday posts. Pretty typical, particularly at this time of year. All that is to say, it’s all a function of your real world network. If I were the age I was when I started using Facebook, I’d probably find it desolate and boring, too.

But I would say ‘fairly durable’ is an apt description of an 18 year old service still operating at its scale. Exciting, maybe less than it once was. But fairly durable, certainly.