I am very confident the image at the top of this article is generated by any of these currently popular text-to-image models. This feels like the beginning of ignoring artworks I see online, foreshadowed by header images at the start of tech blogs.
Agreed, DALL-E 2 seems to have real issues with faces, hands (fingers especially), and objects inside other objects (look at the beakers the teddy bears are using) and actual 3d depth awareness of objects. Looking at these it started to get really easy to pick out the AI versus a human of the style, the humans had really good attention to details like fingers, eye placement, and other facial features.
I think its less that DALL-E has an issue with them, and more that humans are just extremely sensitive to details of faces and body parts in general. It's also extremely difficult for a human to draw a hand or face. AI images only seem different in that they draw mistakes in hyper detail so you get something that's the combination of a child's pencil drawing composition and an expert painters style.
This generated image is much more interesting than most stock photos. Stock photos don't have any details, they are meant to be simple and bland. This one is somewhat fun.
I like that they include the prompt, makes it more interesting. Although it's not the full prompt, because the illustrations in their other recent articles are in the same style.
I think the issue with Instagram is the “follow the money” mentality from a lot of its users. I follow around 600 accounts, many of which are artists and brands, and I definitely saw a drastic shift towards video content.
I do not open Instagram and expect to look at pictures alone unless it is from friends, pretty much.
i dont know.... i never understood "hip" things. back when orkut was all the rage, i was stuck being anonymous. then facebook, twitter, whatsapp, instagram, sarahah app, titok, youtube shorts, i could not be convinced enough to maintain an account there.....
i mean i am on HN, reddit but i dont have my own name, my "social graph" isnt tied to my AFK identity, my AFK friends aren't my online friends, my location is not my location........ the original internet user
I kinda feel the essence of your comment is “nobody stays at the top forever” or something - have never used tiktok but it just seems to benefit from being newer than any FB company.
FB is so large they are just experiencing diminishing returns on things now
no.... i was saying what i said. no "network" has been able to convince me to "engage with content", any of these networks and maybe even in future....
a year or 2 ago, i got my own pleroma instance for my family. its just a few of us for now and because i don't have any b2 storage set up, i do not recommend posting media but still,
I disagree with their premise that Reels is "performative" while TikTok is "authentic". They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite.
Yes I think the real factor is that the TikTok feed was more relevant to that age group and Instagram was more relevant to 30 something parents and home owners.
Also it sounds as if the users had previously spent more time generating curated feeds on TikTok.
Knowing about a dozen people who spent more time in Instagram Reels and then switched to TikToks I don't know that that's true - it seems accurate to me. Personally I used Reels and YT Shorts for a few months before TikTok but the second is far better.
>They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite.
They couldn't, because it's 'the algorithm' that does the picking & Facebook's algorithm optimises for inauthentic or boomer. Cherry-picking posts isn't a standard usecase.
I like that they asked actual users, and provided actual examples; it's something I've always felt off about Instagram's Reels vs TikTok. However the takeaway is that your TikTok feed is curated by hand by artisan robots vs Instagram is curated by lizards who only care about data.
Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome).
My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
The problem with asking "actual users" in this way, is that it fundamentally ties the user's pre-existing conception of these apps to their responses. If a user had been served the same content on Reels that they were on TikTok, it's difficult to see them having the same reaction.
Maybe TikTok trains on product data and validates on expert human rater data? This is a strategy that search engines used to use. Maybe they still do, but they used to too.
As a millennial I can tell you exactly why TikTok is better:
1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
2. Reels are often poor quality. What I see is mostly life hacks that are actually really stupid or jokes that never pay off.
3. TikTok has a creator culture that seems far superior to Reels. What Facebook/Instagram seem to fail to realize is that the problem they have isn’t a lack of a video platform but rather a lack culture. TikTok somehow did foster a really cool culture of people creating content, perhaps using their stitches feature.
4. Instagram is a photo sharing platform. Imagine if every other thing you saw on TikTok was a still photo. It would be jarring. That’s the current experience with reels.
5. I don’t know if this is actually true but it feels to me that you can get a lot more exposure quickly on TikTok than with Reels. I don’t post TikTok videos but know enough people who do and it seems they are very much able to get tens of thousands of views with minimal effort and while being relatively new to the platform. I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
7. I come to Instagram to seek specific kind of content from my friends. I get reels from total strangers. I come to TikTok to get lols from random strangers and sometimes see friends. This is very personal but this is a major reason for me to use both and to dislike Reels.
I agree with all of this and I think the only thing I would add is that Tiktok understood the assignment was to be a mobile app. Everything about Tiktok is streamlined for mobile from the menus, to the time allotments, to a myriad of other design choices. Mobile is the future and, while I don't mean this to be snide towards pc enthusiasts, I find that a lot of people in my generation (millenials) and farther back just cannot comprehend how enjoyable a well designed mobile experience can be because they're stuck in old mindsets and habits. But Gen Z is growing up with phones that don't suck in their hands and the status quo of 'good enough' mobile apps is eventually going to be subverted by apps like TikTok imo that actually embrace mobile as a valid primary medium and not just as a lucrative lowest-common-denominator market.
> 6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
Did they really nail ads or could it perhaps just be that they still consider themselves in a growth phase (perhaps depending on market) where they deliberately try to not use them as hard as they think they could?
