Random spot check and they all seem to be shared by users with high karma, so I think the site is just more popular? And it’s not some sort of marketing push by them.
They’ve been around for a few years with really solid (in my opinion) daily email news digests, and the in depth reporting they’ve done seems solid too, so I generally trust what they publish.
APNews is only good for the fact that something happened, not for any degree of interpretation, and you have to be on your guard for what isn't being said and what facts haven't been mentioned.
The Economist is different because they talk about only a few things and usually add a whole lot of opinion, but when I do dig deeper I find that they generally take defensible stances even if there are problems with their arguments. And if Hacker News is any indication, you'll never be able to assert anything with confidence, however well researched, without someone else asserting the exact opposite with more confidence.
My experience with Axios is that they generally avoid taking editorial positions that are obviously partisan, though they are clearly left of center on the American political spectrum (then again, I think America's current political spectrum has moved so much that the bounds of reality are now mostly left of center). When I dig deeper, I usually find that they aren't guilty of selectively presenting information. Their business model is still ad driven, so they are not immune to the classic problems of money influencing news, so I still view Axios with default skepticism.
Yep. They’ve been publishing seriously for a while now but it is hard to break through. I wondered if it was a conservative publication at the start. But they did the Swan / Trump interview and now I think the brand is on the map.
It is a bit odd from my perspective because I have not seen/heard of "Axios" until this "Trump Interview" thing happened. So I understand the OP's bafflement at it's prominence all of a sudden. Even the fact that they got an interview with the US president seems out of place to me.
I've been reading the site regularly for a few years and seen them (often Swan) break a lot of Inside Baseball type stories on the White House, which I take to mean that they have some pretty high level sources.
They also do occasional stories that look like obvious beat-sweateners[0], likely to keep that access flowing.
Overall I'd say it's a pretty good source for non-partisan news.
There's a Trump-related medical condition which always surfaces when a person is fuelled with conspiracy and suspicion towards him in everyday life. I can't think of its name.
Using HN's search with the term axios.com, I see lots of articles from months and years ago, some with massive point totals. I don't think this week is much different from the past.
> The new product will be embedded within Instagram
Oh god. It means that, like Instagram TV or whatever it was called, it will be forcibly shoved down your throat for the next half a year with nagging reminders for another year.
To easily solve this problem, uninstall all Facebook-owned applications. I know this probably seems absurd and impossible. I promise you that facebook may seem necessary when you're addicted to it but after you break that addiction you'll be left wondering what the hell you were ever thinking in the first place.
I check Instagram most days and I had never heard of Instagram TV before this post. They can't possibly have been shoving it down everyone's throats that aggressively.
You didn't use Instagram when they rolled out IGTV then. There were multiple inline promotions, aggressive hints for the dedicated IGTV button, then they made this dedicated button red (in an otherwise gray-and-white interface) for several months.
It still failed, of course, and got relegated to a small button inside the explore tab, but it the push was aggressive nonetheless. Expect the same for "Facebook's TikTok".
Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time:
"
Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps.
"
Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future...
It's like Facebook didn't learn their own lesson from... Facebook.
The biggest reason I left Facebook was because the platform became a jumbled mess instead of its original clean interface. It's the reason why Facebook originally won out against Myspace and why Instagram won out against Facebook.
Yes, but were you a target audience of someone who would be clicking ads? You are not. My bet is that they do indeed monitor "ad clickers" and only will worry when these people start leaving en mass. Me and you - not so much.
I am on the older end of Gen Z and have noticed the opposite. Snap was cool from 2014 until 2019 but now Insta has a slight edge. I still use both but it varies by whom I'm talking to: some friends I talk to on Snap and some I do on Insta.
It's similar to how Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones aren't cool, but still sell out stadiums.
Facebook (the company) will probably settle into a stable pattern like the BBC's radio lineup, where listeners roll from Radio 1, to Radio 2, to Radio 4 as they age.
I think there's so many ways to connect on the internet that every social app has it's own role and purpose. Everything is fading away as users age and their preferences change. On top of that there are always new apps which are trying to attract new users and lock them in until something new doesn't come out that's why Zuck was obsessed with competition. He tried buying Twitter and Snapchat but they refused on the other hand Instagram and WhatsApp gave in.
Snap is still wildly popular with Gen Z. The use case for them is mostly messaging and private Stories. Instagram is more of a consumption platform for them at this point. They serve two different use cases.
This is just a branding thing though right? We've had all sorts of social networks that each rise and fall. If Facebook has the formula for a successful network and can apply that formula over and over again that's pretty successful.
Facebook is probably the the company most able to claim to have achieved this, with facebook.com and Instagram being two big hits, arguably Messenger and WhatsApp too. TikTok is probably the biggest sign that they have actually failed to hit a 3rd generation.
Who know, maybe its true. Though all I can see is: 'buying out promising products before they are going to become your rivals' mentality.
It might be a successful strategy to run a business when you are big enough to do it (as long as your buyouts are correct).
I heard about facebook from a friend when it was still exclusive and I joined when it was opened up.
Now I open it up at what seems exponential intervals, and each time it seems my disappointment with the platform is also exponential.
Its a mess filled with garbage mixed with adds that pretend to be content.
Back when it was still exclusive to people with university '.edu' email addresses Facebook was the best thing to ever happen to college.
Instantly knowing who's in your classes or potential courses was a game changer.
Facebook is establishing itself as the social network you go to when you are tired of chasing new social networks. If you wait long enough features off that new network will come to you. This is a much bigger market than dominating a five year cohort.
Facebook has been declared dead without actually dying for so long now that it might still be alive when the retro mechanisms start kicking in.
It's not clear Facebook have the formula for a successful new network - Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquired. When Facebook have tried to create their own new networks, like their original Snapchat clone, it didn't work. That's not really a knock on them though, I don't think anybody else could claim to be able to spin up a successful new social network either.
Absolutely. They just reported their Q2 earnings, and Facebook has 2.7B monthly active users. When you exclude China (where they aren't allowed), people without internet or too old/young, then yes - is growth is limited, largely by size of the human population.
Even if young generations decide not to join, this will be likely most powerful network for decades.
todays 30 and 40 year olds are more important than todays 14 year olds, and many of the 30 year olds are still on Facebook. in 15 years todays 14 year old are just gonna be in the beginning phase of their career and earning potential. And also whose to say Facebook doesn't buy one competing platform after the other? Only legal action can stop it from being dominant for decades.
Facebook is always there for people but it is not the talk of the town any more.
