Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels
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surgehq.ai
Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome).
My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
the UI itself can be tested separately
1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
2. Reels are often poor quality. What I see is mostly life hacks that are actually really stupid or jokes that never pay off.
3. TikTok has a creator culture that seems far superior to Reels. What Facebook/Instagram seem to fail to realize is that the problem they have isn’t a lack of a video platform but rather a lack culture. TikTok somehow did foster a really cool culture of people creating content, perhaps using their stitches feature.
4. Instagram is a photo sharing platform. Imagine if every other thing you saw on TikTok was a still photo. It would be jarring. That’s the current experience with reels.
5. I don’t know if this is actually true but it feels to me that you can get a lot more exposure quickly on TikTok than with Reels. I don’t post TikTok videos but know enough people who do and it seems they are very much able to get tens of thousands of views with minimal effort and while being relatively new to the platform. I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
7. I come to Instagram to seek specific kind of content from my friends. I get reels from total strangers. I come to TikTok to get lols from random strangers and sometimes see friends. This is very personal but this is a major reason for me to use both and to dislike Reels.
Did they really nail ads or could it perhaps just be that they still consider themselves in a growth phase (perhaps depending on market) where they deliberately try to not use them as hard as they think they could?
OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you watch one video from some sitcom or cartoon not because it was from that particular show but because it happened to be about something interesting and suddenly YouTube is SURE you LOVE that show and want EVERYTHING IT HAS about that show--but it isn't quite so bad as Instagram, where I've heard a ton of stories about ending up pigeonholed by its algorithm into something they have a phobia for or past trauma related to, and now they are afraid to use the app, because it really does feel like you click on one pimple popping video (which has come up as the SPECIFIC issue for MULTIPLE people I've talked to, INCLUDING MYSELF a while ago) and BAM the app is now nothing but pimples being popped, 24/7.
What’s so hard about randomizing 10-20% of the time?
Add promoted content/ads to the mix that they are paid to promote and you end up with a mix of content that is primarily based on where you are, what they want to pimp in that region, and more of the same shit you were clicking on anyway; more or less in that order. The exact same shit quite often actually. Even filtering that out seems hard.
They are incentivized by ad clicks, not by your amusement. That's the business mistake that allows Tiktok to prosper because they are still trying to grow at the expense of their competition which means that they are in fact incentivized by your amusement as observed through your addictive behavior in the form of content clicks.
Instagram was like that once. And then Facebook bought them and started messing it up. Facebook was once like that until Facebook became an advertising company. The mistake that gets made over and over again in this space is that at some point they think they've won and start milking their network for revenue. The process of doing that destroys and erodes that network and something else pops up that is more interesting for users.
Tik Tok is doomed to go there too. Just a matter of time. It's irresistible for shareholders and advertisers. They'll get dollar signs in their eyes and they'll mess it up.
Recommendations are hard in general, if at all possible in a meaningful way.
Idk why everyone is so focused on feeding a user from a spoon when they are adult and can explore by themselves. Just give them the option to explore North-West instead of a stupid slit facing 312° which they accidentally picked as an initial direction.
This problem of not-enough-novelty in YouTube's recommendations is exactly why I am working on a team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel name to get a list of similar channels.
As an example: our recommendations for Tesla's channel includes James Locke, a small channel (~10k subscribers) with a researcher working on Full Self Driving for Tesla vehicles. There are also dozens of Tesla driving, electrification, and investing channels along with channels for some of Musk's other companies like The Boring Company on the list:
I'm as disgusted with the managers who think it's ok to push that content to people as I am with the content itself.
* FYI on YouTube I've had decent success correcting the algorithm if you go in and remove the video that started it from your watch history.
Extremely relevant Ryan George Youtube skit about this[1]. Once you click it, Youtube will probably want to show you nothing but Ryan George videos, but that's not a bad thing.
Now I can easily spot any ad instantly because Insta is too stupid to realize NOTHING else I interact with has to do with fashion but because of that one time a year ago, they keep trying and I can quickly skip it.
I keep seeing obviously reposted popular tiktok videos. The same ones, over and over again but with different accounts. Same on YouTube shorts.
Can you even watch a reel without an account? Because I know I can't watch stories and after clicking one or two pictures my IP is blocked entirely from Instagram for x hours.
I don't have this problem if someone sends me a TikTok link.
Yes, you in fact get better recommendation as you use it more.
