Instagram Is Facebook Now

Ukraine is of course no major market for Facebook, but it's a good example that doesn't match what you describe at all. In Ukraine, Facebook is the place where you follow top journalists, anti-corruption people, activists, and other public figures. It's basically an extremely valuable addition to the media, where anyone can be lifted in popularity in a matter of hours if their content is truly important. Facebook has been an invaluable tool during the Maidan revolution in 2014 combining its social and video-streaming capabilities. It works in times where media is breaking down, being bought by oligarchs, and isn't to be relied upon.

I don't see any alternative that would replace it, in terms of being social, everyone being present on it, and allowing long text+image+video content to be posted and spread easily.

The problem is that Whatsapp is a very non-US-oriented app - its is very popular in EU and Asia/Africa/Latin America, but none of my US friends use it other than to reach us outside of the US.

Since it's not US-focused, the US execs (and boards, investors) tend to dismiss it. This explains why Whatsapp was left, relatively, untouched by FB in terms of user experience, after the acquisition - it's not shiny by any means for somebody in the valley, so no exec wants to hang that in their portofolio

While many are still using WhatsApp, it has taken significant reputation impact and users are dropping. Potential is only for the limited user group. It can be only changed by changing owner in general.

This is just your perception/opinion (I have a similar one). The company Financial Results and statements (facts) are showing something different.

PS: They are awful for me. I miss the old Internet days.

I doubt teenager me would not have been happy to share a social media presence with my parents aside for superficial content. So every few generations we might gain another platform regardless of its quality. I assume that Tiktok will fall as well, I hear the first people calling it boring.

> It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends.

100% this. So much "promoted" content (aka ads), or "suggested for you" viral content, or people I know promoting their businesses / blogs etc.

Barely anything real posted anymore by real people.

I would agree that Facebook is practically dead but Instagram defeated by TikTok? In very young teens' maybe, that is not really my social bubble but Instagram is far more prevalent everywhere else. Speaking as a someone from Central Europe.

> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis

We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

In that light, I think the chance of a product being allowed to sit and fulfill it's purpose gracefully, at least for services that are major moneymakers, is essentially nil.

Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company. At least, that is, until some large public company sees a way they can "improve" on that model and either buys them up or uses their size to bully them out of market (it's not really free market competition to use billions of VC money to undercut competitors until they fold and you have all of the market).

It's all horribly broken.

> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete'

Blaming Product Managers chasing "impact" is a fashionable thing to think/say here, but I don't think thats entirely true for consumer apps, and especially not for social networks. If it were, you'd expect that the each successive generation of apps to be a return to form. However as we've seen with the migration from FB -> IG -> Snapchat -> back to IG -> TikTok, the core concept behind the "best" product is always changing. That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target.

Shipping stuff that turns out to just be useless clutter absolutely happens - the problem is it is hard/impossible to know the difference going in.

This is putting a lot of undue blame on product managers who only have so much autonomy in a business regime set up for perpetual "growth" that is necessarily quantifiable and ultimately aimed towards economic growth. Constant growth is the underlying objective for any investment-driven software business (pretty much any of the businesses regularly talked about on this site, and certainly ones supported by this site's operators). "Making a great product for the customer" is necessarily secondary to investors getting a return.

But its refreshing to hear of notable exceptions to this! In my field of music tech, Ableton is one of these, for instance, having semi-famously refused significant outside investment to be able to focus on making a great product: https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...

> Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".

"Free" platforms are a dead-end, and will inevitably be ruined by the irrational demand for infinite growth.

The future is decentralization* and open protocols/standards. Anything controlled by a single company is bound to turn into a growth/engagement zombie.

*Real decentralization, no blockchain bullshit.

Even products that don't have a mandate to become attention-sucking get ruined eventually. Developers gotta develop---so once the product is pretty much done, it becomes a feature-cram-fest to try to bolt-on every crazy thing they can think of, including the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, long-standing bugs go unaddressed, security issues crop up, quality drops, and long-time users feel more and more alienated. I've seen this pattern repeat at pretty much every commercial application job I've ever had. Nobody has any concept of a product being finished. Nobody knows what maintenance mode is. It's just "Keep developing!" forever until the product doesn't even do its core function anymore.

I have always been baffled at how software companies start with few developpers who have this insane challenge: build an app from nothing, get traction, conquer the world. Then the company starts hiring like crazy and engineers pile on. However, it seems like the challenge is becoming less big: you should only have to maintain the code and deliver features your users ask for.

