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Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

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Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#251

Post by NCC1701DEngage »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #146
saurik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work. OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you wat…

It's the dreaded "more of the same shit" algorithm that people confuse with deep learning and AI. The sad reality is that recommendation teams in these companies maintain some ugly gobbled together if .. else logic rather than a proper recommendation engine. Proper recommendation engines are hard. That's why recommendations change dramatically if you just use a vpn or travel. The IP address based geo location trumps…

>It's the dreaded "more of the same shit" algorithm

This problem of not-enough-novelty in YouTube's recommendations is exactly why I am working on a team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel name to get a list of similar channels.

As an example: our recommendations for Tesla's channel includes James Locke, a small channel (~10k subscribers) with a researcher working on Full Self Driving for Tesla vehicles. There are also dozens of Tesla driving, electrification, and investing channels along with channels for some of Musk's other companies like The Boring Company on the list:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUC5WjFrtBdufl6CZojX3D8dQ/

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#252

Post by onpensionsterm »

rychco wrote: post #10

I disagree with their premise that Reels is "performative" while TikTok is "authentic". They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite. They're both equally performative & inauthentic.

>They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite.

They couldn't, because it's 'the algorithm' that does the picking & Facebook's algorithm optimises for inauthentic or boomer. Cherry-picking posts isn't a standard usecase.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#253

Post by UncleMeat »

IgorPartola wrote: post #60
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…

As a millennial I can tell you exactly why TikTok is better: 1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work. 2. Reels are often…

I agree with all of this except for TikTok ads being obvious. To me, it is not at all obvious which ones have the little "sponsored" at the bottom.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#254

Post by bkav »

suoduandao2 wrote: post #242
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook just designs too much to data/metrics, doesn't feel like anyone there really has a vision for what they're building. End of the day without that everything they build will ultimately be soulless because building to the vision is what imparts soul into a product.

So many great products have been hamstrung by designing for the nearest-term metrics available. I don't understand why so many highly intelligent people keep making the same obvious (to the consumer) mistake.

Bad company culture. You can’t do anything new without explaining how it will have an immediate payoff.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#255

Post by viburnum »

The sad thing is Instagram's explore tab used to give me excellent personalized content (gardening and architecture) but when they added reels it all went away. At first it was dancing teenagers and now it's random celebrities and weird sped up videos of people cleaning. It doesn't matter how many times I mark it as "not interesting", it just keeps pushing it.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#256

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

rgoulter wrote: post #208
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #198

I so liked to to doomscroll Instagram because it would just find nice pictures for me, but it’s ruined with Reels. First, they rig it so that on every page, there’ll be a reel. You can spot them and flag each and every one with “I don’t want to see this” and it will continue trying to show you reels. It’s definitely an explicit rule to show Reels. Each Reel it finds for me has some mildly interesting-looking footage…

Nitpick: I think 'doomscrolling' is a slightly more precise term than just aimless consumption of infinitely scrolling content. My understanding is, 'doomscrolling' is more about content which outrages (albeit, also consumed in an aimless manner, or to "not miss out").

Noted thx

I’ll need a better word. It’s fun to say doomscroll

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#257

Post by dixie_land »

ren_engineer wrote: post #234
SilverBirch wrote: post #188

> If Instagram wants to capture TikTok's magical human touch, it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper. I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram,…

TikTok is just AI/ML engagement algorithms unleashed, they never gave into the backlash that YouTube and Facebook did after the 2016 election and just continued optimizing purely for engagement metrics. US tech companies dumbed down their own content algorithms and are somehow shocked that they are now getting destroyed. Social media is a drug, TikTok is providing the purest form right now

This; and they have a legion of well educated MLEs in China working for much less in a cut throat competitive environment

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#258

Post by drewbeck »

suoduandao2 wrote: post #241
bko wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get what's wrong with running a social media company that caters towards older people. Not everything has to be geared for 15-35 year olds. Presumably younger people will age into this product so it's not like the user base will literally die off. For instance, once you have a kid and people start using facebook to coordinate and communicate, you're kind of forced on it. As more people you know are on it, you…

I'm not sure younger people do age into a social media product. To give an example, I'm about the youngest (~35) that my cohort still uses facebook. people slightly younger than myself (~30) tend to use whatsapp and google calendar for the useful functions of Facebook and instagram for doomscrolling. They have no reason to switch, except if someone slightly older is 'pulling' them towards the platform. But the only t…

I think social media totally could be like a minivan if the companies took it seriously and built tools for folks at different stages in their lives. Instead they seem to be locked into chasing the youngest people and the most mindshare, always.

In my life a lot of the reason folks got off FB was 1. the experience became trash and 2. the brand became toxic. Neither of these things are about folks moving to the better, newer social network just cuz that's where everybody was.

In general I think the social media companies have no actual vision but are spooked about becoming the next Friendster/MySpace so they constantly react, desperately trying to not become irrelevant.

I think also that figuring out something that works in social media is hard and somewhat random; absent a framework to help imagine new futures people will always become reactive and defensive. Of course SM companies have to frame that as innovation and convince their shareholders that "becoming tiktok" is somehow visionary and helpful because "yes we're losing eyeballs but we're going to double-down on what we do really well and learn from it because we think the future has space for many types of social media" doesn't convince shareholders.

Idk, rambling now, but so frustrated at the whole market.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#259

Post by logicalmonster »

I sort of like the SurgeHQ blog from a few past articles I've read on it, and this article is similarly mostly thought-provoking and well-done. But it pulls off 1 (arguably) disgusting trick IMO. It goes from talking about what users really want and then launches into some 'do you really want people to click on conspiracy theories' type of value-judgement that seems antithetical to actual user-preferences. Again, who decides what's true? Should it be the government? Should it be Mark Zuckerberg or other corporate giants? Is Mark Zuckerberg and others like him my parent who knows what's best for me? What if people actually want to see that content and decide for themselves what's true or not? Are the people to be treated as adults or children? That one thing from the article is probably not meaningful to most here, but I didn't like that specific part.

Re: Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

#260

Post by btilly »

t_mann wrote: post #202
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…

It's an interesting thesis, but I'm a bit confused by your methodology - how can you propose a law without looking at any data yourself? You just seem to collect a few unrelated observations ("librarians have observed X", without giving any reference there) and laws that were developed for different contexts (Zipf's law), and from there you argue your way quite informally (mathematically speaking) to your proposed n…

We were applying a variety of other scaling phenomena which have been long observed, and then applied it in terms of networks. Most of the actual analysis of data, such as mail delivery was done by Andrew Odlyzko. There is also another form of the paper out there with Bob Briscoe added, and he had quantitative data not previously published from British Telecom. (See https://spectrum.ieee.org/metcalfes-law-is-wrong for a link, but you'll need a subscription.)

That said, the argument and result is intentionally informal, and intended to be a better rule of thumb than Metcalfe's law. Which was itself even more informally reasoned. However its key flaw we explained with:

Metcalfe’s Law is intuitively appealing, since our personal estimate of the size of a network is based on the uptake of that network among friends and family. Our derived value also varies directly with that metric. We therefore see a linear relationship between the perceived size and value of that network.

That said, different social networks may well have different scaling laws. In fact I pointed out privately that eBay likely was a counter-example which is closer to Metcalfe's law for the simple reason that you derive value there from connections to random strangers. And indeed eBay successfully maintained a market leading position for a long time despite charging significantly higher fees than competitors like Amazon Marketplace.

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