Reading HN, sometimes it feels like I must be the only one in the world enjoying good recommendations from both YouTube and Instagram. I do have many thousands of watches and likes on YouTube and Instagram, but it didn't feel like work, because I accumulated them over years of use.
they were the only place you could post and share a video of yourself dancing / lip-syncing along to licensed music without getting DMCA'd
For me that isn't the case - I follow mostly "regular" people and enjoy it, but...
The problem I have with Instagram is that when I open the app I want to see the photos that people I've followed have posted since I last opened, it in time order. Yet It's quite a struggle not to see reels or suggested posts or people posting spam. 50% of the time I open IG the first post shown to me is from a hashtag I follow but its an image of an attractive young women with a very loose connection to the hashtag.
By copying other successful paradigms within IG and FB, Meta are destroying what remains of the products and users they have. I occasionally use TikTok but don't want to see a weak version of it on IG
But here's the most braindead thing FB has done: They actually have feature called "show first" which I tried to use it to force FB show posts from friends and not from groups. But some PM there probably made decision that this is not a good idea and forced to limit to only 30 people! So, now when I log in to FB, I get few posts from 30 people and then it's garbage from groups again.
It is beyond me how no one can see these issue there.
Many big tech companies don't perform real R&D, instead they're fast-followers - piggybacking off whatever their competitors do, but the truth is that "disruption should come from within" because letting a competitor design your next product feature is f'n foolish (we see this a lot with consumer hardware too).
Imagine if Facebook/Meta actually focussed on Instagram's core strengths, and had cultivated a proper community or reason for being (e.g like YouTube or Twitch), rather than just spending all that time thinking about how they can squeeze more ad revenue: sure they might have not have had such big short-term ad sales, but Instagram would have found its feet and not have been so easily disrupted - heck, this might have led to innovative ways of advertising: two-birds-with-one-stone imagine that! (/s)
I think I speak for many when I say this is a core frustration with Facebook/Meta. There is nothing exciting coming out of their company because they don't make new ideas* and that leaves themselves open to disruption. By being too focused on ad revenue their acquisitions haven't progressed since day one, instead each looks like a Frankenstein's monster of the same app but with loads of ads and competitor's features bolted on.
* Even the much hyped metaverse isn't offering anything new.
Reels just feels way too urbane and polished. Just not the same vibe.
This is a good observation. From my IG acquaintances too, it seems that only those with instagrammable lives are the ones still posting. The guy who does scenic hikes, the girl who goes to the exciting parties, those with perfect bodies. The occasional wedding or graduation photo. Many others have stopped posting pictures completely or sporadically post photos.
I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram, they're not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave.
Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don't have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.
So it must be the content creators right? But this is rediculous too! Because virtually every content creator worth a damn on TikTok will have a linked Instagram! What's more, many of them will often have a Linktree or similar url either in their profile description or linked on their insta that will include everything from YouTube, to Patreon, to OnlyFans. People who understand how to make money making content on these platforms aren't one trick ponies, they're using sophisticated marketing approaches that leverage the strengths of different online platforms to compensate for the fact they often have handle their own marketing.
So if the content of the knockoffs is bad or the creators arent finding the competition worth considering then the only question remaining I would argue is whether the problem is in the reccomendation system (TikTok was, and still is, famous with users for doing a solid job at this), the moderation system (TikTok, maybe because it's Chinese, is not so fixated on implementing the SJ nonsense that YouTube, FB, etc. pander to at the moderation level), or the compensation system (Again, probably because they care less about demonetizing you for wrongthink against whatever miniority or "important cause" is the pet of the week. Content competes primarily on its merits as likeable content).
In short, TikTok might have had an early mover advantage but the reason no one catches up in the current environment is because they can't get their heads out of the sand enough to realize it's their own fault no one entertaining wants to produce anything but TikTok reposts for them.
I get that advertisers pay more to target a younger audience, but that's fine. It's offset by less competition in the space targeting older people
I don't think social media is like a minivan, where a different lifestyle suddenly makes it make sense to switch. People are on social media for the other people that are there, I don't see the incentive the other people would have to migrate at a certain age, seems more likely they'd change how they use it (as indeed happened with Facebook). Maybe I'm misunderstanding your premise?
In my life a lot of the reason folks got off FB was 1. the experience became trash and 2. the brand became toxic. Neither of these things are about folks moving to the better, newer social network just cuz that's where everybody was.