To me, it seems like the team size should actually follow more this trend:

Early: small | Growth: big | Mature: medium

As an anecdote, I just downloaded Windows 11 and it truly feels like a product invented to keep designers and engineers busy. It has a nicer UI, yes, but was it really worth the investment compared to Win 10? Probably not.

Freaking Sendgrid! Sendgrid, which I hardly use starting sending those engagement begging emails, under the guise of status reports (for me, zero messages for the last six weeks) and they started showing up daily! Now they are big and bought by Twilio be prepared for Product Optimisation via OKR (or POO)

Reminded me to close that account and finish the transition to Postmark.

>We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.

This is impossible for other reasons. When you are feature-developing a product, you will hire tons of employees, and then what do you with them when you are done with the feature development? Fire them? Lay off? When has that ever happened? Bugfixing, even if complicated takes less people than peak scale high growth development and nobody wants to maintain old cruft or refactor anyway. (cough HR cough). I'm willing to bet no company has ever downsized after feature development finished, they either go insolvent after they bolt on the kitchen sink or become IBM.

The real solution seems to be hiring a good, but sustainable sized team that you can maintain perpetually, but that never happens because your competitors will outgrow you if you do that. (Especially salespeople) We don't live in an economy of rational growth, because you'd be living on the streets if you tried to do that.

(Also remember if I'm not wrong GM makes most of its money from financing, it's not a problem unique to the computer software/hardware industry)

The fundamental issue at hand (something you neglected to mention), most of these platforms twitter, instagram, facebook and youtube are free! Now what does free entail, you being the product and thus it will always spiral down to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Basically you are getting a product that is too good for free. Someone has to bear the brunt of that cost and that person must be eventually rewarded otherwise there is no incentive to do so. So in reality the only way to solve this is a change in the users mentality of always jumping to free then crying foul about it when they end up the product. So the real problem(your problem) here is the user's mentality. You are basically just complaining about human nature from the users to the developers of said platforms.

Just today I went back on Facebook and it showed I have a message. So click on the link and no message. It was just Facebook saying “are you going to reply back” to a person I spoke to on marketplace. The thing was we already talked. I messaged him and he messaged me back and gave me his phone number. Our business was done but Facebook wants to put a fake “you have a message” notification to trigger some sort of dopamine hit or something. But instead it just pisses me off. I will talk to the people I want to talk to I don’t need a reminder to finish my conversation. Or the notifications about some obscure post someone I hardly know likes. So desperate to have me engage but I already engage plenty. I mostly use Facebook for marketplace now.

This process is similar to the old software bloat/ bloatware for applications

it's probably the same product managers moving to new companies

The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term but ultimately kill engagement. You can trick my sleepy self to stay up scrolling through ads for a while, but I can tell what’s going on. Afterwards I feel bad, and your app becomes something I am conscious of being bad for me. I try to cut back and will probably quit entirely except for a few specific uses with careful safeguards around them.

I never look at the news feed on facebook. About the only thing I use it for is specific groups that exist for a reason, like trading bike parts or finding apartments. FB lost its entertainment appeal years ago, other than occasionally ironically enjoying a boomer meme.

I don’t think it is fair to say Instagram has shifted from building functionality to increasing engagement. I don’t think you can separate these things at all.

At any stage of a business (which product is part of) you focus only on those things that contribute to your business model. All the metrics you’ve listed: engagement, retention, MAU — all of these are parts of the startup’s unit economy. Every single new feature is mapped against one of these metrics, especially at early stages of the product/business, when there are not many features, and resources to develop new ones are scarce. These metrics actually _drive_ any new features. That’s product management 101.

Back to Instagram, they’ve rolled out huge chunk of functionality this year: Reels. It’s basically another app inside the old one. All done seamlessly. Imagine amount of design and decision-making work that had to went into this. Even for very mature product like Instagram “building functionality” phase never stops.

> it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month"

The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.

I don't think there's a way back.

Software devs need to start thinking seriously about the world they're building. "Just doing my job" isn't an excuse. The only way to a sane future I can see is to quit and start using federated services for everything.

I'm glad we didn't declare the phone "done" at the Razor flip phone or that we didn't declare personal websites "done" with Yahoo Geocities.

Progress has to happen. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong, but you have to try.