A lot of the TikTok users that I follow are now getting sponsored to do ads as part of their regular content, and I will typically watch it because I am interested in the person and therefore interested in how they execute an advertisement. Win/win/win.
> 1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you watch one video from some sitcom or cartoon not because it was from that particular show but because it happened to be about something interesting and suddenly YouTube is SURE you LOVE that show and want EVERYTHING IT HAS about that show--but it isn't quite so bad as Instagram, where I've heard a ton of stories about ending up pigeonholed by its algorithm into something they have a phobia for or past trauma related to, and now they are afraid to use the app, because it really does feel like you click on one pimple popping video (which has come up as the SPECIFIC issue for MULTIPLE people I've talked to, INCLUDING MYSELF a while ago) and BAM the app is now nothing but pimples being popped, 24/7.
I’ve always wondered why they are so bad at learning such an obvious lesson from their supposed biggest threat. TikTok seems to always mix it up; even if you do actually want to watch pimple popping 24/7, they seem to throw in some totally unrelated thing once in a while. Turns out people easily find things they didn’t even know they would enjoy this way, and when they have many interests, their feeds are way more engaging.
What’s so hard about randomizing 10-20% of the time?
TikTok seems the only one who actually put thought about it, because that's exactly the beef I have with Spotify as well. You play a "song radio" and find a new song so you move to that other song radio but only to get exactly the same list maybe shuffled a bit. Somehow they create bubbles of content and that's it, no way out. At least on Spotify you can change bubbles, while on YouTube good luck.
It's the dreaded "more of the same shit" algorithm that people confuse with deep learning and AI. The sad reality is that recommendation teams in these companies maintain some ugly gobbled together if .. else logic rather than a proper recommendation engine. Proper recommendation engines are hard. That's why recommendations change dramatically if you just use a vpn or travel. The IP address based geo location trumps everything else they might know about you. That's because there's a big if else around whatever other logic they have.
Add promoted content/ads to the mix that they are paid to promote and you end up with a mix of content that is primarily based on where you are, what they want to pimp in that region, and more of the same shit you were clicking on anyway; more or less in that order. The exact same shit quite often actually. Even filtering that out seems hard.
They are incentivized by ad clicks, not by your amusement. That's the business mistake that allows Tiktok to prosper because they are still trying to grow at the expense of their competition which means that they are in fact incentivized by your amusement as observed through your addictive behavior in the form of content clicks.
Instagram was like that once. And then Facebook bought them and started messing it up. Facebook was once like that until Facebook became an advertising company. The mistake that gets made over and over again in this space is that at some point they think they've won and start milking their network for revenue. The process of doing that destroys and erodes that network and something else pops up that is more interesting for users.
Tik Tok is doomed to go there too. Just a matter of time. It's irresistible for shareholders and advertisers. They'll get dollar signs in their eyes and they'll mess it up.
Recommendations are hard in general, if at all possible in a meaningful way.
Idk why everyone is so focused on feeding a user from a spoon when they are adult and can explore by themselves. Just give them the option to explore North-West instead of a stupid slit facing 312° which they accidentally picked as an initial direction.
>It's the dreaded "more of the same shit" algorithm
This problem of not-enough-novelty in YouTube's recommendations is exactly why I am working on a team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel name to get a list of similar channels.
As an example: our recommendations for Tesla's channel includes James Locke, a small channel (~10k subscribers) with a researcher working on Full Self Driving for Tesla vehicles. There are also dozens of Tesla driving, electrification, and investing channels along with channels for some of Musk's other companies like The Boring Company on the list:
I had one of those crop up in the reels carousel and freaked out because I very nearly tapped it by accident because there's no way to undo algorithm views on IG*
I'm as disgusted with the managers who think it's ok to push that content to people as I am with the content itself.
* FYI on YouTube I've had decent success correcting the algorithm if you go in and remove the video that started it from your watch history.
The reason I haven't deleted Instagram yet is because the algorithm is so bad it's as if there isn't one at all. It makes it much easier to break the dopamine cycle and not feel addicted. I spend half my time on there telling it that I don't like what it's showing me and I still get the same crap in my feed over and over.
> you watch one video from some sitcom or cartoon not because it was from that particular show but because it happened to be about something interesting and suddenly YouTube is SURE you LOVE that show and want EVERYTHING IT HAS about that show
Extremely relevant Ryan George Youtube skit about this[1]. Once you click it, Youtube will probably want to show you nothing but Ryan George videos, but that's not a bad thing.
I actually used this accidentally to my advantage on Insta. I accidentally clicked on a fashion ad and now EVERY ad is fashion-something, which is the last thing I would ever care about.
Now I can easily spot any ad instantly because Insta is too stupid to realize NOTHING else I interact with has to do with fashion but because of that one time a year ago, they keep trying and I can quickly skip it.
> I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
Can you even watch a reel without an account? Because I know I can't watch stories and after clicking one or two pictures my IP is blocked entirely from Instagram for x hours.
I don't have this problem if someone sends me a TikTok link.
> I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that's work.
Yes, you in fact get better recommendation as you use it more.
Reading HN, sometimes it feels like I must be the only one in the world enjoying good recommendations from both YouTube and Instagram. I do have many thousands of watches and likes on YouTube and Instagram, but it didn't feel like work, because I accumulated them over years of use.
1. Is on point. I’m just a hobby photographer and follow some people for inspiration. I clicked on a comic from the discover page at one point and after that all the recommendations were just random Reddit like comics and posts. Same was when I randomly saw a picture of a tattoo and after that I only had tattoo pictures and reels in the discover section. It’s insane how bad it is.