In general I think the social media companies have no actual vision but are spooked about becoming the next Friendster/MySpace so they constantly react, desperately trying to not become irrelevant.
I think also that figuring out something that works in social media is hard and somewhat random; absent a framework to help imagine new futures people will always become reactive and defensive. Of course SM companies have to frame that as innovation and convince their shareholders that "becoming tiktok" is somehow visionary and helpful because "yes we're losing eyeballs but we're going to double-down on what we do really well and learn from it because we think the future has space for many types of social media" doesn't convince shareholders.
Idk, rambling now, but so frustrated at the whole market.
I thought you were going to call this out. It should read "something more shallow"
This point is perhaps clearer if we take Google as an example instead. Mid-level engineers attach themselves to a project or initiate it, then guide it past a certain point. Once promotion is secured, the project is dropped by its initiators. Staffed with lower-status engineers who were enrolled without the prospect of promotion, the project begins a gradual rot and the Google graveyard deepens.
The key concept here is that the projects are launched and fueled at the start explicitly for the chance of promotion. In the strategy you describe, with Facebook higher-ups mandating the top-down creation of various projects as part of the global strategy of the company, it would become risky for mid-level engineers to ever get involved. They would not have their names connected with the success of the projects as higher-ups would have imprinted themselves on it beforehand, but would be connected to its failure, whereas in the Google scene the 'moonshot' culture is well-established and limits this sort of blame. Due to massive opportunity costs, Facebook employees would be better off trying to get promoted through the traditional channels, or to quit and pursue the promising ideas themselves and hope to get bought out eventually.
Nah. Buy the good ones early enough.
US tech companies dumbed down their own content algorithms and are somehow shocked that they are now getting destroyed. Social media is a drug, TikTok is providing the purest form right now
Also, the big TC numbers (for most ICs, not sure about high level execs) are mostly inflated illiquid RSUs.
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
> The makers of TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing app with hundreds of millions of users around the world, instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed “national honor” or broadcast streams about “state organs such as police” with bans from the platform.
“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-an...
[2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/
But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.
Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works.
A lot of the comments here about why TikTok does so much better don't mention that the person that opens TikTok is already committed to watching lots of short videos, whereas the person using Instagram still has options other than the short reels, diluting the things people are doing.
Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original.
IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.
For the app shorts is a different tab on the bottom of the screen. It goes Home, Shorts Subscription, Library. Shorts are never mixed him to my regular feed.
You can click not interested on them all, it takes some time to get through them all, but after a week or two they are back and it's rimce and report.
Yes I do have a shorts tab at bottom as well. I never click it. It's the shorts in my feed that are a pain in the butt.
I use and like you tube for longer content. If I wanted short content I would create an account with instatok and tikagram or whatever the next thing will be called.
Every week or so I have to go through and click not interested on all shorts suggestions.
I second they need an option to hide. I've sent feedback to YouTube numerous times and I know others have, but my guess is it will fall on deaf ears as they try to keep up with the current cool kid.
In the case of YouTube the extra pain is that I've trained 'double tap' a YT video for scrubbing. But what does that interaction do on a Short, in the YT app?! Like! It likes the video instead of scrubbing. On something that doesn't seem any different from a short normal YouTube video.
Which shows up in their data as a positive and reinforces the design decision
Neither did I.
They've hidden it so fucking well that even though they pay (tens of) millions for exclusive contracts, people can't find it.
But shorts they keep pushing on every UI.
Per https://www.failory.com/google/youtube-gaming: "Out of the 11 million people that have downloaded the app on iOS and Android, and the more than 200 million watching gaming videos daily, only a small number used the app to do so. Most preferred the main YouTube app or the site."
Although org wise it's under YouTube Gaming livestreams can be about anything. The option to go live is shown when you click the upload button. Live streams show up in your video feed and the top of your subscriptions. In explore and on the sidebar of every page is a link to the live metachannel. On game metachannels there is a tab to see people streaming the game. Livestreams show up in search and you can filter for only livestreams.
I think it's pretty hard to avoid since streams are promoted more compared to videos. You must just not watch creators who stream on YouTube or are interested in topics that lend themselves to being streamed.
I never thought YouTube would do something this idiotic and actually drive away their users, but here we are ...
It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)
Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like.
We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill.
And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them.
Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.
Did that ever happen? Was it a US thing? I've heard of Friendster, but I thought it was something that MySpace killed and then MySpace went global and then got overtaken by Facebook.