Can't agree more. I want products to be completed. I hate this constant change "because we have these people working full time and they need to be doing something to justify being paid". I want tools that empower me. I don't want a "service" bundled with everything either. I want products that don't need any form of ongoing support.

IMO modern mainstream operating systems are also a good example of this. An operating system has basically three jobs: abstract the hardware from application software, provide libraries for commonly used functions, like GUIs, and provide the user with some kind of environment/shell to run their applications in. But somehow, this shitshow of an industry has converged on needing to release a major update every year. Imagine being forced to come up with new features for, and release a major update of, a feature-complete product every time the planet completes a lap around its star just because the marketing department exists and demands that it so happens because reasons. Oh, and what if you run out of feature ideas? Then of course you redesign the UI! UI redesigns never get old.

Great point about declaring a product complete.

The internet is interesting in that it can bypass a lot of consumer protections that have been hard fought in government.

One that I recently saw on here was the government (not sure which level, federal I think) declaring that click to sign up, call to cancel is illegal.

There is so much user hostile behavior online it's crazy, generally speaking it seems we all need to find our way back to morals.

Hang in there with the despair.

> a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built.

That gamification is a relevant feature to someone.

As a ADVERTISER

I want ATTENTION

So that MORE MONEY

> Facebook aside you really see this across the board on almost any platform, that once the product reaches it's 1.0 stage, (where it is good, does what the users want it to do, and has realised its vision) it begins a process of gradual decay, as the focus of the product managers (now panicking to find some statistics to improve to show their bosses) shifts from "building functionality" to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month".

Best example for me: Revolut. The app and product as a whole was so simple and good.

One year ago (or maybe 1.5 years ago) it started going downhill, fast. The app got so complicated that I often simply cannot find what I'm looking for (my card or the balance in a specific currency). Everyone I know using Revolut has the same complaint, especially older people like my parents or in-laws.

I don't get it and it makes me sad.

Netflix seems good at not destroying their product... though inherently the vision is kind of a scaled distraction machine.

I agree with the thrust of your comment and wonder how we might get there. Software companies did look more like you describe in the past, and a few like (some parts of) Apple and some game companies still do. Mostly these are companies that ship a chunk of finished software rather than a "service" -- a big release once a year, little post-hoc tracking and engagement optimization. I think there's fundamentally an incentive problem with most (all?) free-to-use software services. If revenue directly correlates to engagement time it's really hard to avoid this trap because it's a very rational path to go down to optimize the business.

I'm not entirely sure what you've described is the case. I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases the for-the-worse changes aren't done when a site is at the top of their game, but are instead reactionary attempts because they noticed downward trends for sign-ups or engagement or whatever that aren't necessarily apparent to the users yet. People don't necessarily need a good reason to stop using something besides they don't think it's cool anymore.

I'd love to hear from the decision makers behind such changes, whether it was an attempt to improve an already-good situation or if it was an attempt to correct a declining situation.

Humans do this with pretty much everything where there's a manager to please and bonuses to justify. Compare McDonalds with In-n-Out (which presumably at one time in the past made similar quality burgers).

> I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age.

Why wait? Like you it disgusts me now.

In short, see 80/20 rule. Once you've hit 80 you probably should look at growing horizontally.

I don't use Facebook but I'm under the impression they've done this somewhat with local market places, games & video streaming.

It sounds to me that you're sick of common abused marketing tactics or maybe it's just that I am & therefore that's how I read your post. Gamification, Deadly Sins, Reciprocity, etc..

The problem is not that they seek to grab attention, is what they decide to do with that attention.

We might think of Web 2.1 composed by socially responsible apps.

I agree this is a problem, but IMO it's pretty specific to social media, or other free online services. Typically a business can reach 1.0, then seek to expand their market, or release the next big version, get people to pay for a bigger plan etc etc. All the normal ways a company grows once it has "made it."

This is just business in general though. It's why I am buying toilet paper and IP addresses from the same company. No company is happy just existing and solving one specific problem, they always feel the pressure to expand and grow as much as possible (from shareholders) even if it really doesn't make any sense.

There are plenty of software products out there that people love. Blender, OBS, Sublime Text, and Procreate are a few that come to mind. We don't need to come up with any new culture or methodology -- if we pay attention, there are already plenty of examples for us to follow if we want to.

> If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.

Why? I do not consider it self evident that such developments are necessarily bad.

As they say, if something is free you're not the consumer you're the product.

Then the product managers are doing their job well if engagement improves

> I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?)

