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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Fitting, my wife showed me Instagram yesterday, and I was like "So this is TikTok?", "No, it's instagram", "Ah I though Instagram was about pictures from people, this is just short, "funny" movie swiping, I thought that was TikTok's thing", "IDK, I never used TikTok".

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Yep. This is the same strategy Instagram used a few years ago in copying Snapchat's Stories format, and likely has the same goal. The idea is not that Instagram can take back TikTok's audience — those users are well and truly lost — but rather that it can deny existing Insta users any reason to even try TikTok in the first place. (Because they can get the same form factor without downloading a new app.)

From what I've heard, the Stories copying strategy did successfully contain (but did not roll back) the Snapchat threat to Insta. So there's some reason to believe they can hold the line against TikTok with this approach too, even absent the possibility of a government ban.

I expect this sort of convergence will continue in the future. Whatever one might think of fast-following as a strategy, scale plus rapid copying of features does seem to work.

Not only does it keep users, but it allows producers to put the same stuff on Instagram, thus Insta users don't have the need to go to TikTok to see the hyped content. (While people say TikTok has the better suggestion algorithm, I never used either)

Facebook is being paranoid and by integrating TikTok-like algorithms into Instagram they're alienating the majority of their users.

Perhaps. Or they have A/B tested the new alternative and found it superior (e.g. Instagram users exposed to that new experience come to the app more often, stay for longer).

I usually stop scrolling after I see the check-mark which indicates I'm up to date. Below that there are TikTok-type short reels with all sorts of stupid things.

It’s a separate feature within IG. People who aren’t interested in short form video scrolling don’t have to use reels.

Stories definitely stopped Snap's potential in it's tracks. I'd consider that a completely successful bootleg. Well successful if we only consider the goal to be stopping Snap, unfortunately in the process there was one casualty, we lost Instagram.

How so? The only thing Instagram sacrificed to add Stories was some real estate at the top of the screen for the Stories bar. I would say adding Reels has been more invasive because those show up in your feed.

lol insta reels suck. it's almost exactly a month behind tiktok on trends etc. i'm not a big user of either and even i known this, facebook has to be aware and just not care. everyone kinda just laughs at reels so i can only assume it's targeted at old millennials?

The kids are on EVERY platform but Facebook. When they get temp banned from TikTok they reach their friends through Instagram.

FB, IG and now YouTube are becoming indistinguishable from TikTok, thanks to the former all copy-catting and heavily promoting video "shorts".

+Snapchat. Twitter also is experimenting (experimented?) with endless video scrolling.

Twitter needs to figure out how to render video in general, before trying to scrap with the big boys.

I accidentally started an fb vertical video and thought "Why does tiktok suck today?" until I realized the hole I had fallen into.

"Today?"

Was it a video that was 27 minutes long teasing the big reveal for 26 minutes and 30 seconds and the big reveal was ... nothing?

Watch this simple trick that only requires a chain, a paperclip and an arc welder

I swear five minutes craft copycats on Facebook are spiraling out of hands.

Or my favorite (I've watched probably too many). How to refurbish old rusted gadgets at home* fast.

*industrial machine shop not included.

"wait for it!!!!!"

"LOLemoji watch to the end! LOLemoji"

The YouTube shorts really piss me off, because, afaik there’s no way to seek (and some of them are a bit long for a “short”), at least from what I’ve seen in the mobile UI. It may be behind a gesture or something though.

That's the copycat behavior. It's forced engagement analytics. You either care (and it's boosted for some people) or you don't (and it's devalued for some people).

All in the pursuit of perpetual doomscrolling.

Hard to save to a playlist too. Find a useful life tip? Forget about being able to find it later.

I wonder how much noise this adds to their algorithm.

The other day my wife wanted to show me some "short" from a content creator she likes, and had to rapidly scroll through ~30 of other "shorts" in her feed until said creator popped up again and she could click on her profile pic. Whatever way YouTube rated those other 30 vids for my wife is completely wrong, unless they happen to have a classification category called "rapidly scrolling down because of your stupid ass UI that doesn't allow backtracking or searching previously seen content".

At this rate, in a few years, even non-tech-savvy people will get fed up with increasingly nonsensical and confusing UIs of social media products.

Sometimes you can drag along the bottom to seek, but it only seems to work on some shorts. You can sometimes tell if it will work because it’ll show a progress bar at the bottom. I’m not sure what distinguishes those though, since I’ve seen long shorts (hah) with and without them.

"Youtube Shorts" is just an alternative frontend, you can replace any url from youtube.com/shorts/XYZ to youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ to watch them with the original UI.

It's a lot more than UI, it is a completely new distribution medium. Creators are also now incentivized to make such type of "shorts" as their distribution/algorithm is completely separate from the normal videos.

And TikTok has a BeReal copy :)

Everyone’s just trying to survive. In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features. I believe the instagram book had a similar claim about Sidstorm (sp?).

I guess when network effects are life you can’t afford to not be the network. Google was smart to nab YouTube. And android. Meta was smart to grab instagram and WhatsApp (and that same logic, after missing out on making a phone, I bet is why they’re rushing to own VR). Innovate, copy, or die, basically.

I feel there's a difference between copy-catting an upstart vs. a competitor that already outclassed you. The latter is kind of admitting defeat :).

But regardless, what's really annoying here is that this new mode of interaction is pushed so hard that it hides away and starves out the "traditional" one. It's like these companies don't understand we're no longer in an era of a single social networking platform. I don't come to YouTube or Facebook to get more TikTok - I'm fine with getting TikTok on TikTok, I come to YouTube for actual longer-form videos, to Facebook for posts and groups, etc. Seeing YT, FB and IG pushing "shorts"/"reels" in my face only makes me visit them less.

> In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features.

Can you explain what this means? I don't know what a lockdown is. Thanks!

From what I understand they would other drop other projects or literally not leave the office until the new feature was built. Again, from a book, you might want to fact check this.

I installed TikTok last year when the company I worked for switched all of their ad spend from FB to TikTok. I found it addictive in the sense that it was a time waster, yet fun…

I have now installed TikTok 3 times. Each time for a week I find it fun, then after about another week I uninstall it because I value my time to create my own stuff (writing and open source).

I find YouTube Short to be different. Somewhat fun, but not enough to pull me away from the YT material I watch, like philosophy ‘think’ content, Playing For Change music videos, and minimal political stuff.

Using https://Freedom.to tools to monitor and limit viewing times is almost always a good idea. Latest macOS/iPadOS/iOS also has very good support for limiting app and specific web site use. These are great tools, at least for my digital life.

A lot of what's "viral/popular" on instagram is just reposts from tiktok/twitter. If you don't curate a following of actual people, that's much of what the algorithm feeds you.

This is the reason I deleted Instagram. It was better than Facebook for keeping up to date with friends, but after an update they added the "Suggested posts" that automatically show as you scroll, after you finished the new posts from friends. They offered no way to disable suggested posts (and simply have, as before, the static feed of your friends post in reverse chronological order).

The correct spelling is right in the submission title.

Fixed :)

My wife does this too and I've noticed that a large percentage of the Instagram videos she shows me have the TikTok logo on them. People are just copying them and reposting from one platform to the other.

it's been a subconscious trend since vine I guess

vine, snap, insta, tiktok, youtube shorts

the notion of time is gonna be a new neurosocial topic

Eh. For me IG is pictures from people (sometimes friends) and then short, movie swiping.

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