How Instagram’s algorithm works
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If I could switch back to chronological feeds, in exchange for double the ads or something, I'd do it. It'd waste less of my time.
Also, Instagram banned me from following via the app for about five months with no communication or explanation. I think it thought I was a bot, but can't be sure. Not the customer but the product, indeed.
I use a third-party app for Twitter, since they've abandoned any relationship with chronological reality, but even so I keep a separate list of people whose tweets I absolutely don't want to miss that I check every few days.
Gosh, I miss RSS.
You click on 1 too many photos of a girls chest popping out of her shirt and you lose control of your IG.
Suppose IG only offers 100% yoga or 10%, based on my click activity.
Ego and id may be fully compatible but it IG is still failing for my use case.
With that being said, in case of Instagram Im kind-of OK with it as it's just pictures.
In case of Twitter, if I was a product manager, I'd file a bug report with highest priority. The kind of bug that developers would not sleep until it's fixed.
I get a series of tweets about an ongoing event in a random order.
It's like watching a goddamn movie with scenes shuffled randomly. It makes no sense.
Have you seen Memento?
Jokes aside I never understood why twitter does not allow the user to choose the sort order of the feed. This is a reoccuring theme for social networks (facebook feed, youtube subscriptions etc) so I guess there is some kind of motivation behind it.
With a sane chronological feed, once you scroll down to the last tweet you remember reading, you know you’re done and can leave the app and do productive things.
With a bullshit “algorithmic” feed, you never know when you’ve caught up, and the “fear of missing out” will make you stay there scrolling way longer just in case there’s one tweet somewhere down there you haven’t seen yet - this gives them the opportunity to show you more cancer.
If a new free social network becomes mainstream, they could however introduce a paid tier as part of their monetisation strategy alongside ads. This would give users a choice, be exploited by ads and see cancer every day, or pay your way out of it.
If anything, Instagram would’ve been the perfect opportunity to offer such a paid plan, as a lot of professional photographers use it, and they wouldn’t mind paying for an improved experience and thus more productivity.
My guess?
Twitter only exist because of network effects.
Everything else somebody else does better.
Oh, and most orinary people are more interested in one-to-one group chat than in many-to-many.
WhatsApp managed to break through even though they were announcing loud and clear that they were going to cost money. Why? I guess because they promised to provide something valuable: a versatile, reliable, trustworthy messaging solution for friends, families and small groups.
Telegram has managed to break through as well. AFAIK Signal is climbing steadily and Matrix is getting more and more mindshare.
Based my experience a lot people here will probably disagree with what I say about twitter. If you are one of those, feel free to tell me what technical detail twitter does better than everyone else.
> even though they were announcing loud and clear that they were going to cost money
On the other hand, WhatsApp announced this back when scammers aka mobile networks still charged a ton for texts, and WhatsApp was the only cheaper option.
Now the masses are trained to expect everything for free, so it's really hard to get them to pay for something. It's not even about social networks, even getting someone to buy a stand-alone app is hard enough - outside of the tech circle, most people consider it weird that I pay for apps. Even getting them to pay for the likes of Spotify is hard (most non-tech people I know are still on the free tier and get their music fix on Youtube, with ads and everything).
This is why I don't think a paid service is unlikely to succeed and become mainstream. A social network needs to be free, at least until it reaches a critical mass, at which point it can switch to a "freemium" model with a free (possibly ad-supported) base tier and a premium, ad-free tier.
I also acknowledge there is a problem where authors should be able to secure an income to do security updates etc and I've no "one-size-fits-all solution" to it but I think between
- feature keys for new features
- optional extra services (support, server side ocr etc)
- reasonable fees for special cases (for example I loved to pay USD 1 a year for a user friendly, secure messaging service that promised not to spam me, datamine my data or leak it voluntarily.)
- etc
there should be room for better alternatives than many of the ones we have today.
Who'd like to pay for a stackoverflow clone without the most annoying stackoverflow rules?
I mean, - a site not focused on curating knowledge but on asking and answering questions?
That answer could of course be: have you looked at this <embed or link>?
But nobody should be punished for asking again and certainly nobody should be punished for answering a duplicate.