A decade ago you could have everyone on it for their entire lunchbreaks, deep-stalking their mates. But nowadays people are not engaged with it compulsively.
Younger people don't use it because their parents are on it.
Content isn't made by people for Facebook because it won't show in their friends feeds.
Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
Before Facebook there was the printed telephone book and the Yellow Pages. People and businesses had to be in the phone books because someone might want to contact them that way. But the Internet and email came along. Facebook is a bit like that, people are there but no more engaged than they are with a printed telephone book.
Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to keep the same eyeballs. Because of that Facebook are successful.
But TikTok is the new, cool app in town. 80 million users in the US apparently, not all of them teenage girls.
I do not understand why this comment has a bad vote, hackernews looks like reddit, if a comment goes against your opinion, downvote without explaining the reasons.
The only thing I disagree with is that Facebook does make big profits from its ads, in fact it does a tough competition to google and amazon... the rest of your arguments seem correct to me... facebook doesn't feel like the home that it was before... it feels more like a newspaper, full of ads, debates, news and toxic people
That comment was downvoted because it was spinning unfounded and untrue speculation as facts. Here’s one example
> Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
No, this is not true. Not only has Facebook done well in Q2, performance was unaffected by the boycott of large advertisers because of revenue from small businesses.
Ok I also agree with that, but what I mean is that in my opinion, nobody is an expert in everything, right? ... and if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons and not just reject their opinion and leave ... then everybody ask why social networks become toxic ... here's the reason
True. But then they should speak with humility and uncertainty, not proclaim their wrong ideas with confidence.
> if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons
No, it's not our job to educate people. Least of all, people who are ignorant but purport to be knowledgeable. These are the most resistant to any kind of learning.
* Facebook's core properties (Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger/Big Blue) have around 2.6 billion MAU.
Even if I just consider FB core + Messenger, Facebook is roughly 20x larger than MySpace. Facebook, as a core product, also is growing in non-US markets, even though it has saturated the US markets for years.
MySpace and Facebook just aren't comparable anymore.
I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive comparison, but each individual contributes inertia to the market regardless of the total size of the market (see 1 below)
The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that:
1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social products increase it too. If my friends aren't using a social platform neither am I, usually.
2. Facebook has such a rich culture of A/B testing that they'll never release controversial changes without a deeper understanding of the impact of those changes on engagement. They won't shoot themselves in the foot like Digg did with current leadership.
3. Facebook has a really successful history of acquisitions and its leadership is very aware of social media trends. It catches those trends early.
As a consequence of (1), I'd argue that Facebook has a tremendous moat in comparison to its peers: it has a large amount of users who are more likely to stay put. While Facebook also moves slowly as a consequence of (2) often enough, it can move really quickly on producing novel products.
Facebook certainly will face challenges in the future, but they're likely to be a lot different at this stage.
Err, didn't you just compare MySpace and Facebook by looking at their MAU?
The questions for continued relevance is if Facebook-the-company can continue to iterate Facebook-the-product, or if its codebase has grown too unwieldy, and the company's culture gone toxic, making it harder to add a feature to Facebook, compared to creating a new company, writing a bunch of code, buying content and acquiring users. Given the rise of Instagram(Acquired), Snapchat (IPOd), WhatsApp(Acquired), TikTok, it's not clear Facebook-the-company is able to innovate. It's not clear that they have to, either, given older Internet brands like Yahoo! are still around and making money.
The comparison I'd make is to email. There are reasons email will never die (along with reasons why email can't innovate), and I think some of those reasons also apply to Facebook by this point. There's just some percentage of people that won't ever move, so while, eg, IRC is no longer in its heyday, it's still alive and kicking.
Facebook, and the rest of the FAANG companies, aren't going anywhere. They have too much money and too little oversight. No one stands up to them when they buy out their competitors. We're in the 2nd Gilded Age, and I don't think this one is going to end with the government stepping up to the plate to do something about it like they did 100+ years ago.
Zuckerberg is very smart and his mission and vision of Facebook was very straightforward to make Facebook a social utility and that's what it is becoming. I think Facebook is a way to connect to people in a more general way but there will be always all sort of niche social apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc.
Btw UI and UX need to evolve but to the point where they don't become bloated.
I used Instagram for the first time 6 months ago because I'm old, and I was shocked that an app with such a rep for elegance is such a hodge podge of features. It really feels like they just glued a bunch of 'me too' functions onto the original core app.
IMO, its elegance came from its simplicity. It did one thing and it did it well.
There is an ever growing demand for new features, not necessarily from users, to fend off rivals and to stay relevant and exciting. As with a lot of popular apps and services, it ends up bloated, trying to offer everything to everyone and satisfying no one.
Except it didn't, the photo quality on Instagram is really bad because of compression and it is not possible to share actual good pictures because of that.
Instagram insists I'm a bot and immediately blocks any account I make. Using Instagram without an account is a rather dismal experience since it blocks viewing any posts, or scrolling too far through previews of posts. I also deal with businesses that post all their updates on Instagram.
User experience doesn't seem to be a priority for Instagram.
I think the trouble is that it's really hard to start a new social network from scratch, so when Facebook wants to compete in a new segment they just tack on the feature to one of their existing social products. However, as you pointed out this leads to feature creep and pushes users to simpler platforms.
What I would do to solve this problem if I were at Facebook is to start new features out on an established platform (like they already do) until they reach a critical mass. Then I would completely break the feature out into its own app with separate branding. Hopefully I could get 10-20% of the active users of that feature to move to the new app and then grow it from there.
It's a very delicate process each time you do it but I think in the long run it would diversify Facebook's revenue across many independent brands and solve the feature creep problem.
Meanwhile snapchat pushed for weird tv shows and sponsored and featured stories, pushing friend stories to the tiny row on top. It's like they do it on purpose to alienate users in exchange for short time increase in "engagement".
Such an odd decision... they had an app for private communication (the value prop was "you can be yourself when your parents and boss aren't in the audience") and tacked on the supermarket tabloids and celebrity news.
I'm glad Snap figured out a way to profitability (and what do I know as an outsider looking in), but they don't have as much good demographic info as say Facebook, so they can't for instance show men's shaving ads to men only, which I recall made their sponsored stories very "most common denominator". I no longer use Snapchat and I used to be a daily user maybe 4 years ago.
> Then I would completely break the feature out into its own app with separate branding. Hopefully I could get 10-20% of the active users of that feature to move to the new app and then grow it from there.
As we all know this strategy worked great for Foursquare.