I remember Hi5 in Latin America and India, Hyves in the Netherlands, Orkut in Brazil, VK in Russia, StudyVZ in Germany, Tuenti in Spain. Finland and Sweden had a popular photo log websitr but I can't remember its name.
> Did that ever happen?
No, it didn't. Friendster was older than MySpace.
Not saying that's what happened, I've barely heard the name Friendster before.
If those they came to follow are gone they will still scroll a feed increasingly filled with ads. When they complain, their friends/family will install something and say touch the dancing penguin/barfing unicorn/whatever to see the latest, it's just like Facebook used to be.
TikTok seems much better at promoting newer creators, possibly because it doesn’t have as many large existing creators. This means all the new talent goes there, and then the established talent eventually follows.
Once that culture starts to go out of fashion (which is inevitable) either the algorithm will have to shift to meet the culture (because the existing participants are probably not going to be fast enough to change) or new users will find another platform to start using. That's why even though people are saying Instagram will die if they start to prioritize Reels, I feel like they're going to die if they don't and this is a last ditch effort.
It's the other way around - Friendster was the incument that Myspace unseated.
For this alone they deserve to be dethroned and forgotten.
Mark Zuckerberg : Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
MZ: Just ask.
MZ: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
MZ: People just submitted it.
MZ: I don't know why.
MZ: They "trust me"
MZ: Dumb fucks.
I actually still remember when my university was added to Facebook - I was studying/procrastinating for my final exams.
I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
So, the social platforms have failed historically because of engineering issues that their competitior excelled at.
Sorry for being so critical, but I would find it quite interesting if you had hard evidence to support a scaling law like n log(n) for the value of a social network.
That said, the argument and result is intentionally informal, and intended to be a better rule of thumb than Metcalfe's law. Which was itself even more informally reasoned. However its key flaw we explained with:
Metcalfe’s Law is intuitively appealing, since our personal estimate of the size of a network is based on the uptake of that network among friends and family. Our derived value also varies directly with that metric. We therefore see a linear relationship between the perceived size and value of that network.
That said, different social networks may well have different scaling laws. In fact I pointed out privately that eBay likely was a counter-example which is closer to Metcalfe's law for the simple reason that you derive value there from connections to random strangers. And indeed eBay successfully maintained a market leading position for a long time despite charging significantly higher fees than competitors like Amazon Marketplace.
This experiment makes no sense if users spent a lot of time training the TikTok algorithm, prior to running the experiment while they didn't train the Instagram Reels algorithm? Of course the results are more interesting and less generic if they had used TikTok a lot before...?
They're both equally performative & inauthentic.
Also it sounds as if the users had previously spent more time generating curated feeds on TikTok.
>As a part of Gen Z, I relate a lot more with TikTok creators in general. Even the ads on Tiktok don't bother me as much.
sounds as authentically human as an android lizard.
They couldn't, because it's 'the algorithm' that does the picking & Facebook's algorithm optimises for inauthentic or boomer. Cherry-picking posts isn't a standard usecase.
But at the current state of things, the details are usually wrong in every subject, not only people.
You could only run this experiment if you had watched exactly the same amount of videos on both platforms or if you would start from scratch on both!?
I don’t think chasing the current hot thing is necessarily a terrible idea but I think pivoting your app constantly to chase the hot thing is. “Be willing to cannibalize your user base” doesn’t mean “force new things on your user base”!
And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too when the idea of having a high quality networked camera and fun filters with you all the time was revolutionary, and Instagram was the way to take advantage of it. Now that phone power, storage space, network bandwidth, and good editing software have made watchable short video easy to shoot, TikTok is that platform.
How will you tell who is leaving the platform because it's suddenly TikTok (like me) vs who's leaving the platform for TikTok?
(Facebook owns Instagram)
The lead reports show where they are coming from.
Overwhelmingly from Instagram. I think we got about 20% of leads from core Facebook and the rest from IG.
The core old timey Facebook is actually dying pretty quickly. All the traffic is going elsewhere.
And all the bugs on Facebook.com is not helping matters. Especially on desktop.
We really started to examine all of this and it’s startling the quick decline.
The motives of a company controlled by the CCP are much much murkier.
In fact, given the general distrust of China in the West in international politics, feels like national governments are more likely to respond to any emerging harms than they did with Facebook.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...
"on a platform we paid money for" - none of you.
Which has the effect of: Advertising tiktok.