The pattern with TV is a good case study. I wonder if there will eventually be guidelines about how many ads you can show users and now much screen real estate is allowed to be covered by ads.
Isn't that kind of what "acceptable ads" programs in adblocks are? (Or, at least, should be?) There are a lot of Adblock Plus users there that basically decided (or got tricked into thinking) that ads that are appropriate are okay to view.
1. There's an inherent belief that they know what you want better than you do (this is inherit in any recommendation engine that gives limited ability to manipulate it)
2. Most users, given the option, won't bother changing it anyways
3. You'll use the service regardless of whether they offer it, because network effects
I think it's actually that they believe they can create an algorithm that will keep you coming back. It clearly works. People want to be entertained, often by their friends, often by things that interest then. This algorithm based on _your input_.
You can absolutely manipulate the feed. Search for 12 yoga based people, click on 12 yoga based hashtags, and then watch your feed become yoga-ified for the next few days as the algo adjusts to keep you coming back.
You can incidentally manipulate the feed. But its clearly not intentional behavior; the recommender system naturally operates on the belief that you're using the services without considering the recommender system. You can manipulate the system to something specific by breaking that assumption, but all you've done is essentially exploit a bug. Its clearly not a feature. And in a perfect world, the recommendation system would realize you're lying to it, and discard that behavior, and serve you what you really want.
your input is expected to be natural consumption of the service, with limited, abstracted forms of feedback, but otherwise without knowledge of the recommender system judging your every move. You don't edit the results, you don't play with ordering, you ideally don't even search too much out of your defined subject range (lest it skew horribly and fuck up all your recommendations, like your yoga example).
>I think it's actually that they believe they can create an algorithm that will keep you coming back. It clearly works.
But this I agree with; it's a better understanding of what I was trying to get at.
> 3. You'll use the service regardless of whether they offer it, because network effects
Actually I stopped using Facebook for that reason. The feed just didnt provide any value to me anymore. Also I never really got into Twitter because of it. I don't see the value in following people if I cannot see their posts without hours of scrolling through retweets.
With a "random" feed, it makes it real hard to find out what you just missed.
This is the best they could come up?
First of all it was misleading: people with 300 or even 500 friends have nowhere newer 1500 posts a day. Sure, some friends post 10 memes a day, but most people do not post anything at all. In any case, I did not hear anyone complaining that they had to deal with too many posts, and managing the feed wasn't an issue. No-one was complaining about the chronological feed before,
What was an issue, however, was that Facebook (and now Instagram - also owned by Facebook) needed to make more money. So they created an algorithmic feed that pushed posts that engaged people more to keep people on the platform. I suspect this is exactly the same tactic, by the same people, backed up by the same compliant media, that we have seen before.
Best example of trying to over-optimize a site I can think of.
Prioritising actual people means that they de-prioritise businesses, who now have to pay to get to previous levels of user engagement.
Tried to pay a marketing company to grow my website. Instead they flaked after turning my page into a business page.
I get 100 people instead of 400 people seeing my posts.
And then I stopped using facebook completely. If facebook is only going to show my political garbage shares and they wont show my website? Theres 0 value from facebook.
Would they admit it exists in either case?
Shadowbanning is more of an explicit denial of the community taken by someone who doesn't represent the community, but rather the hosting service itself. It might align with community taste, but also might not.
I had an account that was shadowbanned, or at least seemed to be, and I was able to confirm that my posts didn't show up under hashtags or in followers feeds. In order to see my posts you had to manually navigate to my page, which caused my likes to drop to less than 5 per post
I think this means they prioritize people within your close circle above brand that try to engage with thousand of followers.
That means that if you're not friend or family, you are being seen less.
if(hasClickedOneImageOfASwimsuitModel) {
fillEntireFeedWithPhotosOfButts();
}I saw some model with 1.1m followers. Went to her website page + looked it up in alexa.siteinfo
1.1M followers, top 11m website, most traffic coming from India.
So basically a fake instagram. I think this is extremely true and there are a few real users that make it all worth it.
Thanks for mentioning alexa siteinfo, didn't know they track individual ig profiles.
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