As an American who looks at WeChat and sees a massive, unintuitive jumbled mess, you've explained in this comment how that could possibly be so popular in China!
I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app.
By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.
You're comparing apples to oranges here. WeChat is a "superapp" platform for doing distinct things: chat, payments, ticket bookings, etc. Instagram's features, on the other hand, are all purely social networking.
I wouldn't say the UX challenges get any easier as you grow from social networking "super app" to generalized "super app." If anything, it would become more challenging, and the top comment would make more sense as to how it appears intuitive.
On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.
AOL and Yahoo eventually died because there were individual sites that did the individual parts that they had better, and then they became less than the sum of their parts. Similar to how massive industrial conglomerates in America fell apart, or department stores when specialized fashion retailers became a thing.
East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.
Nah, I think the comparison was apt. IG's features are not purely social networking. The 'TV' portion is an attempt to create a youtube/video alternative. The video chat can replace phone/video messaging. The 'shop' feature is an e-commerce gateway.
The Chinese version of TikTok douyin is also a hybrid of games, shopping, live streams a messenger and instant apps. The ui is far less important than having a captive user base
Douyin is a mix of lots of things but you barely realize that. It has one main surface - the feed. IG on the other hand, feels like several unrelated things stitched together
Facebook is in the slow process of finally dying. Their ownership of Instagram is sustaining them for the time being, but they are now desperate to steal some market share away from Reddit, TikTok, and WeChat. Facebook is far more desperate than they're letting on publicly. They have already been on the decline for multiple years; the competition is now finally speeding that process up dramatically.
When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse.
tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.
Are you referring to Facebook as a company or Facebook - the product? I do think the Facebook product itself is dying. But their other ventures like IG, WhatsApp etc are doing very well.
>tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.
Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.
WeChat has lots of things hidden behind low impression entrypoints. You can explore them when you want. Its primary features, chat and moments, are dead simple, like WhatsApp. Facebook on the other hand, are mixing lots of stuff into their main feed, making the experience horrible for everyone
Marketing/business side always demand prime real-estate to push 'features' instead of just blending them into the UI. This is extra-apparent on mobile apps but FB did it on their website for years (I haven't seen what it looks like recently).
It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.
TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.
Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).
Instagram is dead simple as well, if you stick to the main feed and just posting photos. I've used instagram without touching any of the stuff discussed in the top-level comment.
It's not a mistake in the short-term, but in the long-term it'll hurt growth. New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?
And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.
According with the new cold war narrative, in this case we have an very evil code that spy people all the time. Forgetting that last time I checked, companies proven by leaked documents to really spy and pass information to the government was Microsoft, Instagram, Facebook and Google.
That's more like it, but seriously there aren't a lot of articles written about app acquisition and the process of going through and debugging a massive codebase. If they buy it, no one from Microsoft will ever write a blog talking about how the code was a mess and how their team improved it.
They're not. "Malicious" in this case means gathering user data and MS wants that data. They're just going to point the information flow to their servers.
TikTok is "malicious" only because a Chinese company partially owns it. That's literally it and it's just like any other social media company otherwise.
Anyone else think Facebook launching this might stop Microsoft from buying TikTok now? Depending upon how much money they need, I think Microsoft not having any past social media presence might scare them taking on Facebook as a competitor.
This is the issue that made Facebook to big to fail now.
They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.
I don't know. In Facebooks case it might as well be hurting them with younger demographics. When everyones mom is there the younger people just might want to go someplace else.
You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.
Young people just make secret accounts and don't tell their parents. My younger brother is 15 and reports him and his peers are on both Snapchat and Instagram in addition to the usual suspects like Twitch, Tiktok, and Discord. The main reason I've heard for not using Facebook is largely that it's redundant when Instagram provides most of the same features in a slicker package. A lot of fb features like the event planning and facebook market aren't relevant to them yet.
I'm not sure if I'm just turning into an old man prematurely or what, but "social" sites and apps usually turn too confusing for me to use around their second or third iteration.
Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then).
Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore.
I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.
I think out of all of them, Twitter is the most complicated. Their comment threads itself are super complex. Plus the character limit forcing people to post in multiple threads makes it worse.
The "genius" of Instagram is that it's social media as advertising where people are mostly advertising photos of themselves.
This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)
Actually those features WeChat wants people to use as new users are pretty intuitive and straightforward. For other functionalities, those are intentionally 'hidden'. Those advanced or experiment features are for those who look for those features or just spreading by friends.
On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.
Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.
PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:
* Buy everything, or course.
* Pay for electric, gas, and water.
* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.
* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.
* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.
Spot on. I do get how Reels could eventually be rolled into replacing Discover or even the home feed but the IGTV thing is just bizarre. Yeah let's enter a mode where you start by consuming content 3 seconds long and then suddenly some of it is an hour and you have to hold your phone awkwardly not to touch the screen while you watch it.
Really feels like it belongs more in the feed part than the stories part but I guess no one would watch it then.
I recently got back onto Instagram for family photos and I still have no idea, or real interest in learning, what stories are. I'm too busy fuming at the avalanche of sponsored posts. It's an utter train wreck.
just to reinforce this, i tried instagram for the first time in a while and wasn't able to even find the new reels functionality. it seems buried among 100 other things instagram is trying to do.
Instagram is like what I read about Highway 99 /Aurora Ave in Seattle: it is the American subconscious where it is a bunch of fitful starts where there was a grand idea but dwindled down to some Psychic stores next to Pot Shops.
>And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow?
It already is... About a week or two ago Instagram decided to put the "Shop" or "Marketplace" button where the "Likes" tab button was... And now to get to your likes/follows/etc. you need to go to your profile tab, and find the "heart" button in the top right.
But because the "like" button has been in the same place for the past several years, it's still ingrained in my habits to press where the "Marketplace" button is, so I keep opening the store page...
In my experience, often people just double tap the photos to like them on instagram. And since most people hardly used the button for liking, it was a prime real estate for shops to move into.
Commerce is already integrated into the stories feed, not only with advertisements as you scroll through stories, but with "swipe-ups" that users can use to sell or advertise products with.
As much as this article paints a messy picture of Instagram as an app, it's still wildly popular and these issues don't seem to be hurting its popularity.
Yes there is one for close friends. It's called Threads.
You can add anyone to your close friends list. So add anyone you like to chat to. If you want a group to appear in Threads, add all the people in the group to threads.
I read this as "Instagram reels [from the blast]" and was super confused about why Instagram was being hurt by products launched from its parent company.
