Instagram quietly bumps up the minimum daily time limit | Hacker News Reader

Instagram quietly bumps up the minimum daily time limit

engadget.com

I can hardly blame Instagram PMs for pushing this change. Their main competitor is TikTok with average daily viewing times of 40+ mins per day (reported 24hrs/month as of Sept 2021). Internally, Instagram PMs have surely been tasked with matching this. Changing the minimum daily time limit was probably the easiest A/B test any PM has ever run.

As a society we should ask ourselves, how do we realign incentives such that social media companies aren't motivated to maximize engagement time? I don't think blanket bans or regulations on viewing time is the answer (that's not what the average user wants). My hunch is that we need to change the relationship between viewing time and value (advertising).

P.S. - perhaps I'm just out of touch and there is no total engagement time problem. Perhaps social media is just as valuable as any media before it. Nobody is argument that we should limit total daily time spent reading books, listening to music or watching Netflix.

Ban or heavily regulate advertising (such as making platforms liable for the ads they serve) so that alternative business models (such as making the user pay for the service directly) become more attractive.

We already know the problem is ads.

We do not care because it is lucrative.

The English language seems to have a bad time with expressing the concept of the poorest result, without some sort of ambiguity.

Reading the headline and being unaware of all the features of Instagram, I tried the interpretation that IG was enforcing a minimum daily usage. "You must use Instagram for at least 6 minutes a day." After digesting all the available writing in this thread and in the Fine Article, it appears that Instagram has a feature to aid with self control of usage of Instagram. The bad news is that they have decided that they want to interfere with self control by requiring the maximum daily usage a user might impose on himself to be above some minimum. "If you control your usage of Instagram by setting a maximum daily usage, that maximum must be at least 23 hours."

TechCrunch has been notified by an Instagram user, that the app has asked to “set a new value” for their daily time limit. The Instagram app currently offers a minimum time limit of 30 minutes.

Give management a button for "increase engagement" and they will push that button eventually, no matter the long-term implications.

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