5. You can get a lot of exposure on tiktok whereas on Instagram they intentionally lower your organic exposure down to where it's now 1% or so of people who follow you who actually see your posts. Of course people are not going to post on Instagram then.
> I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
For me that isn't the case - I follow mostly "regular" people and enjoy it, but...
The problem I have with Instagram is that when I open the app I want to see the photos that people I've followed have posted since I last opened, it in time order. Yet It's quite a struggle not to see reels or suggested posts or people posting spam. 50% of the time I open IG the first post shown to me is from a hashtag I follow but its an image of an attractive young women with a very loose connection to the hashtag.
By copying other successful paradigms within IG and FB, Meta are destroying what remains of the products and users they have. I occasionally use TikTok but don't want to see a weak version of it on IG
This is an issue that is killing FB/Insta and I am not sure why nobody in Meta seems to get this. Apps attract people with certain expectations and mindset. When I want to login to FB/Insta, I want to see posts from people I know. Unfortunately, I made a mistake to like posts from few groups and that was basically the end of my newsfeed. Now all I get is posts from the grops from random people. Eventually it becomes same-old same-old and you quit.
But here's the most braindead thing FB has done: They actually have feature called "show first" which I tried to use it to force FB show posts from friends and not from groups. But some PM there probably made decision that this is not a good idea and forced to limit to only 30 people! So, now when I log in to FB, I get few posts from 30 people and then it's garbage from groups again.
It is beyond me how no one can see these issue there.
I feel like TikTok took the Vine idea to its natural extent. Meanwhile Facebook/Meta shoehorning Snap & TikTok features into Instagram ruined Instagram and wasted their lead.
Many big tech companies don't perform real R&D, instead they're fast-followers - piggybacking off whatever their competitors do, but the truth is that "disruption should come from within" because letting a competitor design your next product feature is f'n foolish (we see this a lot with consumer hardware too).
Imagine if Facebook/Meta actually focussed on Instagram's core strengths, and had cultivated a proper community or reason for being (e.g like YouTube or Twitch), rather than just spending all that time thinking about how they can squeeze more ad revenue: sure they might have not have had such big short-term ad sales, but Instagram would have found its feet and not have been so easily disrupted - heck, this might have led to innovative ways of advertising: two-birds-with-one-stone imagine that! (/s)
I think I speak for many when I say this is a core frustration with Facebook/Meta. There is nothing exciting coming out of their company because they don't make new ideas* and that leaves themselves open to disruption. By being too focused on ad revenue their acquisitions haven't progressed since day one, instead each looks like a Frankenstein's monster of the same app but with loads of ads and competitor's features bolted on.
* Even the much hyped metaverse isn't offering anything new.
It actually blows my mind how Twitter decided to kill Vine when it was very clear that they had an amazing opportunity. Vine was still very popular when they axed it especially considering how many of the popular TikTok and YouTube creators today were originally big on Vine.
Starting to wonder if it was bias towards what they consider "valuable" users on Twitter e.g increasingly irrelevant celebrities, literal twitter addicts and journalists and how they didn't use it. Rather than understanding they could build the breeding ground for the next round of creators/celebs/influencers.
TikTok is banned in India now, but when it was active, my feed was filled with content from daily wage labourers, farmers, and people living in small towns and villages. It was unpolished stuff but delightfully sincere and fun.
Reels just feels way too urbane and polished. Just not the same vibe.
I think there's something profoundly beautiful about teenagers living in tin roof shacks on the other side of the world from kids living in million dollar houses doing the same dances/memes/etc, as if they are equal peers. Maybe there's something for us adults to learn here?
> My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
This is a good observation. From my IG acquaintances too, it seems that only those with instagrammable lives are the ones still posting. The guy who does scenic hikes, the girl who goes to the exciting parties, those with perfect bodies. The occasional wedding or graduation photo. Many others have stopped posting pictures completely or sporadically post photos.
Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting related shorts. I think YouTube doesn't have enough original shorts content creators, and like many of Google's side projects, it will go to /dev/null someday.
Shorts is really half baked. Almost all content i consume on Youtube is in english, but shorts surprisingly ignores that and show content native to my country (most of the time irrelevant). It boggles my mind how YouTube can screw up something as basic as that.
For years several large web properties have been pushing machine translated content.
Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original.
IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
Tangentially related but when I have lived in countries where English isn't the first language I'm amazed how many big companies ignore the language set in my web requests (English) and serves me content in the county's native language. Google for example and they really hide the button to chsngethe language.
I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
Google really sucks with this. It used to be a lot worse a couple years ago when you had to navigate the dumb GDPR thing before you could see the language selector. Believe it or not, its the main thing that pushed me to DuckDuckGo.
Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.
The shorts recommendations are indeed awful. I get solely stuff I really would never watch; I get woke videos or teens being insecure about their lives, neither of which is relevant or interesting to me and YouTube knows that as the normal videos they recommend are usually not bad. And checking quickly now, most of them have the TikTok logo on them. So I agree: it will probably be removed or get worse instead of better.
When I am on the webpage on my desktop there is the x button that says something to the effect of "don't show shorts". I click that and the strip of shorts are removed.
For the app shorts is a different tab on the bottom of the screen. It goes Home, Shorts Subscription, Library.
