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Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

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Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#161

Post by at-fates-hands »

asutekku wrote: post #113
Miner49er wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a mistake in the short-term, but in the long-term it'll hurt growth. New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?

People will flock in where other people are. Unless Instagram gets a decent competitor, people will just get used to it.

This is the issue that made Facebook to big to fail now.

They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#162

Post by burger_moon »

mcbutterbunz wrote: post #45
keiferski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time it was quite elegant. Then, like everything Facebook acquires, it grew into a bloated "why not?" monster.

IMO, its elegance came from its simplicity. It did one thing and it did it well. There is an ever growing demand for new features, not necessarily from users, to fend off rivals and to stay relevant and exciting. As with a lot of popular apps and services, it ends up bloated, trying to offer everything to everyone and satisfying no one.

Also when your salary is tied to feature development, bloated apps and poor UX is inevitable.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#163

Post by mcintyre1994 »

danpalmer wrote: post #59
me_me_me wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but it has limited growth potential. Latest generations are not interested joining it. So in 10 years it will be a dying platform. Kodak didn't die when invented digital cameras, but it was a downhill ride towards inevitable cliff.

This is just a branding thing though right? We've had all sorts of social networks that each rise and fall. If Facebook has the formula for a successful network and can apply that formula over and over again that's pretty successful. Facebook is probably the the company most able to claim to have achieved this, with facebook.com and Instagram being two big hits, arguably Messenger and WhatsApp too. TikTok is probably…

It's not clear Facebook have the formula for a successful new network - Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquired. When Facebook have tried to create their own new networks, like their original Snapchat clone, it didn't work. That's not really a knock on them though, I don't think anybody else could claim to be able to spin up a successful new social network either.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#164

Post by daenz »

rsynnott wrote: post #156

How to appeal to Gen Z; name the thing after a form of video playback that was totally obsolete before any of them were born.

People seem to underestimate how important a name can be. "Instagram Reels", "Reels", "IG Reels"... they have no buzz, they're clunky to say, and like you said, it already implies ancient uncool tech. The marketing people must have been phoning it in when they named this.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#165

Post by 0xffff2 »

dmitriid wrote: post #7

> The new product will be embedded within Instagram Oh god. It means that, like Instagram TV or whatever it was called, it will be forcibly shoved down your throat for the next half a year with nagging reminders for another year.

I check Instagram most days and I had never heard of Instagram TV before this post. They can't possibly have been shoving it down everyone's throats that aggressively.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#166

Post by throwaway5752 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #38

I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry. At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service --Tik…

How much money was Vine losing or making? I honestly am not aware of their unit economics prior to the shutdown.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#167

Post by spike021 »

OzzyB wrote: post #9

Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time: " Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served b…

>And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow?

It already is... About a week or two ago Instagram decided to put the "Shop" or "Marketplace" button where the "Likes" tab button was... And now to get to your likes/follows/etc. you need to go to your profile tab, and find the "heart" button in the top right.

But because the "like" button has been in the same place for the past several years, it's still ingrained in my habits to press where the "Marketplace" button is, so I keep opening the store page...

I can't believe this wasn't on purpose...

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#168

Post by xster »

carlosdp wrote: post #43

> Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile. That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch. It's a big part of why it's so popular. > Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users ov…

Not only that but the machine learning models on those ARs are so successful that judging from our context (of non-Chinese apps we're normally exposed to), I'd be semi-surprised that we can algorithmically apply makeup so correctly with ambient lighting on a single still frame on a compute server, much less locally, in real-time on a low powered phone.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#169

Post by arkitaip »

rsynnott wrote: post #156

How to appeal to Gen Z; name the thing after a form of video playback that was totally obsolete before any of them were born.

The people who launched Reels are probably in their 30s and 40s and working against serious organizational biases that prevent them from innovating. So not surprised that they named this Reels.

Re: Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

#170

Post by didip »

alehul wrote: post #68
OzzyB wrote: post #9

Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time: " Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served b…

As an American who looks at WeChat and sees a massive, unintuitive jumbled mess, you've explained in this comment how that could possibly be so popular in China! I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app. By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.

As an American who had to use WeChat for some stubborn friends...

I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid.

I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.

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