Ah, but the headline is written in sentence case, not title case - as can be seen in the words "launches", "its" and "rival", which are read before "Instagram Reels". Rookie error ;-)
Never used Tiktok, or Instagram, and Facebook just now seems to be nothing more than a feed of irrelevant ads to, and any friends' or family posts are relegated to the little bell icon.
I barely look at it more than once every few days now as it has lost much of its utility.
Most of my friends and family are on other social networks and sites (twitter, strava, discord) now with fewer, or no ads, or even just whatsapp groups on the phone.
Not exactly sure how your personal experience with a company is really relevant, considering that the article is specifically discussing a new product said company is launching.
But transitioning to more intimate forms of social media is a great move, so I'm glad you made the switch. A lot of people do find Facebook (for example) to be too fake, while others need it to keep in touch with their family and communities.
The product they are launching, for me, isn't relevant either.
We've long since reached peak Facebook, and its social network is fragmenting as they're losing people for the reasons I mentioned previously. They're effectively chasing a new audience to keep their numbers up.
My biggest wish for Instagram is to stop creating new ways to format content and give users more control over how their content is distributed. For example, I know a few people with private accounts for close friends or fitness accounts, why not create feeds of posts that people can subscribe to? They have a similar feature with stories/highlights.
This is most likely to boost account #s but it's frustrating to have to follow multiple accounts for one person.
This, but not just for Instagram. I know people who have separate "pages" on Facebook to represent different interests. I know people who have multiple Twitter accounts for the same reason, and even more that I wish would. For all of its weaknesses, Google Plus took a step in this direction with circles. I think streams would be even better.
P.S. Tags could be better still, but only if they're used consistently. My experience with other places/tools that use tags is that never ever happens, so I'd go with streams.
it's amazing to me that the same group of people that consistently whine about unfair treatment of businesses and also china are likely the same group of people applauding the administration's taking tiktok hostage, forcing a sale with the threat of ban and wildly making up claims of what's owed to the government while u.s. companies swoop in to release competing features and for a bargain buyout.
Youtube also has one, I don't remember when I first started noticing it, because I scrolled past it for a long time before opening one. On my phone, in the app, towards the top of the list of videos, is a section called "Stories and short videos". So far, there is very little compelling in there.
I still cannot believe that Twitter bought Vine, couldn't figure out what to do with it, shut it down, then had to bring it back as a read-only archive because there was so much popular outcry.
At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service--Tik Tok--was able to rise against them.
That said, I do think there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it). Then the next round of teens seek a new platform--even if the functionality is the same--just so they can have it to themselves.
Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new.
The business strategy in the face of this theory would be to continuously start or buy new social platforms with similar feature sets, but each time with a new brand that is totally separate from the (older) parent brand so teens don't get scared off.
Technically, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is what the US Tiktok was based off of, and Douyin was launched in 2016 prior to the 2017 musical.ly acquisition.
But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.
My take on it is Twitter just isn't, as a company, very good at making software. This is from external observation and a couple of reports from friends who used to work there.
Yeah it really feels like IBM in the sense that it had some really amazing engineers that built the company up, and after they left, they have just been resting on those laurels ever sense. What have they truly innovated recently?
Idk, the particular flavor of outrage varies greatly depending on the platform. 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, all of the them are drastically different platforms with cultures that emergently form from early design decisions like anonymity, One-to-many vs many-to-many communication paradigms, thread layouts, and moderation decisions.
How do you figure the '50s? Times we've been more united than we are right now seem more the exception than the norm, to me, since the founding of the country. Hell we haven't even had an elected member of the Federal government kill or attempt to kill someone over a political dispute in a while.
My sense is that lots of divided people (mainly fringe) have basically been silenced for years. Twitter has made it possible for those people to have a voice and more problematic made it super easy for malicious actors to mimic those people's ideas to make the situation worse than it really is.
My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.
I feel similarly. Liberal ideals would say that everyone having a global voice is a good thing, but we haven't really seen things play out that way since social media became so dominant. At least not in the US.
Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.
If division can be fomented by giving everyone a megaphone, then the people were already divided, they just didn't know it. I don't agree with all of Twitter's moderation, but this is a symptom, not the disease.
Is it "really amazing engineers" or good management / culture that matters? You can get a "really amazing engineers" and put them in an environment where they can't exploit their talents.
This is of course anecdotal, but a friend of mine worked as an engineer at Twitter, and she said there was more focus on appearing as though they were industry leading engineers than there was focus on actual engineering quality.
History maps to that theory but I would like to think it's coincidental and has more to do with the acumen and aggressiveness of the founders than of any natural generational churn.
Ever heard of redesign? Vine needed it. TikTok didn't win against Vine because of it was new. It had better UI, UX, better features better strategy overall.
Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.
Vine had over 200 million active users and Twitter didn't see any potential?! TikTok has over 800 monthly active users in 3 years. I don't know what Twitter was thinking but Vine had a lot of potential. TikTok wouldn't be so big if Vine was kept alive and managed well.
Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.”
TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.
Key point is ByteDance as a whole (I haven’t been able to find anything to indicate that TikTok itself is profitable), which happens to be a privately held company. ByteDance’s CEO have also gone on record saying they had a “weak” implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would “further deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.
Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine. The blinding fact is that Twitter has never once made a shrewd business movie in ~15 years and is piloted by nimrods.
Even now, they could bring Vine back and compete with TikTok toe-to-toe but they’re evidently allergic to making sound business decisions.
TikTok is as far as I know not profitable. There’s a limit how much investor money you can burn on an app that isn’t making money. But I would say it’s safe to assume the CCP will gladly burn billions to ensure they have a social media platform that’s used worldwide.
IMHO, this course of events also paints a likely outcome had Twitter acquired Instagram instead of Facebook.
Instagram became dominant because it had Facebook's engineering and infrastructure resources. Had they fallen into Twitter's hands, it would be little more than a camera app and a way to embed photos into tweets and or been shut down.
"Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine"
The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it.
>there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use
Precisely, although I think it's 50/50 between "what old people use" and "where the corporations live". IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network, places like TikTok are popular because corporate interests haven't shown up yet (basically no ads and very few sponsored posts / product placement).
> IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network
I'm not so sure about this. 80% of my communication happens through Instagram DMs, and I haven't heard a single complaint about advertisements, or Instagram at all.
Rather, I see friends browsing content on TikTok (rather than on IG), then re-sharing it through DMs. They browse on TikTok because its For You Page curation makes finding interesting and entertaining content easier than on any other platform I've seen.
