Instagram gets worse with dark patterns lifted from TikTok
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty much hate what it has become. 16 years down the drain.
But dark patterns abound, and mobile gaming is largely a hell of monetization and slot-machine mechanics.
I know my iPhone can render excellent graphics, I played to level 60 on Diablo Immortal then got out before they could extract more than $10 from me!
Most of these startups are aimed at improving access via telemedicine, accessibility apps, price comparison apps, etc. I'm not sure what you're imagining.
But I'm acknowledging that for me personally, working for, selling my talent to and/or profiting from the "healthcare" industry as it exists today without a universal option to provide healthcare to every American, full stop, is a breach of my own ethics.
Become backend developer. Pretty much everybody needs them.
I don't think you'll get the huge audience of these other platforms. That may be a feature.
The nice thing with IRC, though, is that by not being one massive centralized entity where all channels in existence reside, you’re not depending on one particular network in the same way you might be dependent on services like Discord. You can run your own server for your own community where you can set your own rules and manage everything the way you want to.
IRCv3 also has SASL [1]. And more rudimentary forms of authentication have been around for ages on most servers.
it's because any way to make money that is currently legal (but some might consider unethical) is the fittest agent in the darwinian natural selection of economic competition.
So any ethical businesses who forgo a more profitable, but slightly less ethical method, would be out-competed. Over time, therefore, what remains must be businesses whose ethical consideration is trumped by profit considerations.
Instagram is following this exactly - tiktok has better retention and user engagement using the dark patterns, and instagram would not survive if they can't keep up.
So it's really up to the law to set the standard. Akin to how in the old days, environmental protection laws don't exist, and the environment is polluted, there needs to be laws to protect the consumer's "digital environment". Unfortunately, the law is slow to catchup - i doubt i will see it in my life time, and often, the law only catches up after significant damage has been done.
No one makes you work for casinos, big pharma, anti-human-rights political groups, or surveillance capitalism companies.
If you work for an unethical company you share responsibility for the harm they do.
If a company you work for is behaving unethically, quit, and find another job. I promise it is an option.
Making unethical behavior illegal actually does have an impact on what people do because it changes their cost/reward decision
- I'm not sure, though the reasoning may be that their future existence is ultimately more valuable as a population control system than merely an ad network.
- Some have argued that online ads are in a bubble. I don't know.
- A free market does not seem to exist though.
Thoughts?
I've looked at some ad spending stuff at companies in the past and while their official numbers always "added up" there always seemed to me to be huge logic gaps that missed lots of obvious overspending. Those things are always hand-waved away as some sort of force multiplier or other nonsense. AKA don't cut our budget or sales will go away we dare you!
I've posted a longer comment on here about an adventure in cutting ad spending at a company I was at because of a minor feud I had with the marketing manager. There were huge areas where the cost/profit from ads was destroying profit margin. I made some tremendous efforts to prove we could make major spending cuts on advertising without losing sales to the owner and ceo and was successful. I probably would not have been able to do it if the marketing guy was not constantly blaming their failures on IT so I stood up for us by spending my personal time making accurate reports and dashboards about the spending and proved him wrong. (he and a couple others lost their job) (no they didn't stand up and clap its a real story)
Not sure if you are sarcastic or not. I totally blame them. I mean would you ask your drug dealer how to quit drugs?
Lord have mercy on all the inexperienced kids and others who just want to create videos and have them seen when they try ads... A lot of experimental money is gambled away on ads daily... I'm pretty sure it's a big pile of income annually for platforms.
I am a -lot- happier. Also as an independent contractor I have more control of the tools I use and am free to use and support only open source software on my workstations.
I use these apps a lot because I promote music I make... I don't really use black hat techniques to do so, but many people who do are completely robbing creator funds and getting far more exposure than most of the honest and most talented creators all combined. The platforms favor memes and things that don't promote any business outside of the platform, so it's made psychological manipulation and subtle suggestion very popular in pretty much every video. The endorphin rush people used to get is dying as videos turn more and more hostile and shockingly towards influencing viewers consumerism habits.
I think ethics are everything though, so I don't leverage my black hat development knowledge against platforms just to be heard, and don't waste tons of money on ads like the highly viewed accounts do... Accounts try to manipulate you into giving them your money, the platforms work to manipulate you into giving them your money for ads, it will eventually wear itself out once the money dries up or people catch on that most people on these platforms aren't really making good money, except for the platforms.
