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Comment by OzzyB | Hacker News Reader

Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time:

" Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps. "

Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676

[1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

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As an American who looks at WeChat and sees a massive, unintuitive jumbled mess, you've explained in this comment how that could possibly be so popular in China!

I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app.

By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.

You're comparing apples to oranges here. WeChat is a "superapp" platform for doing distinct things: chat, payments, ticket bookings, etc. Instagram's features, on the other hand, are all purely social networking.

I wouldn't say the UX challenges get any easier as you grow from social networking "super app" to generalized "super app." If anything, it would become more challenging, and the top comment would make more sense as to how it appears intuitive.

On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

We used to call "super apps" portals. Mistaken valuations of their stickiness generally led to the first cratering of internet company values.

AOL and Yahoo eventually died because there were individual sites that did the individual parts that they had better, and then they became less than the sum of their parts. Similar to how massive industrial conglomerates in America fell apart, or department stores when specialized fashion retailers became a thing.

East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.

Nah, I think the comparison was apt. IG's features are not purely social networking. The 'TV' portion is an attempt to create a youtube/video alternative. The video chat can replace phone/video messaging. The 'shop' feature is an e-commerce gateway.

TikTok however is the opposite of WeChat where the interface is dead simple and intuitive.

What is Reels immitating here?

The Chinese version of TikTok douyin is also a hybrid of games, shopping, live streams a messenger and instant apps. The ui is far less important than having a captive user base

Douyin is a mix of lots of things but you barely realize that. It has one main surface - the feed. IG on the other hand, feels like several unrelated things stitched together

It is not part of the core UX.

TikTok or Doubin, just swipe up/down would be enough for 90% of your input

Doesn't douyin also have a very different demographic than TikTok though? I think their audience is much older in China.

Facebook is in the slow process of finally dying. Their ownership of Instagram is sustaining them for the time being, but they are now desperate to steal some market share away from Reddit, TikTok, and WeChat. Facebook is far more desperate than they're letting on publicly. They have already been on the decline for multiple years; the competition is now finally speeding that process up dramatically.

When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse.

tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.

Are you referring to Facebook as a company or Facebook - the product? I do think the Facebook product itself is dying. But their other ventures like IG, WhatsApp etc are doing very well.

Wechat is in no way a competitor to Messenger or WhatsApp.

>tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.

Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.

WeChat has lots of things hidden behind low impression entrypoints. You can explore them when you want. Its primary features, chat and moments, are dead simple, like WhatsApp. Facebook on the other hand, are mixing lots of stuff into their main feed, making the experience horrible for everyone

Marketing/business side always demand prime real-estate to push 'features' instead of just blending them into the UI. This is extra-apparent on mobile apps but FB did it on their website for years (I haven't seen what it looks like recently).

It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.

TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.

Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).

Let’s ship features! To heck with what users may need or want!

The employees want it, management want it, the owners want it – yes, considering user needs can sometimes be very low down on the list.

That's right, in FBs case user != customer

Instagram is dead simple as well, if you stick to the main feed and just posting photos. I've used instagram without touching any of the stuff discussed in the top-level comment.

It's not a mistake in the short-term, but in the long-term it'll hurt growth. New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?

People will flock in where other people are. Unless Instagram gets a decent competitor, people will just get used to it.

Well there already is a competitor - TikTok.

As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat.

I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.

If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any potentially malicious components?

What malicious components?

And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.

Malicious as in doing things outside the scope of what Microsoft wants done.

They will grep for and comment out the code that goes like “maliciouslyUploadSecretInfo.*()“

Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.

Acquiring an app from a Chinese company and slapping the Microsoft branding on it without doing some sort of vetting would be absurd.

How is it different from acquiring a US app?

According with the new cold war narrative, in this case we have an very evil code that spy people all the time. Forgetting that last time I checked, companies proven by leaked documents to really spy and pass information to the government was Microsoft, Instagram, Facebook and Google.

What’s absurd is thinking Microsoft doesn’t have anyone who can read source code.

> If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any malicious components?

Rename it "Skype for Teens". Make no changes to the codebase.

That's more like it, but seriously there aren't a lot of articles written about app acquisition and the process of going through and debugging a massive codebase. If they buy it, no one from Microsoft will ever write a blog talking about how the code was a mess and how their team improved it.

They're not. "Malicious" in this case means gathering user data and MS wants that data. They're just going to point the information flow to their servers.

My take on this is that a Chinese company can't take a National Security Letter, and Microsoft already has a Room 641A.

TikTok is "malicious" only because a Chinese company partially owns it. That's literally it and it's just like any other social media company otherwise.

