Facebook is ruining Instagram
medium.com
medium.com
I don't really think it makes much sense to be so sad about this, since the whole reason Instagram did this (according to them) is that people were only seeing 30% of the images on average so it just made sense to try and present the best 30% up front (explained here http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/technology/instagram-feed....). And if like me this guy follows few enough people to keep up with all the photos, then there should be no issue because I can always easily keep up with only the people I am following and see all their output. Maybe it is not real time anymore and it is noticeable to this person, but it still seems to be overstating the case.
And how is this change relevant to try to capture most of your time? It seems moreso to be about trying to give the best experience possible, confronting a problem that most people probably friend and follow way too many people to keep up with. Seems reasonable to me... Not to mention it's very dubious to claim the call came from Facebook, and not internally from Instagram following the same direction Facebook and Twitter went over time.
>> It is stealing me as much time as they can. They are fighting to get my attention span, only to feed me with more ads. They are just like the television.
That's an interesting point. Seems like that can be applied to a long list of sites/apps now (or maybe it's always been like that, not sure now is any different).
There really should be a weekly game. Top score to the person with the most items added to the list -
If Mark Zuckerberg was running Wikipedia:
1. Everybody in the world would need an account to access it.
2. The most liked parts of a topic, lets say Linear Algebra, would appear before everything else on the topic.
3. A "free basics" version of Wikipedia would be made available to those who can't afford cake.
4. <please continue>
Next week we play, if Mark Zuckerberg was running Linux.
I prefer the game "Crucify Mark Zuckerberg for following Google's lead".
Although every day is that game around here :)
For Google, "we don't talk about" their aggressive and abusing advertising practices, even though they themselves have written the book on invasive online advertising and monetization of free users. Instead, we criticize Facebook mainly for it. Nearly every thread on privacy attacks Zuckerberg by name while not even mentioning the Google corporation in abstract. Just an observation.
"Why so sensitive on Zuckerberg's behalf?"
Why do you choose to attack me personally for posting an observation about discussion here?
You claim that all are routinely criticized, so could you verify that by showing a conversation here which criticizes a Google executive by name for their advertising practices? I can find literally hundreds of conversations doing it to Zuck, but literally zero conversations criticizing ANY Google executive by name. Just an observation, of course.
Give me a break. With the 35 Billion the world has donated to him he is going to be an obvious target. The poor boy can use his brain and isn't being forced into his bullshit decisions. He could have just opensourced Facebook. He could have got it to work like IRC or email. There are a zillion options an imaginative mind can come up with, especially given the hubris about openness and society he peddles every time he gets on stage.
I am quite happy with the amount of vitriol directed at him, and am even happier to read recently in this supposed open and connected world, he has created that he has to live surrounded by 20 bodyguards.
Linus Torvalds and Jimmy Wales dont. And they are better models of what software can do any day of the week than Zuckerberg's bullshit generating creation.
I love when a user invents a fake point, then spends their entire post attacking the fake point.
Nice strawman, I hope it was pleasurable to knock it down, because other than giving yourself pleasure, I'm not quite sure why you chose to waste your time this way.
>I am quite happy with the amount of vitriol directed at him, and am even happier to read recently in this supposed open and connected world, he has created that he has to live surrounded by 20 bodyguards.
Frankly, you're a sick person and I pity you a little. No wonder you're a new account, this kind of nastiness is not the way this community behaves.
Facebook pretends that it gives you a personal blog platform but it hides and reorders your content to shove more ads at you in otherwise private feeds.
Time to try Instagram again!
Exactly! I've got PLENTY of friends on FB that don't get followed on Instagram. There's probably a 20% overlap at max. I keep my follow count low and start unfollowing anyone or brands that bore or annoy me.
In that way most of my media posts (which I shamefully admit are 90% my kids being adorable to me only) go to Instagram only or Instagram and shared with FB as well. I NEVER post directly to FB with media.
I think a lot of people who don't see value in Instagram think of it like they do Facebook.
That's exactly the point.
(I'm the author)
If I think I make really muffins and I want everyone to know is that advertisement and is it a bad thing? Of course, I love my muffins so much that I want everyone to have them so I'm going to have to start charging, because the best way to get as many people to try them is to do it full time. And of course at some point I'm going to have to hire other people and teach them to make the muffins for me because one man can only make so many muffins. I'll probably have to incorporate and buy a muffin factory. And I'm much better with muffins than I am with words so actually the proclamations of my muffin's superiority are going to be designed by a professional.
I actually don't have a way with words so I'm not sure how to wrap this up but it's a piece of my perspective either way.
The edge case is of course. Disease X now has a treatment!
But IMO, if it's important people are going to find out other ways.
At what point does the monetary value of the damages caused by "advertising" surpass the amount of damages caused by cigs?