I try to always post non-psych-manipulative music related things for followers as well as cynical shitposts in protest as the platforms slowly direct my views towards overseas viewers that will never really purchase nor stream my music. It's rather grim, but I'm sharpening my video editing skills, and it motivates me to keep making music that I can take to whatever slowly corrupted social shit show comes next... touché!
I’m now in talks with a foundation who is building communication tools for social and public initiatives. I don’t know if the idea will work out in the end but there are alternatives worth pursuing.
I really don’t understand the engineers and designers working at Facebook and similar companies. They cannot all be ignorant. There has to be some cultural angle of disdain for the regular user at play.
Facebook is a cesspit of delusion and the "metaverse" initiative they took takes us to a point of no return for all their apps. Tiktok I would say is even worse given how we basically have millions of young teens oscillating on the borderline of being "famous" and sexualizing themselves. Stay away from such social media platforms or those that offer completely "free" products and you are good.
Whether it's enabled or not, Lidar is military-grade tech that has no place on most cell phones,
Let's not act like the entire industry isn't heavily invested in data collection... It does damage to real discussions about privacy and consumer protection for everyone.
encryption is military-grade tech too.
https://www.opentopography.org/blog/iphone-lidar-application...
How about the touch screen/keyboard?
Lidar is completely different tech that can scan an entire room, faces of everyone in it without their consent, and even devices and products in the room with you, even things out of camera view.
Vastly more invasive, and most people are completely unaware it is on phones now and what it can do.
C'mon man... It's not an argument point, it's necessary privacy threat awareness.
Lidar will struggle with items in the room as it is simply an depth detection tech so it will simply see a box, rather than chocolate chip cookies.
I think lidar is an odd one, that's all. Phone cameras are significantly worse for privacy.
Anything painted green and sold for 10x the price is military grade.
You can get Lidar on all sorts of civilian applications, from height mapping on drone photography, to driving assistance on cars. The lidar on phones is over-kill, depth mapping in photos or cheap crappy AR are not great use cases, but that doesn't make it a privacy problem.
The problem is that software engineering is my only marketable skill. I've fallen into a trap.
Perhaps it’s time that bright, young, talented minds are dedicated to solving Real Problems again in the world.
And while Snapchat's AR filters were (and still are) state-of-the-art, those are only short-term distractions and don't have long-term stickiness.
They'll have a much harder time with TikTok. Tiktok's secret juice isn't the Slightly-Longer-Vines. It's the recommendation algorithm. It's INCREDIBLY addictive.
It's also (today) wildly incompatible with Instagram's bread and butter, which is celebrity influencers peddling masked branded content.
Tiktok's very brilliance is that it's egalitarian - every video gets 100 views. And if you're a heavy user (say 1 hour a day) you will almost every day discover some amazing new creator or video BEFORE they go viral. (or as viral as they might in this app where you get 15 seconds of fame not 15 minutes)
I predict that Instagram will fail to beat Tiktok here, but TikTok will be trying hard to be one of the big boys, and ruin what makes it amazing by attracting and embracing celebrities and brands (already starting to happen).
If Instagram can hold on to their celebrities long enough (and i think they will), they'll win out in the end when people get bored of TikTok after they self-sabotage their recommendation algorithm.
> They'll have a much harder time with TikTok. Tiktok's secret juice isn't the Slightly-Longer-Vines. It's the recommendation algorithm. It's INCREDIBLY addictive.
As long as the corporations, large advertisers, existing influencers and celebrities and mainstream media, keep paying big money to TikTok to game the algorithm and flood their content, ads on there to reach more users, the ruining of TikTok will happen, just like it did with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc and the users will always be in last vs the ones who can pay big money.
I predict that TikTok will screw its users over (which it is already doing) due to investor, advertiser pressure to keep it up and this would definitely happen after they IPO to give them a return. The longer they postpone the IPO, it will get worse it for them and especially the users.
It doesn't matter if it is Instagram. If they can't do it will be from someone else. It is the same old power law happening again. The early users who got addicted to it will complain that TikTok is ruining the platform and will no longer feel addicted anymore and leave to find the next addictive hit. The late users will follow suit leaving it to the bots to pick up the pieces.