Anyone else think Facebook launching this might stop Microsoft from buying TikTok now? Depending upon how much money they need, I think Microsoft not having any past social media presence might scare them taking on Facebook as a competitor.

This is the issue that made Facebook to big to fail now.

They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.

I don't know. In Facebooks case it might as well be hurting them with younger demographics. When everyones mom is there the younger people just might want to go someplace else.

You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.

Young people just make secret accounts and don't tell their parents. My younger brother is 15 and reports him and his peers are on both Snapchat and Instagram in addition to the usual suspects like Twitch, Tiktok, and Discord. The main reason I've heard for not using Facebook is largely that it's redundant when Instagram provides most of the same features in a slicker package. A lot of fb features like the event planning and facebook market aren't relevant to them yet.

> New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?

At a certain scale, a person doesn't make this decision... their friends make it for them.

To me WeChat has more in common with the old AOL or Yahoo web portals in a 2020 wrapping.

As an American who had to use WeChat for some stubborn friends...

I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid.

I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.

I can’t use snap chat but apparently it’s very popular!

I'm not sure if I'm just turning into an old man prematurely or what, but "social" sites and apps usually turn too confusing for me to use around their second or third iteration.

Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then).

Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore.

I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.

Yep I agree. I find FB the easiest of them all but I had to log off b/c of the politics. I'd rather be ignorant.

You're are not any more ignorant for avoiding political content on Facebook, it is a bunch of strawman echo chamber trash.

I think out of all of them, Twitter is the most complicated. Their comment threads itself are super complex. Plus the character limit forcing people to post in multiple threads makes it worse.

UI wise, Snapchat is the worst.

The "genius" of Instagram is that it's social media as advertising where people are mostly advertising photos of themselves.

This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)

Actually those features WeChat wants people to use as new users are pretty intuitive and straightforward. For other functionalities, those are intentionally 'hidden'. Those advanced or experiment features are for those who look for those features or just spreading by friends.

On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.

Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.

PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:

* Buy everything, or course.

* Pay for electric, gas, and water.

* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.

* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.

* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.

Scary. I'm going to pay with cash again out of principle (which I stopped doing due to the pandemic).

I think the trouble is that it's really hard to start a new social network from scratch, so when Facebook wants to compete in a new segment they just tack on the feature to one of their existing social products. However, as you pointed out this leads to feature creep and pushes users to simpler platforms.

What I would do to solve this problem if I were at Facebook is to start new features out on an established platform (like they already do) until they reach a critical mass. Then I would completely break the feature out into its own app with separate branding. Hopefully I could get 10-20% of the active users of that feature to move to the new app and then grow it from there.

It's a very delicate process each time you do it but I think in the long run it would diversify Facebook's revenue across many independent brands and solve the feature creep problem.

"they just tack on the feature to one of their existing social products"

After the rise of Snapchat Facebook tacked on stories to FB, IG, and WA.

Meanwhile snapchat pushed for weird tv shows and sponsored and featured stories, pushing friend stories to the tiny row on top. It's like they do it on purpose to alienate users in exchange for short time increase in "engagement".

These sorts of metrics are interesting to investors at a quarterly timescale.

Understanding these phenomena is easier when you think of it solely in terms of the bottom line.

Such an odd decision... they had an app for private communication (the value prop was "you can be yourself when your parents and boss aren't in the audience") and tacked on the supermarket tabloids and celebrity news.

> the value prop was "you can be yourself when your parents and boss aren't in the audience"

If that's the value prop, what were people willing to pay for that value?

I think, instead, getting sponsored stories in front of eyeballs is the service being provided to the paying customers.

I'm glad Snap figured out a way to profitability (and what do I know as an outsider looking in), but they don't have as much good demographic info as say Facebook, so they can't for instance show men's shaving ads to men only, which I recall made their sponsored stories very "most common denominator". I no longer use Snapchat and I used to be a daily user maybe 4 years ago.

And even if they lose some users when they split out the feature to a separate app, they have still slowed down the growth of their competitor.

It's an ugly, but effective strategy.

> Then I would completely break the feature out into its own app with separate branding. Hopefully I could get 10-20% of the active users of that feature to move to the new app and then grow it from there.

As we all know this strategy worked great for Foursquare.

This is the strategy Facebook did with Messenger. Absolutely everyone complained when they tried to spin it out.

It was annoying but nowadays it helps you never see or use the main Facebook app.

So in a way their arrogance may have hurt them in the long run.

It's like Facebook didn't learn their own lesson from... Facebook.

