Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I opened Instagram and scrolled now just to reproduce it again, and I saw one "normal" post before this "ad break" appeared for me: https://i.imgur.com/SS6kuKV.png
They're a punishment for you because you won't let them collect data.
FB app does that too.
I uploaded the image to https://i.postimg.cc/Cx6fYh8p/image.png instead, hopefully you're not on corporate network blocking the (used to be) shady .cc tld.
To add further humor on top of this, I think i.postimg.cc TLS certificate just now/yesterday expired??? Not sure if it's just me, but the certificate says it expired "Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:49:55 GMT" although I did manage to upload the image, maybe different host...
Tax them -> spend in education.... not that I think it will happen though! :)
[1] I have no idea why this is the case, AFAICT it's just anti-bot autoimmune disorder deciding it doesn't like some signal or other.
Anytime an image is opened in new Reddit I have a 50% chance of not being able to back out of the page without it immediately redirecting back to the image and then locking the whole tab. I’m not even able to enter a different site into the url bar, I have to kill the tab and open a new one.
Even logged in old.reddit is worse than logged out as it recalculates the post order after hitting back from a post instead of just giving me the same fucking page I was on.
I don’t know what Reddit plan is, or their business model going forward if users can’t actually use it.
Although I did notice today they’ve added games so I guess they might be going for ad revenue on that like news sites have done in recent years.
> I've seen people use Instagram links on dating profiles
Does that not count as using Instagram or?
Plugging the thing that finally got me off IG. Now if I need to see something I use the browser and it’s so terrible that I get pissed trying to scroll after I saw what I opened the page for.
2 weeks later
"We are please to announce the acquisition of triple nicotine packets that show incredible product innovation."
Well, I have news for you. Social media creates nothing. It lives by getting us to not act... to sit in a mind-numbing silent purgatory, voyeuristically watching the fictitious 3rd-person accounts of the subjective experience of others... as the synchronisation of our genetic inner core with the paths we take in the social realm becoming less and less harmonious... since because of social media we take less paths... since you know... we don't act.
So if the addiction from the behavioural algorithms is all you have to engage with your users, why aren't you classed as drug suppliers?
People would love to go back to something like Facebook circa 2012 or the Twitter (or even Reddit) of maybe a couple of years later. But if you were to somehow manage to do that, how would you prevent them from turning into what they ended up becoming in the past decade?
It seems to me that federation might have given us at least part of the answer, but only if there was some concrete reason to limit posts by default to being "local" (ie. unfederated) rather than global. Think of how FidoNet echoes tended to be limited to a specific net or region, or how IRC networks would inevitably split once they reached something like 100k users.
Google+'s circles might have evolved into something like that, but ATproto seems to prioritise the "big world" rather than "small world" view. I guess commercial considerations make that inevitable but, personally, I think it's a pity that there's not some sort of technical limitation that would force a smaller horizon.
I also find myself here and keep bouncing off bluesky and I think it's just because I find the info and conversation here more interesting.
Some people think this should all fall back on personal responsibility, but the way I see it, introducing highly addictive algorithms should've been regulated the same way adding addictive chemicals to food is.
Folks would just continue on page 2, like in the good old days! Pls take that with a pinch of salt.
There is just so much that can be banned and infinite scroll isn’t one of those things. After all, what kind of nanny state do we want and after how much content does the scroll stop?
The symptoms shouldn’t be addressed, the root cause of why folks feel they need to infinitely scroll through content that is probably providing them psychologically no benefits.
Monkeys and colourful marbles comes to mind, although I’m sure the monkeys lose interest after a while.
Not if you unsubscribe from companies, brands, and publishers. You're welcome.
A middle ground would be to have a "reduced follow" mode where you still have a chronological timeline, except that at most N posts per day are shown from "reduced followees". The filtering can still be based on a popularity signal.
And what is the effect of this on the user?
Oh right, you don't care.
For me this guy is directly repsonsible of all the negative side effects of this attention grabbing engangement BS and he should go to jail for that.
Only problem with algorithm is that it is prone to occasional slips where you open a random cat video (or any other bait) and your recommendations start showing that more often, you keep clicking those and before you know it your recommended feed is full of that.
But if you know how to tame the algorithm for only the content you are interested in, it is amazing. I like my twitter, youtube and insta recommendations and have discovered many new creators who I wouldn't have otherwise.
Unlikely; your brain has been trained to enjoy it because it's a psychological hit inherent with the way the app + algorithm work together to be addictive and keep you 'engaged' instead of doing something else altogether.
Engagement dropping is bad for a corporations ad revenue -> shareholders; it's great for individuals and their physical and mental wellbeing.
I'm pretty sure I've only had a plain (chronological) feed since I started using Twitter a few years ago... There's a few times I had to switch back/reenable it, but it's not new. Though I've always hated Twitter's algo so I would have stopped using the site if the chronological feed went missing.
Snarky reaction aside, and actually reading the article, it says that the problem is something along the lines of "we incentivized and rewarded business accounts to post large volumes, so now if you switch to chronological order you will see more of these posts which reduces user satisfaction".
Well, that just means that the company will have to adapt before their users start unfollowing spammy accounts and the whole "influencer" business takes a hit. Though tbh, not sure how much of a hit it could take but hey, when instagram says engagement falls, I allow myself to feel optimistic for a brief moment.
However, I suspect the other complaint — that chronological feeds get overwhelmed by corporate spam — is fully true.
It's one more regular reminder that none of these companies want to charge a couple of billion users a couple of dollars a month to give them exactly what they are asking for — a way to keep in contact with friends and meet new ones — because that's just not enough revenue for them, even if they charge for optional features.
We're all worth so much more to them if we are addicted.
Doesn't sound worth it to me.
Good?
I honestly only have these apps to see what my friends posted. I know they aren't likely to do it, but it would be lovely to have the friends-only view back by default in every meta app
Seems like a great outcome, right?
Falling by half sounds like a lot, but the glass-half-full read of that is that it means "Instagram would still be incredibly popular without its algorithm."
Its almost like... it was inherently designed to be as addictive as possible?
First I was incredibly surprised and frustrated that their search functionality is effectively nonexistent, then, when I gave up and scrolled, if I tapped on a post to look closer, I had to deal with it interrupting whatever I was listening to.
Then, cherry on top of the shit cake, they suspended my account unless I did some video ID process. Nope, not happening.
Instagram felt like a more invasive and hostile user experience than any social media I've used before.
Stockholm syndrome.
The service that totally baffles me is Tik Tok. I know it's supposed to learn what you like, but it has never really surfaced anything of interest to me. It might even be worse than YouTube for me.
My ideal Instagram algorithm would be to show me only the people I follow, in chronological order. Then show me a marker that I'm at the end of my feed and at that point they can offer me their feed.
I am working on a new social media. I am curious about this point. How would you discover new people to follow initially?
And, is a separate explore page of people you don't follow okay?
Discovery isn't something that I've ever really thought about because it's not a problem I have. The initial person I followed was a relative. By the end of the first year I probably was only following four or five people. Today (15 years later) I think the number is less than twenty.
A separate explore page is fine. I'd probably open it once to see what it was and then close it. Those types of things are generally made to serve the interests of the service and not the user.
I think social media is generally a terrible idea. I am a fan though of a social network.
Engagement ~= addiction. Just a more euphemistic framing.
You can't currently turn off the algorithm in Instagram.
This person is talking nonsense.
This guy thinks feeds will be dominated by brands posting multiple times per day. People will unsubscribe from brands that post what they don't want to see. It's a self correcting problem.
Just one example. It's odd to me that people are willing to put their own byline on obvious slop.