Rinse and repeat for 'current trend'.
I don't know if these patterns were pioneered by Chinese software companies, but from at least 5 years ago they were already doing this in pretty much every mobile app. Infuriatingly, my online banking app did it too, so you couldn't even just log on to check your account balance without having a half dozen pop-ups and flashing icons and weird mini-apps trying to get you to click on something almost, but not quite entirely unlike a banking product.
Nowadays I even see it on ordinary western e-commerce websites like Booking.com, or (most recently, post-redesign) the account management page of my mobile provider. I have no idea what the product managers responsible for this are thinking, because it just makes using the app an exercise in disappointment. If I click on a notification I want to get something that genuinely is important to me, not some kind of alert from a half-assed feature I never wanted in the first place.
It had been a not-insignificant part of my work but now I just resent using it at all.
I was one of those people that thought TikTok was a modern garbage machine that only produced low quality dancing videos of young girls for zoomers. But then I read on HN that you just need to commit for a little while and it will learn what you like.
I was amazed at how much this is true. I'm now getting Scott Manley-esque space news, tech stuff, hyper local restaurant recommendations, real gameplay of game genres I actually like, etc. Basically what took me years to carefully subscribe to on Youtube was done in a few months on TikTok and it only seems to get more relevant (note: YT always still wins in pure intellectual signal vs noise).
The whole addictive thing is obviously an issue, especially for kids, but I'm an adult who grew up with tech and I've learned how to carefully balance internet/life, so it's mostly pure upside for me.
I work in travel content and on my work account I want to see the content of my clients and prospective clients I've chosen to follow (to see the work they're selecting or which videographers they're using), but instead it pushes everything else on me.
More than ever, these apps are about consuming content - ever increasing amounts of it. I seriously resent that.
It's weird. You'd think that inspiring customer loyalty by building a good product would be considered good business, but even as I'm typing that, I'm realizing how comically naive it sounds. Meta and its ilk are 100% about lock-in (and, to no small degree, addiction); you ultimately realize you're not using them because you want to, but because you have to. (Unless, of course, you're willing to sacrifice being able to share your work with friends and build a following. Some people are. I'm not.)
I've found that blocking every user that displays video ads, and reporting the ad as "offensive", does seem to cut down on garbage after a while.
For the more specific/serious stuff—reporting scams, violence, etc—they'll investigate (or pretend they did) and report back to you, but I don't get any of those responses for the "offensive" option.
- 1/3 ads
- 1/3 suggested content
- 1/3 actual content I followed, among which more and more tended to be sponsored
That’s just not worth my time.
If you use Instagram passively like television, you're watching usually-polished content interspersed with ads, which probably feels OK. Maybe this is the majority of people. If you use Instagram just to follow friends, unless their content is all very polished (it generally isn't - it's them walking their kid to school or a basic photo at the beach) then your feed feels like:
1/6th mediocre (but relevant to you) content
1/6th creator-type friends promoting places/things
1/3rd suggested content
1/3rd ads
- They stopped displaying the name of the account under the stories circles at the top, so you don't know who's story you're clicking on unless you memorized their profile photo. Since I only want to click on stories of people I know closely, I now choose not to watch any stories at all.
- They moved the activity (heart) from the main bottom icon navigation and up to the top right next to the dm icon, signifying they're giving it less relevance than it's new replacement, the shopping icon!
- They're pushing shopping in seemingly half the posts showing up in the newsfeed now.
The combination of shopping and forced watching of video reels has me ready to cancel my account entirely. I don't use instagram to watch videos or shop, but even if I did decide to do one of those, which I never would, I don't want it forced on me.
An ad blocker can block a lot more than just ads. Mine removes anything that isn't goal-oriented, including most recommendation elements.
It's in the wording, innit? It's "don't show me again" but "less often" which implies you'll be nagged again with irrelevant content up until you gave up because the queue never ends as algorithm never sleeps.
And then with the Reels 'flipping' mode of browsing. Also been a core facet of the Reels-specific UI area for a long time now. It may not be the most fun for you but it's not new and many who hang out in that area will be comfortable with it.
