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Comment by kache_ | Hacker News Reader

You know what? I love the new instagram changes. And everyone I know has been using it more and more over the years. Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. Data doesn't lie.

TikTok copied short form videos from.. vine. I mean youtube YLYL videos. I mean... newgrounds.

Shit's been around, and both facebook and google are going to lap tik tok. Keep up :)

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Data doesn't lie is, in itself, a lie. Data has to be collected, so it's biased by what you choose to measure. Data has to be interpreted, so it's biased by how you interpret it. Data is only a snapshot in time, so it doesn't predict the future. There are many, many ways to make engagement metrics look much better in the short term while absolutely destroying long term engagement. Whether that's what Instagram is doing is still up for debate, but I think there's a very real chance it is.

>Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it.

You're jumping the gun there. The people who hate it and use it are the people who were using it before the change and want it to go back. They were strongarmed into it and they're not about to abandon their userbase/followers overnight - they'll try and advocate for change and then migrate elsewhere.

But these changes are so relatively new that there hasn't even been time for any of that to play out yet.

There are infinite reasons people might continue using something despite liking it less and less. The network effect is a big one.

So pointing at numbers and saying "they've clearly made the right decisions" is...flawed, to say the least.

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