Sure, because they could get the information they want without having to wade through the mountains of crap you’re pumping out of the septic tank into your users faces. You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Similarly, 'You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown' can be shortened to 'You’re optimising the wrong metric'.
That is, if they really wanted to make it easy for you to connect and share with friends, or maybe meet some new ones (remember Facebook's "poke" feature?), they could easily do that. But they've found they are much better at the endless scroll of mindless WALL-E human crap, having optimized the right brain chemicals to make you feel like you can keep boredom at bay with one more upward swipe.
The only winning move is not to play.
I want a social network where it is OK for people to sporadically add vanal posts. A social network that does not prioritize outrage or contention. And a social network were my close circle is actually discoverable, with high SNR.
Tommy's say on Instagram's product choices is probably about equivalent to my say which is to say no say.
He does have a say in the way that facebook acts because he has leverage through his popularity. Not to mention that he is going on the news giving apologia to the corporation. And you're saying we should we should just twiddle our thumbs and not contest his ridiculous ideas because he's not a shareholder or something?
Tommy doesn't optimize Instagram metrics. Instagram does.
Tommy doesn't have users. Instagram does.
Tommy doesn't pump "mountains of crap out of the septic tank into" users faces. Instagram does. Tommy pumps out whatever content he wants to the people who follow him.
It's clear from the quote that OP thinks Tommy works at Instagram and is criticizing what he think is an Instagram employee.
It's not even apologia for Instagram, it's just Tommy's statement of belief that Instagram won't be negatively impacting users' time spent with these changes. There's no value statement at all from Tommy.
It's not even a "ridiculous idea". It's just that Tommy thinks these changes will increase users' time spent on Instagram. You're just imputing mountains of additional context into what he says.
They're optimizing for the metric that suits their interests.
It occurs to me that Facebook and related companies may well become the equivalent of ransomware companies - controlling more and more of the world's information and making more and more abusive demands for access to it.