Yes, Instagram's copying of annoying things from TikTok and general decline on quality of content experience etc is a common gripe, but that's it, it's a common gripe and part of an ongoing evolution that ppl have been commenting on for ages. Not new. There's a lot of manual finessing that can be done to help the balance of ads and curation you get in your IG experience and it just takes work, all is not lost to the algorithm. People seem lazy and at odds with IG's business goals but that doesn't mean the whole thing has gone out the window.
It's not like Instagram suddenly sucks.
There's this federated photo sharing service pixelfed [1](of course runs on ActivityPub) but it doesn't seem to be gaining any traction, comparable to mastodon. Perhaps because it doesn't come with a mobile application.
The good thing about this scourge getting out of hand is that we might see regulatory action in the future.
https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/ay39vh/first_thing...
But it sounds like this is the end of that. So... Bye!
In any case, now there will always be 3 things moving on this screen and that‘s why I can‘t use it anymore.
And then, let's be honest, video autoplay in any shape or form in the first place is also a clear dark pattern hoping to grab your attention. Some Instagram builds have a server-side setting to disable video autoplay, which I use (by enabling the debug menu where you get to override all those things manually). Some builds do not. Yes, I got annoyed by Instagram UX so much that I had to decompile it, patch the nastiest parts out, and put it back together.
psychological warfare
No
It gives you more of what you watch and upvote. So the contents of your For You page are on you, after the first 5 or so videos.
Their use cases/journeys need a lot of work.
Also, TikTok is not accounting for views properly (Mr Beast reported it on TikTok among many others), they redirect users away from certain accounts when links are shared on web sites, and they even stop certain videos from playing and shadow ban US users if their content talks negatively about the platform... Just like the country it comes from might do.
TikTok promotes the content that you respond to, no different than the recommendation algos we've gotten from our homegrown social media companies. Their biggest differentiator is that the signals they use are way better. If you see alot of gender transitioning content, then it says more about the content you watch.
That said, if you think critically, if Chinese users as a whole preferred educational and wholesome content on tiktok, that says more about Chinese society and what they value not that there is some boogeyman who holds a big level on whether to show you cats or twerking.
>Certain types of content is banned on Douyin but the idea that tiktok promotes "edu and wholesome content within China" is a myth spread
These two comments aren't really contradictory. Tiktok might technically not be "promoting edu and wholesome content" in china, but they might have banned the content that the parent poster thinks is repugnant (ie. "twerking and gender transition"). Indeed, depending on how much stuff is banned and what you consider as "wholesome", it's very possible that the chinese censors banned everything that you don't consider wholesome.
No, I think the phrasing of the statement is misleading. It implies that TikTok (or some Chinese boogeyman) is the one making the decision to "poison" American Tiktok viewers. That isn't the case; the two cultures are different - China may ban choose to ban twerking videos on social media platforms but the US could not do something like that without infringing on free speech.
The people want twerking videos (TikTok did not invent "sex sells"), whether or not tiktok gives it to you is a function of the countries government, not some Chinese mastermind.
That said, I don't think the statement is globally true. I opened TikTok just now on "unpaired words"[1], I've never seen a video on transitioning and I get plenty of educationally curious content. This content does exist on US TikTok and is being promoted; you just have to be interested in watching it.
> The "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.'
and
> Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
So if even the guys lawyers tell you any reasonable person would take him with a grain of salt, I would assume that everything he says is indeed exaggerated and non-literal as they phrase it. Or phrased differently: he will say what he thinks his audience wants to hear. What he says might be completely made up, have some important bits omitted or contain a kernel of truth with a truckload of fantasy.
From a European perspective this guy seems so over the top that I thought it was meant to be parody when I first saw a clip from him.
source: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
It's the complete opposite on tiktok, you see almost exclusively entertainers and creative people
So it's no wonder they are trying to copy this, but copying the UI won't be enough if you keep the same userbase
The only one close enough to TikTok is youtube, but their Shorts UI/UX is one of the worst i ever seen
There is no difference with these platforms other than one of them (TikTok) having an addictive Orwellian algorithm that dictates what is seen and unseen and can amplify a dangerous reality distortion field to create a deception of reality such that its users cannot tell what is real or not, even as serious as a war [0] all thanks to the algorithm.
So when you have something that is even worse than Facebook, Instagram, etc that is hardly 'The best thing to have happened to the Internet.' [1]
[0] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...