1. I have read that you can browse the site completely in the browser, and even as a PWA. So this prevents all of the concerns coming from the privileges and permissions native apps have.
2. You can even browse it without an account (supposedly). But if I do create an account, I'd create a new email for it
3. I will browse it only with Firefox for Android, with uBlock Origin installed, only in private windows (giving uBlock Origin access to private windows, which I already do)
4. Even though there is no "in-app" browser in their web client, I would never enter any personal details or log-in into anything from links I click. If I'm really into a product advertised I'd just search for it in a new tab
5. Use a VPN
I know this is not fool-proof, I'm still going to be fingerprinted and uniquely identified, but this should prevent collection of the things that concern _me_ specifically like location, contacts, ability to scan phone's storage and see what other apps I have installed, reading my clipboard, biometric prints, etc.
Is it worth going through these hoops just for an entertainment app? Probably not, I might get tired of it real quick. We'll see
The same strategy isn't panning out with reels, for whatever reason.
Reels/Tktks involve a different type of content producer than regular stories. On that side, it is "closer" to YT than regular IG
And that I think is the impedance mismatch between IG and the Reels side
First, they rig it so that on every page, there’ll be a reel. You can spot them and flag each and every one with “I don’t want to see this” and it will continue trying to show you reels. It’s definitely an explicit rule to show Reels.
Each Reel it finds for me has some mildly interesting-looking footage combined with the worst sounds you can think of.
Usually it’s some generic down-shifted voice that says “drop the bass” before these clipped, farting sounds come out of the phone.
The best example I ran across had someone putting lubricant until a ball bearing, coupled with what seems to be a cover of a Justin Bieber song but with what sound like cartoon dog voices.
In a dull moment I would like to mindlessly scroll for pretty pictures. It used to show me rockets and women. I like rockets and I like women. Now it shows me farty bass.
I think 'doomscrolling' is a slightly more precise term than just aimless consumption of infinitely scrolling content.
My understanding is, 'doomscrolling' is more about content which outrages (albeit, also consumed in an aimless manner, or to "not miss out").
I’ll need a better word. It’s fun to say doomscroll
i mean i am on HN, reddit but i dont have my own name, my "social graph" isnt tied to my AFK identity, my AFK friends aren't my online friends, my location is not my location........ the original internet user
a year or 2 ago, i got my own pleroma instance for my family. its just a few of us for now and because i don't have any b2 storage set up, i do not recommend posting media but still,
Like another commenter said, it may also be that Instagram had already a use case and a "spot" in peoples minds so its harder to change that mentality to the one that TikTok naturally gained and as such people tend to upload "better" content on there.
Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too.
Instagram is dying ?
No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream.
People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything.
Kylie Jenner ? Really ?
I can almost taste the sugary feeling in the mouth of teenagers when they fall over the same line of self-staging freaks.
Turn it off. Buy a small library. Read.
Pack a suitcase. Buy a train ticket. See the world.
Concentrate. Please.
They sure can be. But young people around me in the early 2000s were into rap-metal, buying ringtones, and using ICQ or IM. These obviously were not great indicators of what would happen in the near future.
Of course, this is easy in retrospect, I couldn't have forecast it correctly at the time!
Instagram is dying? Nothing of value will be lost.
Asking Gen Z about something? Nothing of value will be procured.
Tiktok vs. Reels? Nothing of value are being compared.
Mind you, there's lots of legitimate criticism to throw at social media and I wouldn't mind the whole apparatus burning down either, but it's also the one thing a lot of people born in the late 20th century agree to hate on.
Both were used in their time to get totalitarian governments into power and many millions died.
Every single time they were wrong.
Besides, everything is safe until it is not and research is increasingly pointing towards the toxicity of social media on the young mind.
Even doctors smoke a certain brand, remember?
Does the fact that ET the video game was produced, or Bram Stoker apparently wrote a book so bad were still dunking on it 100 years later invalidate either of their mediums? Does the fact that twerking exists and is labelled invalidate the cultural impaxt of dancing?
And there has been a drop in the average IQ of the world in recent decades, and is directly related to TV and the other things you mentioned, so it's clear that it does have consequences and some of it is indeed a negative influence, source: https://www.swnewsmedia.com/article_8317aad9-876e-5c1e-804a-...
The ratio of absolute nonsense and garbage books to decent literature is probably 99:1, if not higher. It's got to be the same for TV shows, and movies.