I'm sure it depends a lot on region and social circles. I work in tech, and IG is basically dead other than interacting with businesses with my peers. I also have two sisters in high school who confirm IG isn't really a thing anymore for the younger crowd.
If I had a guess why Facebook has stayed around as long as it has.
It started with college students. That quickly became adults that continued to use it into their careers. Skipping the myspace teen generation fad cycle.
facebook was a social network. now it's just a phonebook. Instagram has replaced the social network portion of it for most people. People that want to stay connected but don't want to be social use facebook only. Tiktok is a viral video app. Just like Vine was. Vine failed and left a hole. Tiktok went in and filled that hole. That's it.
> Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it)
I think this is true, but it's worth also considering the factor of how well a platform is able to keep its users segregated into their own echo chambers wherein they feel as though the platform as a whole meets their standard of what is hip and cool
Take Instagram for example. Ten years on from its inception, it's still very, very popular with 18-24 year olds isn't it? Simultaneously though, as I'm sure many Americans with a ~45 year old mother will be able to attest to, it somehow maintains very strong popularity with middle aged women too.
My idea as to how it maintains its general appeal while catering to these two disparate audiences is that its software mechanisms are carefully designed to keep both audiences separated from each other. Consequently both feel as though it's 'their' platform.
It seems that when a social media platform fails to build an intergenerational iron curtain like this, you end up with something like Facebook, where both generations gravitate away from the platform.
I admit I could be completely off the mark here though, and applying my personal experience more broadly than I should.
I wonder if they use IG because there isn't any alternative.
Let's say that someday there is a new "teenstagram" launched, and they paid some teenager influencers to drop content there and some cool kids to use and promote it.
In my experience as teens, "it's uncool to use a same platform as the one your grandma use".
> Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new.
Periodically launch a new instance of the site, on a different URL, with a different colour scheme and an independent userbase?
> Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile.
That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch. It's a big part of why it's so popular.
> Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos.
Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't? do the authors not know, and neither does the audience? I get the "you know your own field better than the writer" effect, but a very large group of people use and at least sort of know how TikTok works, right?
> Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't?
Do you mean the superficial author of the piece or the author of the PR material they are regurgitating?
My guess is someone involved with the latter function knows what is going on in the market and is deliberately being deceptive (but probably not outright lying, the release itself probably doesn't claim that TikTok lacks the described features though it is probably written in a way which gives that impression), the former may or may not know, but probably doesn't care; the better a stenographer they are the more access they get.
The AR claim is a claim that was made by instragram's head of product (who is quoted in other articles). The author presumably just wrote up the article and didn't bother to check that what Instagram are claiming is actually true.
> That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch
I think the author here is differentiating on the pool of available videos to show you. TikTok will show you anything (that fits your profile) from any user, which is markedly different from just showing you content from your social graph.
Not only that but the machine learning models on those ARs are so successful that judging from our context (of non-Chinese apps we're normally exposed to), I'd be semi-surprised that we can algorithmically apply makeup so correctly with ambient lighting on a single still frame on a compute server, much less locally, in real-time on a low powered phone.
I dislike Reel already.
I follow wood working, RC cars, and metal fab/3D printing/CNC.
Now when I browse it's nothing but women jumping around and showing off their clothes... WTH!? So I start saying, not interested to all of that, still spams me with it.
You have to train the feed. A few days on Tik Tok aggressively disliking things you don't want to see and liking things you do, and it becomes an unending stream of interesting content. A single dislike won't do it alone though.
The part about the algorithm might be referring to when you first join TikTok. THEN it shows you the most popular videos at the moment, adjusting quickly to a more personalized feed based on viewing/interaction behaviors.
Facebook launched Lasso as its own app two years ago. I’m not sure if there were any differences between it and TikTok, but either way, it failed miserably.
FB also has a Stories feature as Instagram, in turn from Snapchat, but I barely see anyone use it while everyone and their cat (literally) use Instagram Stories.
Also, FB took a more advanced friend list concept from Google+ but few use or know how it works. (Like how “Acquintances” are your friends but they are pushed down by the algorithm)
It is apparent that it’s hard to just shoehorn different usage patterns due to different social cultures evolving on the respective networks. Let’s see how they do this time...
I find myself never actually using social media. Good friends belong to the same Signal group chats. I have several of these which consists of cliques I have built up over the years in school and at work and that's how I stay in touch. For those that are further out of reach there is email and linkedin if I really need to dig someone up from the past.
You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new". I wish I could get a handful of my friends to use something like Signal. Best even something not requiring a phone number. It's stupid that Signal wants a phone number. What has my phone number to do with chatting via Internet?
Any advice how to get your friends to switch, when they do not care much about their privacy and have a defeatism attitude with regard to guarding their privacy or simply do not understand, that their actions affect their friends?
I find good friends often share similar technological viewpoints right down to the basic level. The people I have on signal are pretty much all cut from the same cloth in that regard. I.E. they tend to avoid big internet corps whenever possible and hack their own solutions.
For people I consider casual acquaintances or just outside of the "inner circle" so to speak, I just use SMS.
>You seem to have well informed flexible friends, who are willing to try something "new".
you're saying this about someone that claims all of their friends use only one app. the fact that that app is signal does that not make them more flexible or better informed than someone who was born into some religion and decided it was coincidentally the most true.
Comedian Jeff Wright had a great commentary recently on how Instagram has a history of copying upstart social networks (Vine, Snapchat, and now TikTok).
Reels’ inclusion in Instagram makes the UI confusing for me. Right now it only feeds me three or four videos that are peppered in my discover feed when I scroll down so I have to swipe up to refresh for more videos:
I took me doing a Google search to find the original Instagram PR release that had instructions on where even to find Reels. But once you are in any Reel it acts just like TikTok, you swipe up for a never-ending feed of content.
So in a sense, any Reel is a portal into "a separate section dedicated to Reels content".
What is the status of snapchat? Does it still exist? Does anyone use it? How do they split time between TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and the other half-dozen platforms?
As someone roughly in the target age and location audience for all of the things you mentioned, here's my take:
- TikTok is somewhat mindless entertainment. Keep scrolling, watch funny or informative videos, and the algorithm will tailor more content to your tastes. It's fun and an absolute time-suck, but not any kind of critical communication. I don't personally know anyone who makes TikTok content, but most people I know watch it at least occasionally.
- Instagram is used for sharing a more public view of your life. While most people I know have private accounts, they usually follow and are followed by between a few hundred and a thousand or so other accounts (think classmates and friends of friends). Instagram is where you post photos of yourself in the best possible light, not just silly and random things. People use Stories to share news and post sillier and less permanent content. Not everyone just scrolls endlessly on Instagram; I only follow people I know in real life but many people follow celebrities and meme accounts as well.
