Facebook Has Got an Instagram Problem
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musicindustryblog.wordpress.com
That's a pretty misleading claim. I guess I sort of understand what's being expressed here, but it feels weird to just add up every platform's monthly active users and come up with a number larger than the population of the Earth.
So how can they be the third phase after regular websites and then social networks?
remember excite chat? i loved that, but mostly used irc.
messenger wise, started using icq but people (me included) hated remembering a huge number to log in. AIM was great though, and msn messenger was great because it tied right into your email too.
I still remember my icq number: 5588776
My username still reflects when I played starsiege as a kid at some silly time over a dial up modem.. Wow!
73117649 :D
Both of these things are driving me to use the app less.
I'm realizing that Facebook does two things builds a social network and then strip mines it off all value.
I mean, I'm sure there's an ostensible reason. Maybe there's metrics that show it increases engagement (which I'd believe, since it kindof fits with the studies that say an uncertain reward is more addictive than completely predictable reward). Maybe adding a special sauce ML algorithm to the feed generation process lets a product manager add a bullet point to their resume and yearly review.
But I kindof think the reason has to be something that is not going to be particularly user driven or otherwise reflect well on FB, because as far as I can tell most users who are conscious about it reaaaally would like to be able to at least set a setting that would give them a strict chronological feed. And yet, that's never an option, and FB never even seems to talk about reasons why they know their way is totally awesome.
I wonder how much of those metrics are false positives due to people scrolling more in frustration to find the user updates that they are missing
"Hey, did you see what $mutual_friend has posted on Facebook this morning?"
Cue 15 minutes of scrolling past two-weeks-old posts
Cue 15 more minutes of scrolling before realising they're two months back because they missed the actual post, because Facebook does not show every update by default
I've noticed this as well, and it appears to have gotten more pronounced in the last month or so.
I don't understand why this isn't a setting that users can toggle. "Show feed strict in linear order" or something like that.
It's hidden under News -> Most Recent
EDIT: Oh wait, Instagram. No idea what to do there, sorry.
On the plus side, Facebook has now taught me (twice!) that they (or any other "social media" company) can't be trusted. Now I'm just deciding whether I should give up social media altogether. I already deleted my Facebook since it became completely useless over the past few years (friends don't post, I don't see their posts when they do, notifications are useless and diluted), I'm considering deleting my instagram (far, far, far too many ads; friends don't post as much)... is it worth it to try to build out a presence on Mastodon? Or is that doomed, too?
They just announced they're (after years of holding the line) opening up the API for publishing photos, so it'll be a spammy feed of corporate stuff very soon.
On the other hand, it’s also showing me advertisements for watches. I have no idea why, because I hate wearing watches and I’ve definitely never googled for watches before.
That, or their model has found a correlation between liking chairs, plants, and watches but doesn't account for your unusual distaste for watches. Take heart, facebook doesn't know you well enough to convince you to hand over your wallet to their customers (yet).
While there are talented photographers on Instagram, the app is really poor as a way to appreciate photography (can't zoom, no iPad app to better view content) and it's also poor as a community, favouring instead over-consumption and poor engagement (low quality comments, if any).
Then there are the shenanigans that game user engagement, like delaying likes to force people to check the app more often or nagging me to enable notifications every single time I open the app.
It has become little more than an ad-delivery platform.
The addition of stories does make it feel busier though. I'm enjoying my time on it much less than I used to. Even after muting stories from people whose stories I wasn't interested in watching.
After all, Instagram lends itself well to high-margin brand advertising, interest-based advertising, and hyperlocal content. It's hardly a problem that certain demographics spend less time on Facebook and go on Instagram instead, especially if these demographics are quite valuable on their own.
Even the article admits that the more traditional messaging networks like Messenger and WhatsApp are harder to monetize. They have had some experiments the past [1] but with so many competitors, user resistance is a risk.
The Facebook app and websites have barely innovated in years and the changes they HAVE made have slowly but steadily eroded the core user experience. What was once a SOCIAL NETWORK - a place where friends could come together or new friendships were made - has become a disjointed "news" feed full of gossip, fake news, Russian propaganda or US politics division. All this interspersed with cat pics and buzzfeed top ups.
It's hard to find and enjoy the 'social' aspect of this social network if it's full of oddly unedited "news" footage.
Now its nearly all trash. People bitching, posting memes, sharing slideshows, etc. The only thing I go there for is 1 specific local group and even that is pointless because there is a discord.