> where instantaneous feedback loops of dopamine shots are pushing the balance in favor of the worst kind of content, I admit TV already did some of that but social media platforms are on a whole new level.
We've been having this argument for decades - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/children-80s-never-fe... this is a great example of it. People were worried about that playing video games will turn you violent, or that novels will make it difficult to differentiate between reality and fantasy.
> And there has been a drop in the average IQ of the world in recent decades, and is directly related to TV and the other things you mentioned, so it's clear that it does have consequences and some of it is indeed a negative influence, source: https://www.swnewsmedia.com/article_8317aad9-876e-5c1e-804a-...
Link didn't work for me (thanks GDPR), so archive link here: https://archive.ph/wnaFn - That' not a source, that's a column in a local newspaper with no citations and no research. The article (which is a two paragraph soapbox about people on the internet being stupid) doesn't mention TV, social media, or what the cause for his claim that IQ is dropping is.
The ratio of consumption the one that matters here, and in that context social media is the clear winner in the ratio of consumption of garbage content, just the other day I learned there are a few kids making millions of dollars from opening toys in gift packages, "unboxing" they call it, it's like crack cocaine for children watching, and there are thousands of other families/channels (with children) trying to do the same and reach the same audience; you try to compare things and say that all this has happened before but the similarities are next to none, specially when the entry barrier to become a content creator it's so low.
Videogames turning you violent is dumb because it involves turning a fantasy behavior into a real one, this has nothing to do with that because the problem TikTok and others pose is wasting time in proportions never seen before, a lot of factors play a role, including the ubiquity of smartphones, most people spend 100% of their time next to theirs, another one is the incentives to make you waste as much time as possible to show you as many ads as possible.
It's weird, the article has a lot more paragraphs when accessed from a different referrer, anyway, I found another source that quotes one of the studies that says that IQ is lowering, and it's clearly states that is due environmental factors, and yes, that includes media: https://www.google.com/amp/s/learningenglish.voanews.com/amp...
[Evidence required]
I don't know what teenagers you're speaking to but at least my nieces and nephews are certainly not the same. If anything, what's changed is its now acceptable to be part of more of these groups than it was before.
This article may not be relevant for you, but it's certainly relevant to a not-insignificant portion of the HN audience.
There's no reason to be insulting.
IMO the problem of Instagram is not only related to Reels, but is more generalized. For the past ~5 years I have been noticing a serious decline in the quality of the interactions and of the content around.
Any interaction nowadays on Instagram feels fake, for the sole purpose of getting attention. The old-style pictures that are almost sure to generate more interactions are recycled old jokes that people with common sense are now tired of reading, but somehow a lot of users still enjoy them.
There are also some unexplainable phenomenas, like pictures with absolutely trash content that probably took zero effort to produce, getting thousands of likes and comments.
These situations (and more...) for me have eventually taken away all the fun of using the app.
Think this is one of the fundamental differences, Tiktok feel more like a level playing field and it also feels like the system actually goes out of it's way to find you an audience.
It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that Tiktok almost creates invisible "Subreddits" for topics it identifies then pushes all content it detects as that topic to everyone in the group. All invisible to the end user.
While tiktok helps you find an audience for your content, IG almost punishes you because you don't have one, then punishes you more if you don't do the right algorithm dance.
A new platform is not built on a single day. Even creators found a new platform and decided the first thing they do should be re-posting their old works.
In no way I want to defend Reels (in fact I don't consume neither TikTok nor Reels), but a blind test would have been really really important here.
The point being TiKTok does a ton of labelling of videos that allows the algorithm to “see” the content - or at least qualifies lots of elements of each video. And then optimises for joy and happiness responses from users.
Other useful observations in the podcast
Best UX is the product without the need of settings though.
Maybe they're losing users because nobody can sign up?
Or maybe the web sign up doesn't work, and you're only allowed to sign up with a facebook account (now they have your data) or the mobile app (they also have your data).
If so that's the kind of abject dishonesty that might also lose you users.
[0]https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pi...
I do not open Instagram and expect to look at pictures alone unless it is from friends, pretty much.
Seems very likely
I bet they dont rely as hard on algos when it comes to content, but thats just a guess
Also, Instagram adds value as an app that people truly enjoy from a consumption standpoint.
It’s not going anyway.
I don't know why any company would try to target the current "in" thing. That shows that not only are they behind but that they are behind a minimum of two generations of "in" apps/things. So Google and Facebook are just showing that they only know what was next and not what is actually next.