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Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

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201–210 of 231 posts

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lolwut? Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the same. It doesn’t even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved. It may very well be the most toxic property out there. It’s hard to imagine something more phony, optimized soley as a way to waste your time tapping away giving “likes”. Watching somo…

I admit I’m surprised to hear that. I don’t use Instagram that often. Sometimes I pop on to see pictures of friends’ kids, holidays, parties, or events. That’s basically 90% of what I see. I post holiday pictures and interesting things I cook, because some other people like to see them. Sometimes there are ads in my feed, and for the most part they’re inoffensive products that I even sometimes look at! It’s just kind…

Agreed. I realized a few weeks ago that I really like Instagram because everything on there is original content- pictures/videos from my friends and a very few select people I don't actually know that I share interests with. And that's kind of what I want to see- the highlights of what people are up to in life.

No one is sharing content from BlatantlyBiasedNews.sketchydomain all day, memes, or other crap. Its the stuff I see less and less of on FB, and why while I still check FB at least daily, its starting to feel more like going through the motions than something I enjoy doing.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#202

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I have a passive income of €1.5k/month without being a millionaire. Some of my friends are millionaires and we are basically equal. We all can choose to work and are free, this makes all the difference. The main differentiator between rich people and others is the fact that rich people don't have to work . This is the biggest freedom. I figured out that I don't need to be rich to do that. I still work, but I mainly d…

May I ask what kind of business are you running for your passive income and how you got there? Background of this question: Also form Europe (Austria), an EE engineer but modestly paid and overworked. I figure I should pivot to a passive income source as even switching jobs won't imporve my quality of life since companies are overly stingy on paying competitive salaries and most try ot burn you out in the long run as…

Ok, I will give some instructions. Unfortunately, it's not an easy way. It's mainly websites.

1. Know your numbers: How much do you need to live? How much do you spend each month? How much money can you save up in your job every year?

2. Save up. Live extremely cheap and save every penny. You need enough money to live for ~9-12 months without any income, e.g. if you need 1200€ you need to save minimum €14k - no holidays and expensive stuff until you've reached your number. This is your lifeline money.

3. Save a little more: You need to invest money to make money. You need about €5-10k minimum for investments (buying domain names, themes, content, designs, ...)

4. You have saved up €20-30k? Continue the plan. Otherwise continue to live extremely frugal and increase your income.

5. There are many ways now: build websites, AirBnB, flipping stuff, writing books ... - first, you have to build something. After you've found something that works, you continue to increase the profit margin and automate the process (also utilizing manual labour). You can only do this if you already have some money, this is the reasoning behind step 1 and 2.

- - -

In my calculations, you need to invest roughly €30-40k to make €1-3k/month in completely passive income (I achieved it with 5-10k, but I was lucky). It's definitely achievable in 3-4 years to save this amount of money if you commit to a frugal lifestyle, save up and invest it correctly (I achieved it in some months, but as I said, I was lucky).

I think it's not fair to sell you the idea that it's easy - although my journey was extremely straightforward, I know that most people struggle to even make a dollar online. But I can assure you that you will find a way if you're committed to leave your day job behind.

But please make sure that you have enough savings, I know many people who left their job and after 6 months they ran out of money. You don't want to be the defeated one who wasn't well prepared for this type of lifestyle.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#203
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were multiple memes with screenshots of people declaring they were quitting Facebook and using Instagram exclusively. Don't know if this was widespread though.

Ah I see, thank you. I've also mostly left FB, keeping the account around only for events and messenger. It has become so cluttered. It really is on its last legs.

Facebook is my new rolodex :)

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#204
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of commenters seem to be bemoaning this poster as missing out on endless riches. Why? we already know that being super rich doesn't really make you all that much happier compared to being rich (and if you are a programmer in work in then you are pretty rich). I feel that they missed out more on the rocketship journey of being on a startup. And even then that's not everyone's cup of tea.

There's a gigantic difference between $200,000 a year and "I don't need to work again." The "money doesn't make you happy" camp compares $70,000/year and $200,000/year; not $200,000/year and "I have enough money to never work again if I don't feel like it."

Those two goals are only separated by about a decade of normal work, which is not even much more time than it takes to bring a startup to an exit.

If you can put 1-2.5M dollars into investments you can pull safe returns of enough to live on indefinitely and never need to work again.

Making >$200k a year and being frugal it is not that hard to put together 1-2.5 million dollars in capital.