Shorts are never mixed him to my regular feed.
I use and like you tube for longer content. If I wanted short content I would create an account with instatok and tikagram or whatever the next thing will be called.
Every week or so I have to go through and click not interested on all shorts suggestions.
I second they need an option to hide. I've sent feedback to YouTube numerous times and I know others have, but my guess is it will fall on deaf ears as they try to keep up with the current cool kid.
I hate how I can’t scrub through the video on Shorts. Counterintuitively, I feel like my time is being wasted when I’m forced to watch the whole clip, despite it being not that long to begin with.
Not being able to scrub video is an accessibility issue. If you don't catch something on the first watch, it's incredibly frustrating to re-watch the whole thing instead of going back a few seconds. Even if it's 'short' content. Looping the whole clip again isn't useful to someone who just wants to re-listen to one line so that they are sure they understood it correctly. In one case, a small nuisance; very frustrating in the general sense.
In the case of YouTube the extra pain is that I've trained 'double tap' a YT video for scrubbing. But what does that interaction do on a Short, in the YT app?! Like! It likes the video instead of scrubbing. On something that doesn't seem any different from a short normal YouTube video.
They used to have a separate app called YT Gaming.
Per https://www.failory.com/google/youtube-gaming:
"Out of the 11 million people that have downloaded the app on iOS and Android, and the more than 200 million watching gaming videos daily, only a small number used the app to do so. Most preferred the main YouTube app or the site."
>Did you know that Youtube has a game streaming service like Twitch?
Although org wise it's under YouTube Gaming livestreams can be about anything. The option to go live is shown when you click the upload button. Live streams show up in your video feed and the top of your subscriptions. In explore and on the sidebar of every page is a link to the live metachannel. On game metachannels there is a tab to see people streaming the game. Livestreams show up in search and you can filter for only livestreams.
I think it's pretty hard to avoid since streams are promoted more compared to videos. You must just not watch creators who stream on YouTube or are interested in topics that lend themselves to being streamed.
It's buggy enough on my phone that anything which used to be just a short video now gets the static preview for it stuck over top of the video, obscuring it almost completely.
Yeah shorts are getting kinda annoying to me as a youtube consumer. Some of my favorite subscriptions have started uploading like 5 shorts in a row and that fills up my page of new content with trash.
YouTube is plagued by unnecessarily padded content because I believe creators were rewarded depending on how much time they spent watching their videos (and hence number of ads that can be shown). Vast majority of YouTube videos I come across can be reduced by 90% in length without any loss in information you are seeking. YouTube needs to simply change incentives for the content creators and TikTok will have a massive competition.
I suspect that a big chunk of YouTube’s audience puts it on and lets it auto play, the same way one might turn on a tv channel and see whatever is on. This audience has more tolerance for ads, and so is more lucrative than people seeking short, information-dense videos. And so they are what gets optimised for.
This is the way of the figurative boomer, in the parlance of our times. In 5-10 years, something will have replaced TikTok, if trends of the past continue. It's possible, in the same way that humans broke out of evolutionary balance, that an app such as TikTok and its machine learning algorithms can break out of the evolutionary balance of what teens find intriguing or "in", but that remains to be seen.
I don't know why any company would try to target the current "in" thing. That shows that not only are they behind but that they are behind a minimum of two generations of "in" apps/things. So Google and Facebook are just showing that they only know what was next and not what is actually next.
Because GOOG, FB/META need to hold up reach of their app platform, growth figures, and, ultimately, value of their shares. It's not an either/or strategy anyway, as will be seen by the insane biddings for a perceived next big thing; you can't typically innovate within an established org anyway.
If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, wait 'til you find out what a China-based company can do with detailed preference and arousal data from young people.
This is what keeps me off Tiktok. I feel like I’m losing my mind even having to make a judgement like this, but I trust Facebook more than China. Only a tiny bit, but it’s there.
Well, as a non-US person I like that not all my PII is concentrated in US companies. If anything, I feel that US having something on me can have worse effects on me, compared to China, given the amount of US/western stuff I use.
Any entity that knows so much about you can manipulate you in ways you won’t suspect. Their government isn’t held back by the Constitution and they probably wouldn’t hesitate to influence the citizenry of their main rival on the world stage.
... the US government isn't particularly limited in such a way either. They have nice have for everything foreign communications, and all the actions are held as confidential
The US government isn't really held back by the Constitution either. It's been diluted so much they can just use Canada as a proxy and return the favour, for example, no problem. I agree with your overall point but it's not really a legal matter, it's just power.
Probably as much as a US based company can. I didn't see any US social media giants getting any real punishment for what they got up to between 2007-17.
In fact, given the general distrust of China in the West in international politics, feels like national governments are more likely to respond to any emerging harms than they did with Facebook.
Interesting read, would be interesting to see how TikTok optimizes their recommendation algorithms and what kind of metrics they use.
Like another commenter said, it may also be that Instagram had already a use case and a "spot" in peoples minds so its harder to change that mentality to the one that TikTok naturally gained and as such people tend to upload "better" content on there.
Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like.
We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill.
And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them.
Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.
Did that ever happen? Was it a US thing? I've heard of Friendster, but I thought it was something that MySpace killed and then MySpace went global and then got overtaken by Facebook.
In some countries, Friendster was extremely popular before Facebook! In others, there were other dominant social networks, like Orkut. Facebook was the first to dominate in all countries.