The biggest reason I left Facebook was because the platform became a jumbled mess instead of its original clean interface. It's the reason why Facebook originally won out against Myspace and why Instagram won out against Facebook.

Yes, but were you a target audience of someone who would be clicking ads? You are not. My bet is that they do indeed monitor "ad clickers" and only will worry when these people start leaving en mass. Me and you - not so much.

Instagram didn't "win out" against Facebook. They fulfill two different roles with a few duplicated features.

Yes it did. Instagram is cool and Facebook is not. Now Snap is cool and Instagram is fading.

I am on the older end of Gen Z and have noticed the opposite. Snap was cool from 2014 until 2019 but now Insta has a slight edge. I still use both but it varies by whom I'm talking to: some friends I talk to on Snap and some I do on Insta.

It's similar to how Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones aren't cool, but still sell out stadiums.

Facebook (the company) will probably settle into a stable pattern like the BBC's radio lineup, where listeners roll from Radio 1, to Radio 2, to Radio 4 as they age.

Pretty sure Instagram won the Snap battle when they copied stories. Not sure who still considers Snap a major contender in the long run.

I wouldn’t say Instagram is fading. Just that Tiktok is keeping the younger generation away from it. Snap is losing on both sides because of them.

Agree. Snap used to be cool but Instagram sailed past it.

I think there's so many ways to connect on the internet that every social app has it's own role and purpose. Everything is fading away as users age and their preferences change. On top of that there are always new apps which are trying to attract new users and lock them in until something new doesn't come out that's why Zuck was obsessed with competition. He tried buying Twitter and Snapchat but they refused on the other hand Instagram and WhatsApp gave in.

Snap is still wildly popular with Gen Z. The use case for them is mostly messaging and private Stories. Instagram is more of a consumption platform for them at this point. They serve two different use cases.

What lesson would that be? Facebook is hugely successful.

Well yes, but it has limited growth potential. Latest generations are not interested joining it. So in 10 years it will be a dying platform.

Kodak didn't die when invented digital cameras, but it was a downhill ride towards inevitable cliff.

This is just a branding thing though right? We've had all sorts of social networks that each rise and fall. If Facebook has the formula for a successful network and can apply that formula over and over again that's pretty successful.

Facebook is probably the the company most able to claim to have achieved this, with facebook.com and Instagram being two big hits, arguably Messenger and WhatsApp too. TikTok is probably the biggest sign that they have actually failed to hit a 3rd generation.

Who know, maybe its true. Though all I can see is: 'buying out promising products before they are going to become your rivals' mentality.

It might be a successful strategy to run a business when you are big enough to do it (as long as your buyouts are correct).

I heard about facebook from a friend when it was still exclusive and I joined when it was opened up. Now I open it up at what seems exponential intervals, and each time it seems my disappointment with the platform is also exponential.

Its a mess filled with garbage mixed with adds that pretend to be content.

Back when it was still exclusive to people with university '.edu' email addresses Facebook was the best thing to ever happen to college. Instantly knowing who's in your classes or potential courses was a game changer.

Facebook is establishing itself as the social network you go to when you are tired of chasing new social networks. If you wait long enough features off that new network will come to you. This is a much bigger market than dominating a five year cohort.

Facebook has been declared dead without actually dying for so long now that it might still be alive when the retro mechanisms start kicking in.

It's not clear Facebook have the formula for a successful new network - Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquired. When Facebook have tried to create their own new networks, like their original Snapchat clone, it didn't work. That's not really a knock on them though, I don't think anybody else could claim to be able to spin up a successful new social network either.

==Latest generations are not interested joining it.==

But they sure love Instagram and WhatsApp.

> Well yes, but it has limited growth potential.

Absolutely. They just reported their Q2 earnings, and Facebook has 2.7B monthly active users. When you exclude China (where they aren't allowed), people without internet or too old/young, then yes - is growth is limited, largely by size of the human population.

Even if young generations decide not to join, this will be likely most powerful network for decades.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Welcome to era of neo capitalism

todays 30 and 40 year olds are more important than todays 14 year olds, and many of the 30 year olds are still on Facebook. in 15 years todays 14 year old are just gonna be in the beginning phase of their career and earning potential. And also whose to say Facebook doesn't buy one competing platform after the other? Only legal action can stop it from being dominant for decades.

Facebook is always there for people but it is not the talk of the town any more.

A decade ago you could have everyone on it for their entire lunchbreaks, deep-stalking their mates. But nowadays people are not engaged with it compulsively.

Younger people don't use it because their parents are on it.

Content isn't made by people for Facebook because it won't show in their friends feeds.

Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.

Before Facebook there was the printed telephone book and the Yellow Pages. People and businesses had to be in the phone books because someone might want to contact them that way. But the Internet and email came along. Facebook is a bit like that, people are there but no more engaged than they are with a printed telephone book.

Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to keep the same eyeballs. Because of that Facebook are successful.

But TikTok is the new, cool app in town. 80 million users in the US apparently, not all of them teenage girls.

I do not understand why this comment has a bad vote, hackernews looks like reddit, if a comment goes against your opinion, downvote without explaining the reasons.

The only thing I disagree with is that Facebook does make big profits from its ads, in fact it does a tough competition to google and amazon... the rest of your arguments seem correct to me... facebook doesn't feel like the home that it was before... it feels more like a newspaper, full of ads, debates, news and toxic people

That comment was downvoted because it was spinning unfounded and untrue speculation as facts. Here’s one example

> Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.

No, this is not true. Not only has Facebook done well in Q2, performance was unaffected by the boycott of large advertisers because of revenue from small businesses.

Ok I also agree with that, but what I mean is that in my opinion, nobody is an expert in everything, right? ... and if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons and not just reject their opinion and leave ... then everybody ask why social networks become toxic ... here's the reason

> nobody is an expert in everything, right

True. But then they should speak with humility and uncertainty, not proclaim their wrong ideas with confidence.

> if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons

No, it's not our job to educate people. Least of all, people who are ignorant but purport to be knowledgeable. These are the most resistant to any kind of learning.

Yes but it is especially uncool and if it stays uncool it will be a future myspace. Instagram is still ok, but even there. It's sliding.

But I think Zuck knows this and buys up enough up and comers to probably stay ahead on enough things.

Feels like it's already the new AOL.

I find the MySpace comparison tired:

* MySpace, at its peak, had around 75 MM MAU.

* Facebook's core properties (Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger/Big Blue) have around 2.6 billion MAU.

Even if I just consider FB core + Messenger, Facebook is roughly 20x larger than MySpace. Facebook, as a core product, also is growing in non-US markets, even though it has saturated the US markets for years.

MySpace and Facebook just aren't comparable anymore.

A more cogent comparison would include total available markets at the time.

75m MAU in 2008 is very different than 2.6b in 2020.

I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive comparison, but each individual contributes inertia to the market regardless of the total size of the market (see 1 below)

The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that:

1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social products increase it too. If my friends aren't using a social platform neither am I, usually.

2. Facebook has such a rich culture of A/B testing that they'll never release controversial changes without a deeper understanding of the impact of those changes on engagement. They won't shoot themselves in the foot like Digg did with current leadership.

3. Facebook has a really successful history of acquisitions and its leadership is very aware of social media trends. It catches those trends early.

As a consequence of (1), I'd argue that Facebook has a tremendous moat in comparison to its peers: it has a large amount of users who are more likely to stay put. While Facebook also moves slowly as a consequence of (2) often enough, it can move really quickly on producing novel products.

Facebook certainly will face challenges in the future, but they're likely to be a lot different at this stage.

Yeah, Facebook is more akin to Google/Microsoft than it is to Myspace.

Err, didn't you just compare MySpace and Facebook by looking at their MAU?

The questions for continued relevance is if Facebook-the-company can continue to iterate Facebook-the-product, or if its codebase has grown too unwieldy, and the company's culture gone toxic, making it harder to add a feature to Facebook, compared to creating a new company, writing a bunch of code, buying content and acquiring users. Given the rise of Instagram(Acquired), Snapchat (IPOd), WhatsApp(Acquired), TikTok, it's not clear Facebook-the-company is able to innovate. It's not clear that they have to, either, given older Internet brands like Yahoo! are still around and making money.

The comparison I'd make is to email. There are reasons email will never die (along with reasons why email can't innovate), and I think some of those reasons also apply to Facebook by this point. There's just some percentage of people that won't ever move, so while, eg, IRC is no longer in its heyday, it's still alive and kicking.

Facebook, and the rest of the FAANG companies, aren't going anywhere. They have too much money and too little oversight. No one stands up to them when they buy out their competitors. We're in the 2nd Gilded Age, and I don't think this one is going to end with the government stepping up to the plate to do something about it like they did 100+ years ago.

A lot of people I know switched to Instagram because it was so simple. Just post a picture.

Now they're Facebooking Instagram.

Zuckerberg is very smart and his mission and vision of Facebook was very straightforward to make Facebook a social utility and that's what it is becoming. I think Facebook is a way to connect to people in a more general way but there will be always all sort of niche social apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc.