I think OG Twitter sent you an SMS every time someone you follow tweeted.

Note though, the goal isn't quite to keep you interacting with the app as possible. The goal is to get the most people interacting with the app to get the most revenue.

Probably why a lot of these changes make apps less engaging for people like the author and commenters here. That random boomer photo is probably popular among the average person even though it doesn't fit into your feed. Facebook/Instagram don't care about your interaction and revenue in particular, they care about getting the most interaction and revenue in general.

Exactly that!

Entropy is an unstoppable force. The churn to save our past ways is the problem.

We don’t need industrial pipelines for everything.

Centralize logistics of biological necessity, privatize self exploration.

We should only industrially build industrial machines we need, and personal gadget fetishism can go in the bin.

Our wealth is a mathematical quagmire. No one knows who owes what really, and Dick Cheney was saying the quiet part out loud before Trump: deficits don’t matter.

It’s an emotional boondoggle. Future people will renegotiate or blow ourselves up.

I met one of the most brilliant people in my life. Smart, passionate about art, culture, politics. Brilliant student, top of her class from elementary through college. Fluent (as in certified) C2 in English and German. Terrific career as a public servant in foreign politics already in her late 20s.

She would never, ever, miss a single episode of a “reality” about dating in tv, a show famous in Italy as “trash tv”. It was unwatchable, worse than Jersey shore.

I asked her why such an intelligent and smart person couldn’t miss an episode of something so terrible and lame and she answered me “I know it’s awful, but for an entire hour I’m able to be lobotomized and not have a single thought, I can completely detach from reality and relax”.

My current SO does the same with Instagram. Whenever she needs to detach from her thoughts she zombifies on Instagram. Might be cats or fashion bloggers but she tunes out completely and she does that intentionally knowing that’s the effect it has on her.

It's television for the current generation. I've noticed my parents and inlaws cannot exist without having the television on. I mean they can, but pick a random day, show up at their house and the TV is on some show that they are remotely interested in but watching because they had nothing else to do. That's instagram/facebook/snapchat/etc.

My way of using Instagram was that I only follow people I have talked to in real life. No influencers, no news outlets, no brands, no businesses, no "young people making popular dance moves" unless that's made by young people I know and have talked to in real life.

The app has been making this way of using Instagram more and more difficult. It's not surprising because my way likely doesn't generate any revenue.

I have an Instagram account where I post about modding retro game consoles. Turns out there's a huge community of very supportive people who do the same thing. It's not all TikTok influencers, there are niches on every platform. It's just like real life, there are good and bad people, places to go, etc. I love Instagram and some of the communities I've discovered within it.

I hate that it's owned by Facebook.

It's basically a porn site. Perhaps there's no nudity, but it's as soul-sucking and a waste of time as erotic pornography. The behavior of the user, the emotional high, and the business model really aren't so different.

Same here. My wife spends hours On IG every day. I have asked some people how this is possible and their reply was : 'I thought I would not be addicted but when I installed the app I got hooked'.

I genuinely do not understand why people like so much watching photos. I can spend a few minutes watching photos or drawings of things I enjoy but I tire really quickly. I can't even think of something I like enough to spend one hour watching photos of it.

> This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to claim that Facebook is a "neutral" platform.

Who claims that?

They are publishers, they just use algorithms as editors and publish billions of unique personalized webpages every day.

You can't promote some content without effectively censoring other content.

> Friends with bands and tiny galleries

Speaking of algorithmic feeds, I will always lament what could have been - for a short time, you got what was promised on the box: follow creators you like, see the event flyers they post, put the event on a calendar. Utopia.

Then they pushed “organic reach” onto the world, and my musician friends with 5000 followers started to be informed that their event flyers would not be delivered unless they paid a fee for different levels of reach.

since then, i’ve regularly been informed of events the day after they happen, because that’s when facebook decided a post was popular enough to show me. how many missed connections occurred because facebook was squeezing small creators for ad revenue? so much for connecting the world

As a Young People™, this is not entirely true.

Stories are only partly chronological. The stories are grouped per user and in these groups they are chronological. However these groups are not chronological.

Secondly, posts are not for old people. Posts serve a different purpose than stories. The barrier to post is a lot higher, and they are definitely not used (anymore) to share that you are going to a restaurant/movie/etc, because stories took over that niche. However something like a (single!) post with (multiple) photos of your last holiday (with at least the first one including you) and some fun caption is still totally done.

