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Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

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Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#21

Post by mike10921 »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #8

There is something about the TikTok style swiping videos which just hits differently. I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super addictive so just keep it off my phone. I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their “Reels” for hours before pulling myself away from it. YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile I find m…

YouTube is my time waster as well (besides when I actually watch technical info).

YouTube Shorts are decent but I must keep the volume off because for some reason creators think they must add the most annoying music to any video clip they upload. Similar to the way you describe TikTok I feel like I need a cold shower after endlessly scrolling those videos.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#22

Post by personjerry »

If you're an innovator and think along this trend, then you're fighting the fight in the trenches where Facebook and TikTok are already embedded and winning, and AI already promises to win the next round.

For me, the question is where can there be a shift that causes the existing competition to become derailed altogether? And how can you help induce such a change, and ride the wave?

For example, imagine a social shift away from the "online all the time" trend to "hanging out with people IRL", riding the end-of-covid wave.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#23

Post by ketzo »

jrm4 wrote: post #13
andsoitis wrote: post #2

That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences and behaviors for deciding what product features to build. Also interesting: 1. The Pre-Internet ‘People M…

At the risk of being overly optimistic: Number 4 is an interesting inflection point that could potentially (hopefully) sow the seeds of it's own destruction (or at least radical transformation?) Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." Hen…

If content-generation AI is given sufficient resources and training input, I think 4>5 is pretty much guaranteed.

The recommendation systems that power "algorithmic everyone" are not optimizing for real human interaction, or real people sharing real things; they're optimizing for the absolute most engaging content that they can find.

This is Kardashian-killing because no one person or brand -- not even Kim -- can create the most engaging content in the world on every single post; and even if they could, they can't do it at a rate to fill an entire feed.

Sufficiently good recommendation systems kill the Kardashians because they can crawl through an ocean of user-generated content and find the winners.

If you combine a sufficiently good content-generation AI with the data you glean from the world's best recommendation system, you can just create the most engaging possible content, without even knowing what that would be.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#24

Post by benjaminwootton »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #17
benjaminwootton wrote: post #8

There is something about the TikTok style swiping videos which just hits differently. I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super addictive so just keep it off my phone. I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their “Reels” for hours before pulling myself away from it. YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile I find m…

same here with the youtube/tik tok shorts, a barrage of video diarrhea to make my brain light up.

You can almost feel it grabbing your brain, and it takes real will to stop scrolling and get up. These products are really powerful.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#25

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

photochemsyn wrote: post #14

You have to dig through this entire article to get to the punchline, but here it is: > "These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as well: one of the outcomes of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make that shift more qu…

> but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US government and major corporations are also playing this game on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.

De-monitization on YouTube should make this obvious to anyone.

Why would YouTube recommend content that isn't going to make them money?

Companies get to decide what makes money / where their ads are placed (this makes sense).

The problem is - the social media companies are big enough that they don't really need to care about your user experience. You AREN'T the customer! All they care about is serving you ads.

YouTube would much rather you have a mediocre experience using YouTube for 5 minutes and they make $0.50 off you than you have an outstanding experience for 30 minutes but they make $0 off you.

You get what you pay for - and with Social Media... That's nothing.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#26

Post by cloutchaser »

strogonoff wrote: post #15

> That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. Stop right there. What you mean is that their corporate wallets like it. These companies delude themselves if they consider “spend more time in the app” as an indicato…

This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards.

You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades.

Same goes for the newsfeed.

Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about survival. Not “corporate wallets”

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#27

Post by slowmovintarget »

swyx wrote: post #7
andsoitis wrote: post #2

That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences and behaviors for deciding what product features to build. Also interesting: 1. The Pre-Internet ‘People M…

"the replacement of humans with machines will continue until morale improves"

My AI-generated content is being virtually consumed and clicked on by thousands of AI readers. No actual people in the loop. Happiness increases.

I also have an AI that filters out AI generated content so I only see things sourced directly from people I know to be people. Granted, Cortana sometimes slips and gets it wrong and lets through something that obviously came from an AI... Hmm... I wonder how that happened. Happiness decreases.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#28

Post by cloutchaser »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #8

There is something about the TikTok style swiping videos which just hits differently. I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super addictive so just keep it off my phone. I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their “Reels” for hours before pulling myself away from it. YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile I find m…

Isn’t this basically what 9gag also does, but TikTok just built a better interface and recommendation algorithm?

9gag seems almost exactly the same as tiktok, it just never got personalized

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#29

Post by rconti »

> I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as the type of person that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it.

I found this comment super-insightful. I generally hate online videos with a passion. I DO NOT click "recommended posts" or ads or videos or what I consider garbage. But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get interested in a thumbnail I see until I realize what "they're" trying to get me to click on.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#30

Post by pixl97 »

>The payoff, though, will not be “power” for these small creators: the implication of entertainment being dictated by recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending.

This is what these companies want. Take the power away from a few ultra powerful users (Kardashians for example), and retain that power for themselves.

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