At 10 years of 250k with a 40% tax rate and 30k in annual expenses with 7% average returns, you pull down about 70k in capital gains at 5% returns in year 10 (so you can keep 2% extra nominal in to keep up with the fed's inflation target and maintain that purchasing power forever). $70k is less than you made, but is more than enough to live on without working for the rest of your life.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#205
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video calling and live video is innovation now?

I can't say that I or anyone I know has ever thought "I wish I could do video calling" on IG

Maybe they’ll add a p2p payments system too!

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#206
post #55
post #9

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I was shocked to discover that many people making salaries amongst the highest percentile in the world are indeed a few months without paychecks away from being in an unpleasant financial situation. I’m not too sure what the overarching reasons for that are, but my guess is that lifestyle inflation is very real, financial education isn’t very common, and many people focus on the wrong abstractions (ie decision making…

That, and rent that's well over 50% of your monthly income, to have a 1 bedroom apartment miles from anything.

No programmer working at A-list Bay Area companies should be earning so little that a 1 bedroom anywhere needs to be 50% of their gross income.

1 bedrooms in Mountain View are going for 3-4K/month. No programmers at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook are making less than $100k. Starting salaries (not counting bonuses and RSUs) are between $120k and $150k.

NIMBY-ism shovels money towards landlords, no doubt, but Bay Area programmers are still very rich.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#207
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lolwut? Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the same. It doesn’t even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved. It may very well be the most toxic property out there. It’s hard to imagine something more phony, optimized soley as a way to waste your time tapping away giving “likes”. Watching somo…

> 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace hybrid abominations designed to get likes. IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.

Have you ever really thought about the feed you get from Twitter? It's a jumbled mess of insight, humor, flaming and trolling. The context switching required to jump from comedians to programmers to politicians to pundits is EXHAUSTING.

The thing that Twitter most needs is some way to find and sort by topic or category. And I haven't been able to find any resource to help me find accounts like the ones I most enjoy. You'd think, with all this machine learning that's supposedly going on, someone would find a way to lead me to the people I would enjoy reading, based on some "seed" accounts.

I'm on about my 12th account, and I barely pay any attention to it, because it's just too much work to put what I'm reading into context, and then switch it 72 times to catch up my feed. And I follow less than 200 accounts! God help the poor souls who have thousands of follows.

I say all that to ask: Do you know any way to find accounts with high signal-to-noise ratios that might align with other, known accounts? If Twitter wants more "engagement," THEY ought to be the ones offering tools like this.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the same. It doesn’t even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved. >IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace hybrid abominations designed to get likes. I guess you aren't f…

> I've seen plenty of engaging and cool content. I've even become friends with people from the opposite side of the world. Basically a modern kind of pen pal. I did that before with Facebook, and Twitter, and forums, and WoW, and MSN, and ICQ and IRC and MUDs...literally any form of online interaction. This doesn't set Instagram apart; it happens despite the fact it's a hyper-optimized advertising app.

Yeah, I've done that on all of those as well.

But you know what? People I've met on IG aren't the types I would've found elsewhere on those other networks. And why does "setting it apart from the others", to paraphrase, have to be an issue? In that sense IRC and forums are exactly the same.

And no, hyper-optimized advertising app would mean I'm constantly seeing ads for products that fit what I like, which is further from the truth than any of this. I rarely, if ever, follow brand accounts, so I rarely, if ever, am subject to "hyper-optimized" advertising.

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#209
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a gigantic difference between $200,000 a year and "I don't need to work again." The "money doesn't make you happy" camp compares $70,000/year and $200,000/year; not $200,000/year and "I have enough money to never work again if I don't feel like it."

Those two goals are only separated by about a decade of normal work, which is not even much more time than it takes to bring a startup to an exit. If you can put 1-2.5M dollars into investments you can pull safe returns of enough to live on indefinitely and never need to work again. Making >$200k a year and being frugal it is not that hard to put together 1-2.5 million dollars in capital. At 10 years of 250k with a 4…

You're completely missing the point.

> being frugal ... 30k in annual expenses

Requires budgeting and is a bit of a standard of living lower than most people would prefer. Especially if they got kids.

Plus how you going to live in SV on $30,000 a year when rent alone is that much?

> 7% average returns

So requiring those 10 years are during a bull market.

There's a big difference between "work at a startup for a good salary living an average life for 10 years" and "live in a shoebox with 10 other guys, eat nothing but lentils and beans, and own no possessions for 10 years"

Re: Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I see, thank you. I've also mostly left FB, keeping the account around only for events and messenger. It has become so cluttered. It really is on its last legs.

Facebook is my new rolodex :)

Let's hope it goes obsolete like the Rolodex, only on an internet time scale
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