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Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

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Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#161

Post by satyrnein »

danielovichdk wrote: post #113

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…

Eh, previous generations were watching America's Funniest Home Videos and celebrity gossip on TV for 5 hours a day. It wasn't any better.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#162

Post by [deleted] »

btilly wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#163

Post by sytelus »

TLDR; Human wants and needs are two different things. If you only measure things like click throughs, you may end up measuring "wants" and therefore risk long term dissatisfaction as "needs" are not met. So the idea here is to engage paid human rating crew who will supposedly more focus on "needs" (because they are paid, they will presumably prefer less of garbage/controversial/clickbaits).

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#164

Post by satyrnein »

l33tbro wrote: post #142
inductive_magic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those were great indicators! Rap-metal was the weird transition between rock/metal being ascendent in the 90s to the complete takeover by hip hop. Ringtones were people paying money to customize their mobile experience, they were early apps and appstore. ICQ and IM were telling us that text based instant messaging was take a lot of share from email and phone calls both.

Of course, this is easy in retrospect, I couldn't have forecast it correctly at the time!

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#165

Post by sytelus »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #72
nemothekid wrote: post #11

I like that they asked actual users, and provided actual examples; it's something I've always felt off about Instagram's Reels vs TikTok. However the takeaway is that your TikTok feed is curated by hand by artisan robots vs Instagram is curated by lizards who only care about data. Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has t…

> I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram. For me that isn't the case - I follow mostly "regular" people and enjoy it, but... The problem I have with Instagram is that when I open the app I want to see the photos that people I've followed have posted since I last opened, it in time order. Yet It's quite a struggle not to see reels or suggested po…

This is an issue that is killing FB/Insta and I am not sure why nobody in Meta seems to get this. Apps attract people with certain expectations and mindset. When I want to login to FB/Insta, I want to see posts from people I know. Unfortunately, I made a mistake to like posts from few groups and that was basically the end of my newsfeed. Now all I get is posts from the grops from random people. Eventually it becomes same-old same-old and you quit.

But here's the most braindead thing FB has done: They actually have feature called "show first" which I tried to use it to force FB show posts from friends and not from groups. But some PM there probably made decision that this is not a good idea and forced to limit to only 30 people! So, now when I log in to FB, I get few posts from 30 people and then it's garbage from groups again.

It is beyond me how no one can see these issue there.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#167

Post by sytelus »

btilly wrote: 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…

You are missing a huge point. MySpace and Friendster didn't got out of fashion suddenly because social is not "sticky". Friendster was heavily burdened with scaling issues, design complexity and bugs that basically force moved users to FB which remained fast, slick and extremely usable. Similarly, MySpace just couldn't engineer features faster that users wanted. The big point here is that social is very hard engineering problem and FB excelled it in early days. They are currently failing, in my opinion, because their newsfeed algorithm shows too much content from groups and much less from friends. The group content is something people will like initially but becomes monotonic later and so they quit.

So, the social platforms have failed historically because of engineering issues that their competitior excelled at.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#168

Post by sytelus »

nixcraft wrote: post #14

Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting r…

YouTube is plagued by unnecessarily padded content because I believe creators were rewarded depending on how much time they spent watching their videos (and hence number of ads that can be shown). Vast majority of YouTube videos I come across can be reduced by 90% in length without any loss in information you are seeking. YouTube needs to simply change incentives for the content creators and TikTok will have a massive competition.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#169

Post by charcircuit »

bluehorseray wrote: post #85

I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn't really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them. But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't…

>I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app

The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app)

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#170

Post by sytelus »

smelendez wrote: post #39

TikTok has such a content and data advantage. More viewers, more creators, more content. Feels like it’ll be very hard for Meta, YouTube or any competitor to come back without coming up with a hugely superior recommendation algorithm, and TikTok’s feels hard to beat, or some kind of improved creation tools that give it a content library advantage. And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too w…

Content and data are not advantage. Creators can simply re-upload their content to Insta/YouTube to increase their revenues. It's already happening. It will accelerate if Insta/YouTube provides right incentives.
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