Hell, im a pretty early adopter of instagram along with loads of friends and like 95% of content has become stories.

Turns out Snapchat was what most of us wanted but without a purposefully obtuse interface

Give it a year or two and I bet there will be unskippable ads between the stories.

Worth noting that “very young people” are using TikTok and Instagram is usually an afterthought for them.

If you’re a big insta user you’re already “two generations” out of date (snap and TikTok).

Stories are not chronological.

Most people under the age of 30 are using Snapchat

Makes sense. Even from the outside the absolute interest of the 2005 generation in Myspace YouTube and Facebook was extraordinary at the time.

I imagine from the inside it must have been an amazing high to be part of Facebook Twitter YouTube.

Trying to recapture that high of being the absolute crest of the wave of the future makes sense as a motivation for someone who has it all.

I don't know anyone who quit social media that says they miss it.

Granted, that's only a handful of people.

You didn't "engage" with it the right way.

That was the part that captured me too. I really want to create a "personal feed" or newsletter out of a Matrix [1] group chat with threads [1] enabled, where I can post once a week or so and my friends can react/reply.

[1]: https://matrix.org/

[2]: https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#threads

No need for LAMP! Just use next.just or gatsby to build your static site and upload to cloudfront.

Pixelfed has a very thoughtfully designed webapp. It's not the same experience as a native app, but I find it works nicely.

PixelDroid[1] is a great android client for PixelFed!

1 - https://pixeldroid.org/

Sounds like they got their inspiration from the youtube recommendation engine.

If they just showed you a chronological feed you'll be able to tell when you've reached the end of the new posts and stop there.

With an algorithmic feed there's essentially no end in sight, people will scroll way more in hopes of seeing new content, which gives them the opportunity to include more ads.

The changes to Instagrams algorithms are, just like those of Facebook, to optimize "engagement". Where I believe most platforms fail is how they measure their improvements.

For the first weeks, or months, people just sort of deal with the new algorithms, because Facebook, Instagram and so on is part of their rutine. Engangement goes up, because people stay longer, as they can find anything. Over time, engagement then decreases, as users are increasingly annoyed. They starts to use the platform less and less, because the content they originally came for is hidden away. At that point the platform has moved on and is no longer seeing users leaving as a result of some change made months ago.

I'd be extremely surprised if Facebook has the attention span to tracking changes to their platforms over longer periods of time. As a result they focus on sort term improvements, because that's what they reward internally, without considering what the cost will be next year.

As a counter-point, IG recently made it much easier to upload content directly from a desktop operating system. It finally added a button for users upload posts from a web browser from a desktop OS (before, you had to switch the browser's user agent to identify as a mobile device, then refresh).

But separately, if professional brands really do take over IG over user-generated content between friends, the runner-up is Pinterest. A February 2021 study of social media usage shows that Instagram usage among US adults is 40% [0], with Pinterest at 31% usage. Beyond Pinterest, the runner-ups for (high-quality, artistic) creative content are platforms like Adobe's Behance or Dribbble, but the users for these are primarily creative professionals.

For user-generated content between friends (day-to-day stuff), Snapchat isn't a bad replacement (25% usage, according to the same survey). I would guess that most content remains user-generated (via photos that delete themselves sent to other friends). I would also guess it's less less harmful to mental health for certain groups, as it doesn't feature Likes or Comments.

To be totally honest, though, I wouldn't regret the loss of user-generated social media content. Exchanging messages, having video calls, and seeing people in-person feels a lot more enjoyable and helpful for strengthening relationships.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media...

I got rid of my account and started a blog instead. Much more fun to learn about Jekyll, CSS, and improve my long form writing skills anyway. There's federated blog networks like Micro.blog out there, but personally I've just backpedaled to good old RSS myself. If a blog provides it, it's a strong sign they're producing content from a passionate place, rather than trying to collect email addresses and followers for monetization.

Chronological, completely distributed... it feels a bit like rediscovering ancient technology in some science fiction or fantasy universe. "An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age."

TikTok probably. Everyone is saying they're really prioritizing creation tools in-app.

Once upon a time, youtube did the same until it got enough (semi professional) content creators.

Check out Imgur's usersub. Lots of crap, but isn't art just screwing around with crap?

I only use it on my PC though. I really don't like the app, and imgur has purposely ruined the mobile web version to push me there.

I sort of recall the moment where imgur straight up disabled functionality of the mobile web site. I think it was that you can't post content via the mobile website anymore.