> In others, there were other dominant social networks
I remember Hi5 in Latin America and India, Hyves in the Netherlands, Orkut in Brazil, VK in Russia, StudyVZ in Germany, Tuenti in Spain. Finland and Sweden had a popular photo log websitr but I can't remember its name.
TikTok is not the same offering as Facebook though right? It competes in the Instagram and YouTube space. One thing about FB though is that it was the first social media platform that my mom and dad joined. FB was big enough for the boomers to join it. And I figure that is the moat, the boomers who for the first and only time in their lives joined a social platform and they ain't changing it up now.
Maybe they will leave it on like a tv news channel in the background.
If those they came to follow are gone they will still scroll a feed increasingly filled with ads. When they complain, their friends/family will install something and say touch the dancing penguin/barfing unicorn/whatever to see the latest, it's just like Facebook used to be.
Ostensibly their core use cases don’t overlap 100%, but as long as you accept that textual medium is just a means to information and is replaceable with video, you can actually get everything you get from Facebook on TikTok — news, commentary, entertainment, friend and family updates, messaging, etc. Plus, on a deeper level, everything competes with everything for your time and attention.
Has there been research done on negative value from scaling, the uncool participants effect? Where teenagers/young adults leave (or reduce their activity/start looking for other networks) when mom and grandpa join?
One negative effect of scaling I’ve noticed is that mature social networks (eg Instagram) seem harder to break into. Only established influencer content is surfaced so a new creator has trouble.
TikTok seems much better at promoting newer creators, possibly because it doesn’t have as many large existing creators. This means all the new talent goes there, and then the established talent eventually follows.
TikTok nailed that. It’s well established now but back when it was still growing and sort of small, creators who were on both Instagram and TikTok praised TikTok for how easy it was to break in (with good content and not merely follower count).
I'd love to see actual research on "the uncool participants effect" but anecdotally it feels like a real thing that's impossible to avoid. Any social network will start to favor a specific culture - enforced either by the algorithm or by its participants.
Once that culture starts to go out of fashion (which is inevitable) either the algorithm will have to shift to meet the culture (because the existing participants are probably not going to be fast enough to change) or new users will find another platform to start using. That's why even though people are saying Instagram will die if they start to prioritize Reels, I feel like they're going to die if they don't and this is a last ditch effort.
Btw I have wondered for a long time why search on Facebook is such an atrocious mess. But then it struck me: it must be intentional, so you would spend more time scrolling feeds to find that one post you've missed.
For this alone they deserve to be dethroned and forgotten.
It was a while ago that this happened, so there's a possibility that some people on here are too young to remember this. It was a leaked exchange between Mark Zuckerberg and a friend during the very early days of Facebook - when it was only available to Harvard students:
Mark Zuckerberg : Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
MZ: Just ask.
MZ: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
MZ: People just submitted it.
MZ: I don't know why.
MZ: They "trust me"
MZ: Dumb fucks.
I actually still remember when my university was added to Facebook - I was studying/procrastinating for my final exams.
> But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win.
I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
It's often said the value of social networking is O(n^2), which is basically impossible to overcome, versus n lg n, which makes the difference between 2 million and 20 million users a lot smaller (too tired for the math, sorry, maybe 20x?) instead of 100x.
If the total value of the network is O(n log(n)) then the value per user is only O(log(n)). So comparing a 2 million user network with a 1 million user network, if the second one is on a product that is 10% better, users should find switching an improvement.
Thanks for explaining! I'd always heard that O(n^2) value for social networks but never really thought about who that value is for. Now that you mention it, the value of a network to an individual user really is only O(n) or even O(log(n)). So while the company still has a massive cash advantage, it's much harder to deepen that moat and secure your customers with it than it seemed.
You are missing a huge point. MySpace and Friendster didn't got out of fashion suddenly because social is not "sticky". Friendster was heavily burdened with scaling issues, design complexity and bugs that basically force moved users to FB which remained fast, slick and extremely usable. Similarly, MySpace just couldn't engineer features faster that users wanted. The big point here is that social is very hard engineering problem and FB excelled it in early days. They are currently failing, in my opinion, because their newsfeed algorithm shows too much content from groups and much less from friends. The group content is something people will like initially but becomes monotonic later and so they quit.
So, the social platforms have failed historically because of engineering issues that their competitior excelled at.
Aren't you just rephrasing the GP's point? If social media was "sticky", users would suck up the poor UX and missing features and stick with platform X because 'that's where everyone is'. The fact that users are willing to 'start over' their accounts over such issues just shows that the moat offered by being the place where everyone is is more shallow than one would think.
It's an interesting thesis, but I'm a bit confused by your methodology - how can you propose a law without looking at any data yourself? You just seem to collect a few unrelated observations ("librarians have observed X", without giving any reference there) and laws that were developed for different contexts (Zipf's law), and from there you argue your way quite informally (mathematically speaking) to your proposed n log(n) formula.
Sorry for being so critical, but I would find it quite interesting if you had hard evidence to support a scaling law like n log(n) for the value of a social network.
We were applying a variety of other scaling phenomena which have been long observed, and then applied it in terms of networks. Most of the actual analysis of data, such as mail delivery was done by Andrew Odlyzko. There is also another form of the paper out there with Bob Briscoe added, and he had quantitative data not previously published from British Telecom. (See https://spectrum.ieee.org/metcalfes-law-is-wrong for a link, but you'll need a subscription.)