Facebook is essentially dead to me, and certainly dead to all my younger cousins 15-19 yos. I feel like I must be missing something, because I have no idea why anyone would visit. It's so negative and low quality.
With the implosion of Twitter, Facebook has since undone a lot of these changes, but the damage had already been done. People had already learned to stop going to Facebook to be social.
They even do the opposite. Maybe a half a year ago they removed one of the best features Facebook had - the event calendar. My guess is to promote a standalone events app that was released around that time.. but the app doesn't seem to be around any longer, and the events calendar is still gone. Replaced by a shitty list of upcoming events.
Random screenshot for those who didn't see it: https://ucarecdn.com/9bd0a297-7576-41ee-9580-f7ee0ef50943/
Now they have all sorts of things cluttering the feed besides just Ads... Recommended Posts, Friend-Invite Recommendations, Mid-feed stories.
The clutter is making it less and less enjoyable to use the app, and I've started considering dropping the only social platform I actively use.
Sure you're not spreading your own here?
Yes, buying all the competition.
Messenger apps are also inherently highly personal. It's your primary means of communication in the digital age. The idea of ads being injected into that experience appalls me.
It's main innovation, as far as I can tell, is that it uses the real world as a model for its approach. Your content spreads as 'gossip', peer to peer (over LAN/wifi), but also propagates through 'pubs' that are internet-accessible.
What first made me interested is that the Patchwork client is quite user-friendly and I've noticed that the relatively small group of current users are not all tech-savvy. That's something of an achievement. Furthermore, some other options I've looked into strike me as either unrealistically decentralized, or too (pragmatically?) centralized.
Anyways, even as just as a look into how thing could work different I can highly recommend checking out these types of alternatives!
It might be that I joined a pub with very little traffic, I haven't spent much time on it and I plan to have another look when I have some free time.
That said, I suppose the whole thing is inherently quieter than something like Facebook or a forum because it's decentralized and, of course, still a small community at this point. And quite possibly the whole point is not to be as busy as other social platforms :).
I also started to appreciate what's the price for decentralization: after following just a couple of users I already have several hundreds megabytes downloaded.
I wouldn't consider Instagram to be a messaging app - in fact they're spinning off another app from Instagram just to do messaging (because it's not exactly great at that).
It sounds to me more like Facebook might have some problem and Instagram is just doing it's own thing (as are Facebook's other services).
Not sure this is true; back in the day BlackBerry used to be the combo of the handset + backend services provided by RIM, including BBM, which they charged a fiver a month for and people didn’t mind paying it. If RIM had been willing to take the risk of extending BBM to other devices (sooner and better) perhaps the whole world would be paying them a vig now.
Apple’s iMessage is arguably monetised in advance by hardware sales, and I’ve only recently learned does group chat too.
It still amazes me that there are so many billions of advertising dollars to prop up something as useless as facebook and their snowflake-innovator-genius engineers with over 100k salaries.
Look at people around you (grocery checkout lines or bus stop or subway or Starbucks) - everyone is glued to their phone screens. And Facebook is the ultimate magnet to waste those 2-5 min wait times one has to endure every so often. Earlier, people would get bored waiting in line, or strike conversations with strangers or just muse over random thoughts. No more. All that attention has gone to their smartphones.
And advertisers are simply following those eyeballs. Since Facebook manages to capture so much attention of so many humans, they rake in billions.
It used to be fine, minimal and functional. I won't install any fb app, I just want to use it on the web.
FB app on ipad disallows pinch/zoom. You better be damn happy with the font sizes they dictate. Or you could stick with the web version.
wat
Also, pretty insane Instagram numbers. Now that is a service I really don't get, yet considering how many people use it, it can't just be being too old.
And also, there are insanely good professional photographers on Instagram and some people just like looking at pretty photos instead of thumbnails grabbed from political news articles.
My gut feeling is that you can run a messaging app for a million users on the same infrastructure you would use to run Facebook for 1000 users. So having a messenger app with a ton of users and no monetization is bad, but not that expensive?
All I see on Facebook is friends of friends fighting over politics with other friends of friends, fake news, stupid animal pics, people with low self esteem hunting for the likes, stupid mainstream commentary, "look at me how awesome I am" status updates, rants where everyone feels to be treated unfairly by the world because of [insert the single characteristic about yourself where you can pretend to be discriminated], etc.
I only go to Facebook for one reason now, to check that I'm not missing a birthday of some close extended family. This takes me about 1 minute every day and then I don't visit FB for another 24 hours.