That was when I just stopped using it on my phone and exclusively use it on the PC. Yeah I could switch to desktop mode on my phone to keep posting, but it wasn't worth the hassle. Much less use by the way.

Glass.photo is trying to fill a gap for actual photographers (not really a social network for selfies). Paid, but ad free. They’re close to sustainably profitable too.

Take it to Telegram channel.

No algorithmic mess.

The best part of the name change is that if profits ever start to stagnate, we can say that they’ve entered Meta-stasis!

Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) and Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. In terms of the rebrand they committed $10+ billion a year to VR development and promoted the head of VR to CTO so it's a pretty bold PR stunt.

There's a famous smoking cessation book (that I cannot remember the name of) with one core theme which is supposedly very powerful in the eyes of smokers. The idea that you gain nothing from smoking. That's my realisation when I quit Facebook.

Meta/Facebook will crumble as more people come to realise that.

FB has had a big problem for years. Zuckerberg, notwithstanding everything else, to his credit has demonstrated he is intimately aware of it through his acquisition strategies. If it's in a blink of an eye, it's your eye. To others it's been the case ever since the Instagram/Whatsapp acquisitions.

I wouldn't really describe it as "blink of an eye", Facebook hasn't been popular with the younger crowd for many years.

That was one of the reasons FB acquired Instagram, as most younger users started flocking there instead of FB.

Facebook became the old people platform when my parents and relatives joined in ~2012. That's about the time I stopped using it.

Serious consideration: they are embracing this reality as their primary long-term strategy, anticipating their becoming the defacto “metaverse” virtual world that older people wish to be plugged into. I can clearly see a future in which users can sign over all current and future retirement funds and financial assets, and in exchange be plugged full-time into a “facebook disneyland” to live out the rest of their years in digitally augmented bliss as an avatar alongside friends and family.

Yeah, I’m exactly the same. I would have thought that they would notice that I literally never scroll past there (except every now and then by accident, then I wonder why my feed is full of crap) and stop showing it… I guess not enough people stop scrolling there? Or maybe they do and Instagram is just trying to ram it down everybody’s throats to show more ads?

It really sucks that you can’t turn it off. The worst bit is when you see “You’re all caught up”, click the ‘View older posts’ link, and then see posts that I don’t remember seeing from friends that I follow and want to see posts from. Makes me so annoyed! But these friends are only posting on Instagram (or Instagram and FB, which is worse) so there’s not really any good options for seeing these posts I want to see except fighting Insta’s stupid interface…

There’s a “sensitive content control” option in account settings. Set to “limit even more” and this type of content will actually stop showing. My search screen is just airplanes and Turkish construction videos now.

Agreed, Google also added YouTube shorts and those are similarly overfit to whatever is the most “engaging” content for some broad demographic, so since I work out I just get nonstop videos of ripped 18-24 year old women doing squats to show off their butts - and I’m not into any of it but they’ve already decided that’s what I want to see, forever.

> Since Reels launched, my feed and the search screen is basically just softcore porn.

I had this problem with Reels too - I think you're right that it's just kind of "what we show dudes by default." But under the three-dots menu there's a "Not interested" option. Tell the algo that a couple times and you won't see that stuff anymore.

This is my exact problem with it. I only follow comic book artists, friends, and local businesses. Yet my reels are full of semi nude women gyrating to music. I don't want that there.

Wow. That is probably one of the more underhanded things I've heard about them.

So they hope that you will forget, and in reality I'd bet most people do. Basically the same as a "Free 30 Day Trial" and then they take your credit card number. Of course most people don't remember and get charged anyway. (Which was deemed illegal in a court of law? Or am I just being hopeful?)

Curtains open.... "But it's for security!"

I dunno. Until the recent changes, Instagram has been very very much a net positive for me. I've connected with artists I love, learned how to improve my work, and paid a particular woodworker north of $1k for a couple pochade boxes I absolutely adore. Without Instagram, my life would be significantly less fulfilling.

Caveat though: I'm very good at clicking 'not interested' for content that isn't right in my particularly desired niche.

that's why I use reddit clients like sync for reddit ..no recommendation bs just get the feed from subreddits I subscribed for .. imo you should try it

It's awful. I have it on one account, and not on my other one. The result of the snapping is I stop scrolling and close the app much sooner when browsing that account.

It’s terrible.