Btw UI and UX need to evolve but to the point where they don't become bloated.

>And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow?

It already is... About a week or two ago Instagram decided to put the "Shop" or "Marketplace" button where the "Likes" tab button was... And now to get to your likes/follows/etc. you need to go to your profile tab, and find the "heart" button in the top right.

But because the "like" button has been in the same place for the past several years, it's still ingrained in my habits to press where the "Marketplace" button is, so I keep opening the store page...

I can't believe this wasn't on purpose...

In my experience, often people just double tap the photos to like them on instagram. And since most people hardly used the button for liking, it was a prime real estate for shops to move into.

I think you're confused.

The "Likes" button on the tab bar wasn't to like a post. It was to basically see the list of all interactions on your posts or new followers/requests.

This hasn't rolled out to me yet (Canada). I'd be super annoyed about this.

Makes sense. I assumed I was a part of some A/B testing group.

It's terrifically awful. If you do get a notification, then pressing the "Profile" tab button now brings you to the notifications list view.

But if you have "read" the new ones and want to go back to it you need to dig through for it like I mentioned in the OP.

It's ridiculous.

I used Instagram for the first time 6 months ago because I'm old, and I was shocked that an app with such a rep for elegance is such a hodge podge of features. It really feels like they just glued a bunch of 'me too' functions onto the original core app.

Once upon a time it was quite elegant. Then, like everything Facebook acquires, it grew into a bloated "why not?" monster.

IMO, its elegance came from its simplicity. It did one thing and it did it well.

There is an ever growing demand for new features, not necessarily from users, to fend off rivals and to stay relevant and exciting. As with a lot of popular apps and services, it ends up bloated, trying to offer everything to everyone and satisfying no one.

Also when your salary is tied to feature development, bloated apps and poor UX is inevitable.

> It did one thing and it did it well.

Except it didn't, the photo quality on Instagram is really bad because of compression and it is not possible to share actual good pictures because of that.

That's not what it meant to do - it was supposed to make your crappy early-smartphone pictures look nice with its filters.

Hey, those promotions aren't going to get themselves. You have to make sure your features get into production for your year-end review.

Gotta keep busy adding features to justify that head count.

> rep for elegance

Back in 2013-2014 it was a quite simple to use and elegant app. Then Facebook happened.

Instagram insists I'm a bot and immediately blocks any account I make. Using Instagram without an account is a rather dismal experience since it blocks viewing any posts, or scrolling too far through previews of posts. I also deal with businesses that post all their updates on Instagram.

User experience doesn't seem to be a priority for Instagram.

Spot on. I do get how Reels could eventually be rolled into replacing Discover or even the home feed but the IGTV thing is just bizarre. Yeah let's enter a mode where you start by consuming content 3 seconds long and then suddenly some of it is an hour and you have to hold your phone awkwardly not to touch the screen while you watch it.

Really feels like it belongs more in the feed part than the stories part but I guess no one would watch it then.

IGTV content does show up in the feed also, which kinda proves your point that no one would watch it there.

I thought it did but you had to click to activate it.

Only watched one once and feel like that’s where I did.

I recently got back onto Instagram for family photos and I still have no idea, or real interest in learning, what stories are. I'm too busy fuming at the avalanche of sponsored posts. It's an utter train wreck.

Stories are simply for things you want to be temporarily visible instead of permanently visible to your followers.

I don’t know what that means, how that works, or what to make of what I see when I click a story - so I never do.

I’ve used it for 8 years now and it’s fine, don’t think the UX is bad at all. Want to know for yourself? Go ask 10 non-developers.

Instagram is like what I read about Highway 99 /Aurora Ave in Seattle: it is the American subconscious where it is a bunch of fitful starts where there was a grand idea but dwindled down to some Psychic stores next to Pot Shops.

>perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow?

Commerce is already integrated into the stories feed, not only with advertisements as you scroll through stories, but with "swipe-ups" that users can use to sell or advertise products with.

As much as this article paints a messy picture of Instagram as an app, it's still wildly popular and these issues don't seem to be hurting its popularity.

> Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app.

Wait, there's a separate app for IG messages? For iOS? Link? I can't find _any_ references to it.

Yes there is one for close friends. It's called Threads.

You can add anyone to your close friends list. So add anyone you like to chat to. If you want a group to appear in Threads, add all the people in the group to threads.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/threads-from-instagram/id14738...

just to reinforce this, i tried instagram for the first time in a while and wasn't able to even find the new reels functionality. it seems buried among 100 other things instagram is trying to do.

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