That said, the argument and result is intentionally informal, and intended to be a better rule of thumb than Metcalfe's law. Which was itself even more informally reasoned. However its key flaw we explained with:
Metcalfe’s Law is intuitively appealing, since our personal estimate of the size of a network is based on the uptake of that network among friends and family. Our derived value also varies directly with that metric. We therefore see a linear relationship between the perceived size and value of that network.
That said, different social networks may well have different scaling laws. In fact I pointed out privately that eBay likely was a counter-example which is closer to Metcalfe's law for the simple reason that you derive value there from connections to random strangers. And indeed eBay successfully maintained a market leading position for a long time despite charging significantly higher fees than competitors like Amazon Marketplace.
TikTok has such a content and data advantage. More viewers, more creators, more content. Feels like it’ll be very hard for Meta, YouTube or any competitor to come back without coming up with a hugely superior recommendation algorithm, and TikTok’s feels hard to beat, or some kind of improved creation tools that give it a content library advantage.
And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too when the idea of having a high quality networked camera and fun filters with you all the time was revolutionary, and Instagram was the way to take advantage of it. Now that phone power, storage space, network bandwidth, and good editing software have made watchable short video easy to shoot, TikTok is that platform.
Content and data are not advantage. Creators can simply re-upload their content to Insta/YouTube to increase their revenues. It's already happening. It will accelerate if Insta/YouTube provides right incentives.
TikTok developed the whole contemporary mobile video style in concert with its users and it’s algorithm. I don’t think you can just copy the features and throw them at a different audience and expect things to work out.
I don’t think chasing the current hot thing is necessarily a terrible idea but I think pivoting your app constantly to chase the hot thing is. “Be willing to cannibalize your user base” doesn’t mean “force new things on your user base”!
I'm one of the olds, but I wish Instagram would just go back to simple photo sharing with friends. No video, no sponsored posts, no ranking algorithm, just show me what my friends are up to, damn it!
Same here. The addition of Reels and how hard they push it is really annoying. If I wanted to use Tik Tok, I would use Tik Tok. I'm on Instagram because I want to use Instagram.
Me too. Its interesting, I work with a group of visual artists (about 300). Instagram was by far the most popular way for them to share what they were working on.
It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)
Instagram isn’t dying. It’s the default app while commuting, bored, taking a dump, “looked at all my other apps and I’m bored, mindless app surfing, etc.
Also, Instagram adds value as an app that people truly enjoy from a consumption standpoint.
I think this quote from a recent New Yorker article[1] sums up a subtle difference that’s easy to overlook. Topic has been on my mind a bit lately[2]:
“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””
Can we finally agree that 'currently cool' is no longer a moat, and stop giving insane 10x price/sales valuations to social media companies on the promise of eternal future growth / profitability.
I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn't really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them.
But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.
I agree. There's something to be said for app/services that decide that medium sized is good enough and they'll stick to doing their one thing well. Flickr springs to mind (although is much past its hey-day). I know people who left facebook for Instagram because of the changes to facebook but the changes just followed them to Instagram.
It's also stopped me uploading video to Instagram because now "your video will be uploaded as a Reel" and controlling the "share to Facebook" permissions for Reels isn't possible via facebook.com, you have to use the iOS app (which I do not have installed.)
Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
It's their Google+ moment (as a reminder, Google+ destroyed Buzz, Reader, and heavily damaged Talk, YouTube and generally Google's reputation; I liked it, but it went too far on so many things). Or dare I remember when every app was integrating a "story" feature to compete with Snap ? Their are probably other examples of this.
A lot of the comments here about why TikTok does so much better don't mention that the person that opens TikTok is already committed to watching lots of short videos, whereas the person using Instagram still has options other than the short reels, diluting the things people are doing.
They did actually create a standalone app, it was called Lasso. They put Lasso out there and did Reels at the same time. Then I guess their metrics made them decide to focus on Reels, possibly they looked at the wrong ones.
They did go through a period of releasing these experiments as extra apps but then they never push them beyond the first week and then wonder why they fail.
273 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 406 ms ] threadBut at the current state of things, the details are usually wrong in every subject, not only people.
https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/humans-vs-dall-e
I do not open Instagram and expect to look at pictures alone unless it is from friends, pretty much.
i mean i am on HN, reddit but i dont have my own name, my "social graph" isnt tied to my AFK identity, my AFK friends aren't my online friends, my location is not my location........ the original internet user
a year or 2 ago, i got my own pleroma instance for my family. its just a few of us for now and because i don't have any b2 storage set up, i do not recommend posting media but still,
They're both equally performative & inauthentic.
Also it sounds as if the users had previously spent more time generating curated feeds on TikTok.
>As a part of Gen Z, I relate a lot more with TikTok creators in general. Even the ads on Tiktok don't bother me as much.
sounds as authentically human as an android lizard.
They couldn't, because it's 'the algorithm' that does the picking & Facebook's algorithm optimises for inauthentic or boomer. Cherry-picking posts isn't a standard usecase.
Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome).
My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
the UI itself can be tested separately
1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
2. Reels are often poor quality. What I see is mostly life hacks that are actually really stupid or jokes that never pay off.
3. TikTok has a creator culture that seems far superior to Reels. What Facebook/Instagram seem to fail to realize is that the problem they have isn’t a lack of a video platform but rather a lack culture. TikTok somehow did foster a really cool culture of people creating content, perhaps using their stitches feature.