Should be a network for professionals talking about careers, it’s half people discussing Facebook things (squid game was a popular topic a month ago…), and its another half of attention seekers.

Tech Twitter and HNs are the only socials I read to find interesting content and read everyday, plus few selected subreddits on sports I care for as soccer or formula 1, but step out on some other subreddits and its bigocy and cringe.

They probably know this acutely which explains Meta.

Federation instead of centralization.

What you want is SMS group chats. No ads. No sign up. Sorta ephemeral. Always chronological.

Have you tried making a discord server? My server is my social media entirely now and I love it. The hard part is getting non gamers into it.

I wish we could force advasarial integration on social media like we did with telephones. Imagine only being able to call and talk to only other people on the Sprint network.

Let the tech companies compete on UX and what they do with your data. Don't hide my friends and family away from me

This is the first time I ever heard of Threads. Just downloaded it, and the first thing I see is a message that says "Threads will no longer be available, starting December 2021", as in, today.

To be followed up by "WhatsApp" rebranding to "What's Facebook" and "Oculus" to "Facebook Live 360".

Ahahaha. Long time since I’ve laughed so hard on HN. And thing is, it kind of makes sense.

I've been thinking the same until I got this far down in the comments. The article doesn't seem to address the service's name, just bla-bla-bla average grade navel gazing.

I first started using the app in earnest my final year of college, and look back wistfully at how I artfully chronicled my life for the subsequent six years, weaving together pictures of concerts and coffee shops with mirror selfies and delicious meals into an effortless pointillist tableau of my 20s. I still post on the app occasionally, but basically left a little over a month ago in favor of a personal newsletter, where I feel less pressure to be constantly documenting my consciousness.

tangentially, I'm not a fan of headline case; it just creates unnecessary ambiguity. Sites with normal casing (like a typical sentence) for titles I find much easier to read and process.

Metagram Instant

Delete it instead. I’ve been deleting any but text medias and I just can’t believe how much time people spend on it.

For reference, Instagram lets you see how much time you spend on the app, daily and on average.

I was shocked when I found out I averaged almost 18 minutes per day. I just didn’t feel like I spent so much time on it, but then you start realizing all of the pauses and voids it filled here and there and it was almost 20 minutes per day. I started watching the time my SO spent on it, almost two hours per day. Commuting? Instagram. Before falling asleep? Instagram. After coming home from work? Instagram. That’s 15% of her day, of her life, spent on that.

I cannot but have a grim outlook on all of this. Do yourself a favor and set some examples. This whole culture of attention seeking has to die.

This really is the worst part of Facebook's approach to products - it's constantly trying to inject "recommended" content into my experience, which ultimately IMO is the precise problem with this form of social media.

I don't want to use social media to interact with total strangers - I follow people I know IRL, or businesses I frequent, or just generally people/accounts that I've been recommended from sources I trust.

This "HEY YOU MUST MEET THIS STRANGER" thing that FB pioneered and that Instagram seems big into now is the root of so many problems. It encourages the kinds of negative interactions that define the FB experience (rude/abusive comments on one's posts from rando strangers? Hello!)

There's been much said about the coarsening of discourse post-social-media, and I have to say this constant drumbeat of getting everyone to talk to every stranger is one of the primary causes of it.

Exactly. I just use instagram to msg people who aren't on Telegram and other services as I don't have FB. I don't think I've ever used the feed before, simply because of seeing ads. I never watch stories either. It's a dumpster fire, and any algorithm to show me stuff is a mistake, full stop. I only want to see my friends stuff chronologically, nothing else on the app matters for me.

I genuinely don't understand why they do this. Sure, keep the ads, whatever, but make it chronological. Too many busy bodies I guess?

This is why I eventually gave up on Instagram.

I’d carefully curated my feed to what I was interested in, following a load of really good abstract and generative artists, until it would suddenly decide that what I really wanted to see was nailcare tips or whatever.

After a few days of me actively pruning content the feed would settle down, but it happened more and more frequently until I couldn’t be bothered anymore.

It's worse than TV, it's home shopping network.

RSS/Atom was the way to do this. It's a huge shame hardly anyone (knowingly) uses it anymore.

> People just want a chronological feed of things they followed.

Feed consumers are not the paying customers.

Hacker News is not representative of the population at large. If people in fact do not like this, engagement will drop, and they'll stop doing it. It turns out most people in the silent majority actually do like this, or are at least more engaged/addicted because of it.