- Snapchat is more like a communication platform than a social media platform. People send disappearing photos (usually quick selfies or photos of what they're doing at the moment) to their friends. If you exchange a photo or video with someone for any number of consecutive days, you'll start a streak with that person, which further incentivizes you to continue sending photos to them. Snapchat also has stories, but these are usually intended to be even less permanent. Candid selfies with friends or videos of people doing silly things are the main use, at least within my extended group of friends. It's gotten no less popular recently.
- YouTube continues to be popular. Hopefully this should be self-explanatory. Gaming content is popular.
- Facebook is basically unused by anyone my age other than for specific groups that haven't migrated elsewhere.
- GroupMe is popular for college class group chats and whatnot, but not as a place to hang out and talk about other stuff.
- Twitter is still occasionally used for content consumption, but not as much as Instagram.
- FaceTime, Snapchat's video-calling functionality, and Houseparty (sometimes) are the usual ways to communicate via video chat between friends.
- Discord is expanding outside of gaming circles for text and voice chat.
That 53% number meant that 53% of Snapchat's American users are 15-25, not that 53% of 15-25-year-olds in the US use Snapchat. Scroll down a little further to see that 78% of Internet users between 18 and 24 years old use Snapchat.
This seems like a perfect opportunity since TikTok is banned in India. Most influencers will migrate to Instagram reels. I don't like facebook's business model, but seems they know how to make money.
For a moment, I read the word "reels" in the headline as a verb (meaning: "lose one's balance and stagger"), instead of a noun (film reel). But my mind quickly readjusted: "that doesn't make sense, because FB owns Instagram."
I read it the same way initially, thinking a different FB team made the tiktok competitor and the Instagram team didn't know about it and was taken aback.
I know how it's supposed to be read (and I've even seen real reels at old movie theaters!), but I still just think about fishing reels every time I see it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadIs this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios?
APNews is only good for the fact that something happened, not for any degree of interpretation, and you have to be on your guard for what isn't being said and what facts haven't been mentioned.
The Economist is different because they talk about only a few things and usually add a whole lot of opinion, but when I do dig deeper I find that they generally take defensible stances even if there are problems with their arguments. And if Hacker News is any indication, you'll never be able to assert anything with confidence, however well researched, without someone else asserting the exact opposite with more confidence.
My experience with Axios is that they generally avoid taking editorial positions that are obviously partisan, though they are clearly left of center on the American political spectrum (then again, I think America's current political spectrum has moved so much that the bounds of reality are now mostly left of center). When I dig deeper, I usually find that they aren't guilty of selectively presenting information. Their business model is still ad driven, so they are not immune to the classic problems of money influencing news, so I still view Axios with default skepticism.
They also do occasional stories that look like obvious beat-sweateners[0], likely to keep that access flowing.
Overall I'd say it's a pretty good source for non-partisan news.
[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beat%20sweet...
Reuters stories also fill that role now, as eg Bloomberg and many other prominent news sources have clamped down hard on their non-paywalled content.
Are these the only two possible reasons to choose from?
Oh god. It means that, like Instagram TV or whatever it was called, it will be forcibly shoved down your throat for the next half a year with nagging reminders for another year.
It still failed, of course, and got relegated to a small button inside the explore tab, but it the push was aggressive nonetheless. Expect the same for "Facebook's TikTok".
" Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps. "
Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676
[1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...
The biggest reason I left Facebook was because the platform became a jumbled mess instead of its original clean interface. It's the reason why Facebook originally won out against Myspace and why Instagram won out against Facebook.
Facebook (the company) will probably settle into a stable pattern like the BBC's radio lineup, where listeners roll from Radio 1, to Radio 2, to Radio 4 as they age.
I wouldn’t say Instagram is fading. Just that Tiktok is keeping the younger generation away from it. Snap is losing on both sides because of them.
Kodak didn't die when invented digital cameras, but it was a downhill ride towards inevitable cliff.
Facebook is probably the the company most able to claim to have achieved this, with facebook.com and Instagram being two big hits, arguably Messenger and WhatsApp too. TikTok is probably the biggest sign that they have actually failed to hit a 3rd generation.
It might be a successful strategy to run a business when you are big enough to do it (as long as your buyouts are correct).
I heard about facebook from a friend when it was still exclusive and I joined when it was opened up. Now I open it up at what seems exponential intervals, and each time it seems my disappointment with the platform is also exponential.
Its a mess filled with garbage mixed with adds that pretend to be content.
Facebook has been declared dead without actually dying for so long now that it might still be alive when the retro mechanisms start kicking in.
But they sure love Instagram and WhatsApp.
Absolutely. They just reported their Q2 earnings, and Facebook has 2.7B monthly active users. When you exclude China (where they aren't allowed), people without internet or too old/young, then yes - is growth is limited, largely by size of the human population.
Even if young generations decide not to join, this will be likely most powerful network for decades.
A decade ago you could have everyone on it for their entire lunchbreaks, deep-stalking their mates. But nowadays people are not engaged with it compulsively.
Younger people don't use it because their parents are on it.
Content isn't made by people for Facebook because it won't show in their friends feeds.
Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
Before Facebook there was the printed telephone book and the Yellow Pages. People and businesses had to be in the phone books because someone might want to contact them that way. But the Internet and email came along. Facebook is a bit like that, people are there but no more engaged than they are with a printed telephone book.
Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to keep the same eyeballs. Because of that Facebook are successful.
But TikTok is the new, cool app in town. 80 million users in the US apparently, not all of them teenage girls.
The only thing I disagree with is that Facebook does make big profits from its ads, in fact it does a tough competition to google and amazon... the rest of your arguments seem correct to me... facebook doesn't feel like the home that it was before... it feels more like a newspaper, full of ads, debates, news and toxic people
> Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
No, this is not true. Not only has Facebook done well in Q2, performance was unaffected by the boycott of large advertisers because of revenue from small businesses.
True. But then they should speak with humility and uncertainty, not proclaim their wrong ideas with confidence.
> if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons
No, it's not our job to educate people. Least of all, people who are ignorant but purport to be knowledgeable. These are the most resistant to any kind of learning.
But I think Zuck knows this and buys up enough up and comers to probably stay ahead on enough things.
* MySpace, at its peak, had around 75 MM MAU.
* Facebook's core properties (Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger/Big Blue) have around 2.6 billion MAU.