4. Instagram is a photo sharing platform. Imagine if every other thing you saw on TikTok was a still photo. It would be jarring. That’s the current experience with reels.
5. I don’t know if this is actually true but it feels to me that you can get a lot more exposure quickly on TikTok than with Reels. I don’t post TikTok videos but know enough people who do and it seems they are very much able to get tens of thousands of views with minimal effort and while being relatively new to the platform. I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
7. I come to Instagram to seek specific kind of content from my friends. I get reels from total strangers. I come to TikTok to get lols from random strangers and sometimes see friends. This is very personal but this is a major reason for me to use both and to dislike Reels.
Did they really nail ads or could it perhaps just be that they still consider themselves in a growth phase (perhaps depending on market) where they deliberately try to not use them as hard as they think they could?
OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you watch one video from some sitcom or cartoon not because it was from that particular show but because it happened to be about something interesting and suddenly YouTube is SURE you LOVE that show and want EVERYTHING IT HAS about that show--but it isn't quite so bad as Instagram, where I've heard a ton of stories about ending up pigeonholed by its algorithm into something they have a phobia for or past trauma related to, and now they are afraid to use the app, because it really does feel like you click on one pimple popping video (which has come up as the SPECIFIC issue for MULTIPLE people I've talked to, INCLUDING MYSELF a while ago) and BAM the app is now nothing but pimples being popped, 24/7.
What’s so hard about randomizing 10-20% of the time?
Add promoted content/ads to the mix that they are paid to promote and you end up with a mix of content that is primarily based on where you are, what they want to pimp in that region, and more of the same shit you were clicking on anyway; more or less in that order. The exact same shit quite often actually. Even filtering that out seems hard.
They are incentivized by ad clicks, not by your amusement. That's the business mistake that allows Tiktok to prosper because they are still trying to grow at the expense of their competition which means that they are in fact incentivized by your amusement as observed through your addictive behavior in the form of content clicks.
Instagram was like that once. And then Facebook bought them and started messing it up. Facebook was once like that until Facebook became an advertising company. The mistake that gets made over and over again in this space is that at some point they think they've won and start milking their network for revenue. The process of doing that destroys and erodes that network and something else pops up that is more interesting for users.
Tik Tok is doomed to go there too. Just a matter of time. It's irresistible for shareholders and advertisers. They'll get dollar signs in their eyes and they'll mess it up.
Recommendations are hard in general, if at all possible in a meaningful way.
Idk why everyone is so focused on feeding a user from a spoon when they are adult and can explore by themselves. Just give them the option to explore North-West instead of a stupid slit facing 312° which they accidentally picked as an initial direction.
This problem of not-enough-novelty in YouTube's recommendations is exactly why I am working on a team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel name to get a list of similar channels.
As an example: our recommendations for Tesla's channel includes James Locke, a small channel (~10k subscribers) with a researcher working on Full Self Driving for Tesla vehicles. There are also dozens of Tesla driving, electrification, and investing channels along with channels for some of Musk's other companies like The Boring Company on the list:
https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUC5WjFrtBdufl6CZojX3D8dQ/
I'm as disgusted with the managers who think it's ok to push that content to people as I am with the content itself.
* FYI on YouTube I've had decent success correcting the algorithm if you go in and remove the video that started it from your watch history.
Extremely relevant Ryan George Youtube skit about this[1]. Once you click it, Youtube will probably want to show you nothing but Ryan George videos, but that's not a bad thing.
[1]: https://youtu.be/d8fJPvXyfc0
Now I can easily spot any ad instantly because Insta is too stupid to realize NOTHING else I interact with has to do with fashion but because of that one time a year ago, they keep trying and I can quickly skip it.
I keep seeing obviously reposted popular tiktok videos. The same ones, over and over again but with different accounts. Same on YouTube shorts.
Can you even watch a reel without an account? Because I know I can't watch stories and after clicking one or two pictures my IP is blocked entirely from Instagram for x hours.
I don't have this problem if someone sends me a TikTok link.
Yes, you in fact get better recommendation as you use it more.
Reading HN, sometimes it feels like I must be the only one in the world enjoying good recommendations from both YouTube and Instagram. I do have many thousands of watches and likes on YouTube and Instagram, but it didn't feel like work, because I accumulated them over years of use.
they were the only place you could post and share a video of yourself dancing / lip-syncing along to licensed music without getting DMCA'd
For me that isn't the case - I follow mostly "regular" people and enjoy it, but...
The problem I have with Instagram is that when I open the app I want to see the photos that people I've followed have posted since I last opened, it in time order. Yet It's quite a struggle not to see reels or suggested posts or people posting spam. 50% of the time I open IG the first post shown to me is from a hashtag I follow but its an image of an attractive young women with a very loose connection to the hashtag.
By copying other successful paradigms within IG and FB, Meta are destroying what remains of the products and users they have. I occasionally use TikTok but don't want to see a weak version of it on IG
But here's the most braindead thing FB has done: They actually have feature called "show first" which I tried to use it to force FB show posts from friends and not from groups. But some PM there probably made decision that this is not a good idea and forced to limit to only 30 people! So, now when I log in to FB, I get few posts from 30 people and then it's garbage from groups again.
It is beyond me how no one can see these issue there.