Will that amount of damage ever be more than lung cancer and lost lives? Who knows... but ads aren't just annoying. They are dangerous.
Just ask the hospitals that have had to run at limited capacity due to infections. (that infection was due to a tainted email... but it could have easily been from a drive-by-ad-malware... ala 30-after-30 malware: http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say... ). And it's only a matter of time until one infection causes a death...
Then expand that to our increasingly connected cars and houses...
I don't want to eat fast-food, but they will use shiny pictures, bright colors, reverse psychology, "everyone else eat burgers" tactics, etc. to make me want it.
They are little squares of manipulation.
Your willpower is low when you are tired or in an advanced state of mind.
Take a look at decision fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
"Decision fatigue can influence irrational impulse purchases at supermarkets. During a trip to the supermarket, trade-off decisions regarding prices and promotions can produce decision fatigue, hence by the time the shopper reaches the cash register, less willpower remains to resist impulse purchases of candy and sugared items."
We are bombarded with ads, which we discard, but every time we discard one, it tires us.
You can easily transcend all of that.
Not the fact that you're being controlled by an elite consisting of rich, well brought up white people and a media which serves them and each other.
But the day to day annoyances of adverts and supermarket deals etc. If you read books, listen to music ripped from CDs, watch movies/tvs from netflix/downloads etc, then you're going to suffer only very slight interference from ads. Certainly I see no justification for the suggestion it's "tiring" to "discard" an ad.
If you have to shop in supermakets (and you do not) then it's possible to just buy sensible stuff; fruit, veg, milk, juice, break, rice etc. You don't need to wander down the colourful aisles and pay over the odds for this seasons exciting "as seen on tv" junk foods. It's hard to imagine any self-respecting HN reading struggling to understand which size/brand of some product is the cheapest. It's not remotely taxing to do this, and mental activity keeps your mind fit and staves off dementia. It has no consequence on willpower whatsoever. In any event, a lot of shops in the UK have no "candy" by the "cash register" because it annoys parents who have to get their kids to stop screaming for it.
Exactly, but most people are not HN readers.
I've added countless ads to websites, added countless trackers, implemented countless marketing emails. Of course I am aware of what's happening behind the scene.
Most people are going to be watching TV and be bombarded by ads. They are then going to go to the supermarket, and be bombarded by packaging. They are going to listen to radio on the way to work and be bombarded by audio ads, with some nice billboards on top.
Every day, we are trying harder and harder to customize our ads to be more effective toward users. It's not paranoia. We have "loyalty" cards that track all of our users purchases which we analyse and use to send targeted ads. We are working our best to beat the mind's "firewall" to inject our "malwares" into the mind of the consumers.
Most of the social events I go to are now typically organized via Facebook; the non-FB people require a separate email which is an extra step that is not taken 100% of the time.
IMO, that's often a feature not a bug.
Introduce the new thing as a cool new beta product that people can try and after a certain amount of time switch it to default, but still allow the old version. Then wait until a majority switch over and cut off the old version.
Combine that with the ever annoying problem of leaving the page, suddenly seeing something interesting, hitting the back button and being presented with an entirely different order of sorting news items forcing me to go digging through my friend's timeline on their actual page ....
I guess what I'm saying is I don't trust them to not fuck up two streams on Instagram the same way they've done it on FB: to the point of being completely useless as a dichotomy.
Are there any examples of happy acquisitions? Oculus?
It's reordered but not filtered.
If you keep scrolling you will see everything posted that you haven't seen since the last time you checked.
It's not even bad.
What did you expect is going to happen? Why would you invest so much effort and emotion into growing a thing that you can be 100% sure will eventually try to consume you.
If people want social media that does not feed on them, they have to start using p2p, decentralized social apps. Not like Diaspora (federated), but truly p2p, where each user contributes resources and there's no need to support scalability engineers maintaining state of art datacenters.
http://twister.net.co/ https://zeronet.io/ https://www.ipfs.com/ http://www.synereo.com/ http://maidsafe.net/
Somewhere there or in something similiar is our holy grail: social networking by users for users.
People's opinion that Instagram is 'ruined' is completely valid. Just because the 'average' experience ticked up doesn't mean that you're making it better for everyone. This is a classic case of managing to the average. The desires of the people who are most passionate about Instagram are being ignored in lieu of hitting quarterly numbers.
This is why it's important to deeply understand your users qualitatively as well as quantitatively. You can't A/B test your way to a great product.
It's getting less social and more like magazine-subscription of channels.
My solution is to use them less.
Good point. Probably my problem (I'm the author) was to get too attached to the Medium. I idealized it.
Real time is better. Don't guess what I would prefer to see. Let me filter it myself.
In any case it sounds like if there's a huge drop-off of users Instagram can very easily address the issue by setting a sort by option in the settings.