Even if I just consider FB core + Messenger, Facebook is roughly 20x larger than MySpace. Facebook, as a core product, also is growing in non-US markets, even though it has saturated the US markets for years.
MySpace and Facebook just aren't comparable anymore.
75m MAU in 2008 is very different than 2.6b in 2020.
The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that:
1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social products increase it too. If my friends aren't using a social platform neither am I, usually.
2. Facebook has such a rich culture of A/B testing that they'll never release controversial changes without a deeper understanding of the impact of those changes on engagement. They won't shoot themselves in the foot like Digg did with current leadership.
3. Facebook has a really successful history of acquisitions and its leadership is very aware of social media trends. It catches those trends early.
As a consequence of (1), I'd argue that Facebook has a tremendous moat in comparison to its peers: it has a large amount of users who are more likely to stay put. While Facebook also moves slowly as a consequence of (2) often enough, it can move really quickly on producing novel products.
Facebook certainly will face challenges in the future, but they're likely to be a lot different at this stage.
The questions for continued relevance is if Facebook-the-company can continue to iterate Facebook-the-product, or if its codebase has grown too unwieldy, and the company's culture gone toxic, making it harder to add a feature to Facebook, compared to creating a new company, writing a bunch of code, buying content and acquiring users. Given the rise of Instagram(Acquired), Snapchat (IPOd), WhatsApp(Acquired), TikTok, it's not clear Facebook-the-company is able to innovate. It's not clear that they have to, either, given older Internet brands like Yahoo! are still around and making money.
The comparison I'd make is to email. There are reasons email will never die (along with reasons why email can't innovate), and I think some of those reasons also apply to Facebook by this point. There's just some percentage of people that won't ever move, so while, eg, IRC is no longer in its heyday, it's still alive and kicking.
Now they're Facebooking Instagram.
Btw UI and UX need to evolve but to the point where they don't become bloated.
There is an ever growing demand for new features, not necessarily from users, to fend off rivals and to stay relevant and exciting. As with a lot of popular apps and services, it ends up bloated, trying to offer everything to everyone and satisfying no one.
Except it didn't, the photo quality on Instagram is really bad because of compression and it is not possible to share actual good pictures because of that.
Back in 2013-2014 it was a quite simple to use and elegant app. Then Facebook happened.
User experience doesn't seem to be a priority for Instagram.
What I would do to solve this problem if I were at Facebook is to start new features out on an established platform (like they already do) until they reach a critical mass. Then I would completely break the feature out into its own app with separate branding. Hopefully I could get 10-20% of the active users of that feature to move to the new app and then grow it from there.
It's a very delicate process each time you do it but I think in the long run it would diversify Facebook's revenue across many independent brands and solve the feature creep problem.
After the rise of Snapchat Facebook tacked on stories to FB, IG, and WA.
Understanding these phenomena is easier when you think of it solely in terms of the bottom line.
If that's the value prop, what were people willing to pay for that value?
I think, instead, getting sponsored stories in front of eyeballs is the service being provided to the paying customers.
It's an ugly, but effective strategy.
As we all know this strategy worked great for Foursquare.
So in a way their arrogance may have hurt them in the long run.
I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app.
By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.
On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat
East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.
What is Reels immitating here?
TikTok or Doubin, just swipe up/down would be enough for 90% of your input
When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse.
tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.
Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.
It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.
TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.
Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).
As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat.
I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.
And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.
Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.
Rename it "Skype for Teens". Make no changes to the codebase.
They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.
You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.
At a certain scale, a person doesn't make this decision... their friends make it for them.
I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid.
I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.
Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then).
Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore.
I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.
UI wise, Snapchat is the worst.
This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)
On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.
Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.
PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:
* Buy everything, or course.
* Pay for electric, gas, and water.
* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.
* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.
* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.
Really feels like it belongs more in the feed part than the stories part but I guess no one would watch it then.
Only watched one once and feel like that’s where I did.
It already is... About a week or two ago Instagram decided to put the "Shop" or "Marketplace" button where the "Likes" tab button was... And now to get to your likes/follows/etc. you need to go to your profile tab, and find the "heart" button in the top right.
But because the "like" button has been in the same place for the past several years, it's still ingrained in my habits to press where the "Marketplace" button is, so I keep opening the store page...
I can't believe this wasn't on purpose...
The "Likes" button on the tab bar wasn't to like a post. It was to basically see the list of all interactions on your posts or new followers/requests.
It's terrifically awful. If you do get a notification, then pressing the "Profile" tab button now brings you to the notifications list view.
But if you have "read" the new ones and want to go back to it you need to dig through for it like I mentioned in the OP.
It's ridiculous.
Commerce is already integrated into the stories feed, not only with advertisements as you scroll through stories, but with "swipe-ups" that users can use to sell or advertise products with.
As much as this article paints a messy picture of Instagram as an app, it's still wildly popular and these issues don't seem to be hurting its popularity.
Wait, there's a separate app for IG messages? For iOS? Link? I can't find _any_ references to it.
You can add anyone to your close friends list. So add anyone you like to chat to. If you want a group to appear in Threads, add all the people in the group to threads.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/threads-from-instagram/id14738...
I barely look at it more than once every few days now as it has lost much of its utility.
Most of my friends and family are on other social networks and sites (twitter, strava, discord) now with fewer, or no ads, or even just whatsapp groups on the phone.
But transitioning to more intimate forms of social media is a great move, so I'm glad you made the switch. A lot of people do find Facebook (for example) to be too fake, while others need it to keep in touch with their family and communities.
The product they are launching, for me, isn't relevant either.
We've long since reached peak Facebook, and its social network is fragmenting as they're losing people for the reasons I mentioned previously. They're effectively chasing a new audience to keep their numbers up.
This is most likely to boost account #s but it's frustrating to have to follow multiple accounts for one person.
P.S. Tags could be better still, but only if they're used consistently. My experience with other places/tools that use tags is that never ever happens, so I'd go with streams.
At the time, the story was that all these other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat were adopting short videos, so Vine could not compete anymore. But obviously it was possible to compete, since an entirely new service--Tik Tok--was able to rise against them.
That said, I do think there may be a human-oriented life cycle to these sorts of social apps. Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it). Then the next round of teens seek a new platform--even if the functionality is the same--just so they can have it to themselves.
Under this theory, there's nothing Twitter could have done with Vine to make it beat Tik Tok, since a crucial feature of Tik Tok is simply that it's new.
The business strategy in the face of this theory would be to continuously start or buy new social platforms with similar feature sets, but each time with a new brand that is totally separate from the (older) parent brand so teens don't get scared off.
