Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is over, it’s because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.
This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.
What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
But it is a positive feedback loop in a technical sense. Think of a microphone providing sound to an amplifier, and that amplifier in turn providing amplified sound into the original microphone. It's self-reinforcing.
> What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
The thing is, I don't want to be on Instagram. It's basically TV for me, and I'd rather not engage with content that way because it's passive and messes up my attention span. I already stare at a screen for eight hours a day for work, and I'd rather not have to spend any more time on screens than I have to.
My analogy to reinforcing any other compulsive damaging behavior stands. It's not "positive feedback" to the dealer or casino.
Let us not let our words do the thinking for us, as Orwell cautioned.
No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
The essence of enshittification is product leadership losing the plot on their users' desires and piloting everything off the cliff by solely following growth metrics.
Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue', again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation. Companies are not making products to solve an end-user issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working well for the investors.
The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
But of course if they'd done that Meta wouldn't be worth a hundred gazillion dollars now.
The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.