But yes, US TikTok is absolutely built off of musical.ly services. A lot of the TikTok API URLs still have musical.ly domains.
My (probably unpopular) opinion is that they simply shouldn't have a voice. Twitter is bad for society period.
Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.
And I don't think the power of short messages is specific to the United States
> Scandal and Betrayal: The Story of How Twitter Started
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8N0xN0ihMA
Somebody could make new Facebook but people wound't move to it cause Facebook has 15 years head start and gigantic social graph.
TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.
Even now, they could bring Vine back and compete with TikTok toe-to-toe but they’re evidently allergic to making sound business decisions.
Instagram became dominant because it had Facebook's engineering and infrastructure resources. Had they fallen into Twitter's hands, it would be little more than a camera app and a way to embed photos into tweets and or been shut down.
The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it.
Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg
Precisely, although I think it's 50/50 between "what old people use" and "where the corporations live". IG is being used less and less because it's turned into the Home Shopping Network, places like TikTok are popular because corporate interests haven't shown up yet (basically no ads and very few sponsored posts / product placement).
I'm not so sure about this. 80% of my communication happens through Instagram DMs, and I haven't heard a single complaint about advertisements, or Instagram at all.
Rather, I see friends browsing content on TikTok (rather than on IG), then re-sharing it through DMs. They browse on TikTok because its For You Page curation makes finding interesting and entertaining content easier than on any other platform I've seen.
It started with college students. That quickly became adults that continued to use it into their careers. Skipping the myspace teen generation fad cycle.
“Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” - Mark Zuckerberg
I think this is true, but it's worth also considering the factor of how well a platform is able to keep its users segregated into their own echo chambers wherein they feel as though the platform as a whole meets their standard of what is hip and cool
Take Instagram for example. Ten years on from its inception, it's still very, very popular with 18-24 year olds isn't it? Simultaneously though, as I'm sure many Americans with a ~45 year old mother will be able to attest to, it somehow maintains very strong popularity with middle aged women too.
My idea as to how it maintains its general appeal while catering to these two disparate audiences is that its software mechanisms are carefully designed to keep both audiences separated from each other. Consequently both feel as though it's 'their' platform.
It seems that when a social media platform fails to build an intergenerational iron curtain like this, you end up with something like Facebook, where both generations gravitate away from the platform.
I admit I could be completely off the mark here though, and applying my personal experience more broadly than I should.
Let's say that someday there is a new "teenstagram" launched, and they paid some teenager influencers to drop content there and some cool kids to use and promote it.
In my experience as teens, "it's uncool to use a same platform as the one your grandma use".
Periodically launch a new instance of the site, on a different URL, with a different colour scheme and an independent userbase?
That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch. It's a big part of why it's so popular.
> Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos.
TikTok has had AR filters for a long time now...
Do you mean the superficial author of the piece or the author of the PR material they are regurgitating?
My guess is someone involved with the latter function knows what is going on in the market and is deliberately being deceptive (but probably not outright lying, the release itself probably doesn't claim that TikTok lacks the described features though it is probably written in a way which gives that impression), the former may or may not know, but probably doesn't care; the better a stenographer they are the more access they get.
I think the author here is differentiating on the pool of available videos to show you. TikTok will show you anything (that fits your profile) from any user, which is markedly different from just showing you content from your social graph.
That’s basically how TikTok started.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...
Also, FB took a more advanced friend list concept from Google+ but few use or know how it works. (Like how “Acquintances” are your friends but they are pushed down by the algorithm)
It is apparent that it’s hard to just shoehorn different usage patterns due to different social cultures evolving on the respective networks. Let’s see how they do this time...
Any advice how to get your friends to switch, when they do not care much about their privacy and have a defeatism attitude with regard to guarding their privacy or simply do not understand, that their actions affect their friends?
For people I consider casual acquaintances or just outside of the "inner circle" so to speak, I just use SMS.
you're saying this about someone that claims all of their friends use only one app. the fact that that app is signal does that not make them more flexible or better informed than someone who was born into some religion and decided it was coincidentally the most true.
https://twitter.com/JeffRightNoww/status/1287842365126914048
(Coincidentally, I think Jeff Wright had his breakthrough TikTok...)
https://imgur.com/a/jDtYbVP
Why not have a separate section dedicated to Reels content instead of having it interspersed with photos and regular video posts?
I think they are trying to make old users suddenly discover reels while flipping through photos, but it feels very messy.
So in a sense, any Reel is a portal into "a separate section dedicated to Reels content".
people use it for the content, not the navigation style
- TikTok is somewhat mindless entertainment. Keep scrolling, watch funny or informative videos, and the algorithm will tailor more content to your tastes. It's fun and an absolute time-suck, but not any kind of critical communication. I don't personally know anyone who makes TikTok content, but most people I know watch it at least occasionally.
- Instagram is used for sharing a more public view of your life. While most people I know have private accounts, they usually follow and are followed by between a few hundred and a thousand or so other accounts (think classmates and friends of friends). Instagram is where you post photos of yourself in the best possible light, not just silly and random things. People use Stories to share news and post sillier and less permanent content. Not everyone just scrolls endlessly on Instagram; I only follow people I know in real life but many people follow celebrities and meme accounts as well.
- Snapchat is more like a communication platform than a social media platform. People send disappearing photos (usually quick selfies or photos of what they're doing at the moment) to their friends. If you exchange a photo or video with someone for any number of consecutive days, you'll start a streak with that person, which further incentivizes you to continue sending photos to them. Snapchat also has stories, but these are usually intended to be even less permanent. Candid selfies with friends or videos of people doing silly things are the main use, at least within my extended group of friends. It's gotten no less popular recently.
- YouTube continues to be popular. Hopefully this should be self-explanatory. Gaming content is popular.
- Facebook is basically unused by anyone my age other than for specific groups that haven't migrated elsewhere.
- GroupMe is popular for college class group chats and whatnot, but not as a place to hang out and talk about other stuff.
- Twitter is still occasionally used for content consumption, but not as much as Instagram.
- FaceTime, Snapchat's video-calling functionality, and Houseparty (sometimes) are the usual ways to communicate via video chat between friends.
- Discord is expanding outside of gaming circles for text and voice chat.
- Reddit is mildly popular for meme content.
Roughly eight-in-ten Snapchat users ages 18 to 29 (77%) say they use the app every day, including 68% who say they do so multiple times day.
https://www.omnicoreagency.com/snapchat-statistics/
The goal is to hook you after all...