Many big tech companies don't perform real R&D, instead they're fast-followers - piggybacking off whatever their competitors do, but the truth is that "disruption should come from within" because letting a competitor design your next product feature is f'n foolish (we see this a lot with consumer hardware too).
Imagine if Facebook/Meta actually focussed on Instagram's core strengths, and had cultivated a proper community or reason for being (e.g like YouTube or Twitch), rather than just spending all that time thinking about how they can squeeze more ad revenue: sure they might have not have had such big short-term ad sales, but Instagram would have found its feet and not have been so easily disrupted - heck, this might have led to innovative ways of advertising: two-birds-with-one-stone imagine that! (/s)
I think I speak for many when I say this is a core frustration with Facebook/Meta. There is nothing exciting coming out of their company because they don't make new ideas* and that leaves themselves open to disruption. By being too focused on ad revenue their acquisitions haven't progressed since day one, instead each looks like a Frankenstein's monster of the same app but with loads of ads and competitor's features bolted on.
* Even the much hyped metaverse isn't offering anything new.
Reels just feels way too urbane and polished. Just not the same vibe.
This is a good observation. From my IG acquaintances too, it seems that only those with instagrammable lives are the ones still posting. The guy who does scenic hikes, the girl who goes to the exciting parties, those with perfect bodies. The occasional wedding or graduation photo. Many others have stopped posting pictures completely or sporadically post photos.
Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original.
IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.
For the app shorts is a different tab on the bottom of the screen. It goes Home, Shorts Subscription, Library. Shorts are never mixed him to my regular feed.
You can click not interested on them all, it takes some time to get through them all, but after a week or two they are back and it's rimce and report.
Yes I do have a shorts tab at bottom as well. I never click it. It's the shorts in my feed that are a pain in the butt.
I use and like you tube for longer content. If I wanted short content I would create an account with instatok and tikagram or whatever the next thing will be called.
Every week or so I have to go through and click not interested on all shorts suggestions.
I second they need an option to hide. I've sent feedback to YouTube numerous times and I know others have, but my guess is it will fall on deaf ears as they try to keep up with the current cool kid.
In the case of YouTube the extra pain is that I've trained 'double tap' a YT video for scrubbing. But what does that interaction do on a Short, in the YT app?! Like! It likes the video instead of scrubbing. On something that doesn't seem any different from a short normal YouTube video.
Which shows up in their data as a positive and reinforces the design decision
Neither did I.
They've hidden it so fucking well that even though they pay (tens of) millions for exclusive contracts, people can't find it.
But shorts they keep pushing on every UI.
Per https://www.failory.com/google/youtube-gaming: "Out of the 11 million people that have downloaded the app on iOS and Android, and the more than 200 million watching gaming videos daily, only a small number used the app to do so. Most preferred the main YouTube app or the site."
Although org wise it's under YouTube Gaming livestreams can be about anything. The option to go live is shown when you click the upload button. Live streams show up in your video feed and the top of your subscriptions. In explore and on the sidebar of every page is a link to the live metachannel. On game metachannels there is a tab to see people streaming the game. Livestreams show up in search and you can filter for only livestreams.
I think it's pretty hard to avoid since streams are promoted more compared to videos. You must just not watch creators who stream on YouTube or are interested in topics that lend themselves to being streamed.
I never thought YouTube would do something this idiotic and actually drive away their users, but here we are ...
The same strategy isn't panning out with reels, for whatever reason.
Reels/Tktks involve a different type of content producer than regular stories. On that side, it is "closer" to YT than regular IG
And that I think is the impedance mismatch between IG and the Reels side
[0]https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/08/01/tiktoks-poison-pi...
I don't know why any company would try to target the current "in" thing. That shows that not only are they behind but that they are behind a minimum of two generations of "in" apps/things. So Google and Facebook are just showing that they only know what was next and not what is actually next.
The motives of a company controlled by the CCP are much much murkier.
In fact, given the general distrust of China in the West in international politics, feels like national governments are more likely to respond to any emerging harms than they did with Facebook.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...
Like another commenter said, it may also be that Instagram had already a use case and a "spot" in peoples minds so its harder to change that mentality to the one that TikTok naturally gained and as such people tend to upload "better" content on there.
Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like.
We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill.
And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them.
Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.
Did that ever happen? Was it a US thing? I've heard of Friendster, but I thought it was something that MySpace killed and then MySpace went global and then got overtaken by Facebook.
I remember Hi5 in Latin America and India, Hyves in the Netherlands, Orkut in Brazil, VK in Russia, StudyVZ in Germany, Tuenti in Spain. Finland and Sweden had a popular photo log websitr but I can't remember its name.
> Did that ever happen?
No, it didn't. Friendster was older than MySpace.
Not saying that's what happened, I've barely heard the name Friendster before.
If those they came to follow are gone they will still scroll a feed increasingly filled with ads. When they complain, their friends/family will install something and say touch the dancing penguin/barfing unicorn/whatever to see the latest, it's just like Facebook used to be.
TikTok seems much better at promoting newer creators, possibly because it doesn’t have as many large existing creators. This means all the new talent goes there, and then the established talent eventually follows.
Once that culture starts to go out of fashion (which is inevitable) either the algorithm will have to shift to meet the culture (because the existing participants are probably not going to be fast enough to change) or new users will find another platform to start using. That's why even though people are saying Instagram will die if they start to prioritize Reels, I feel like they're going to die if they don't and this is a last ditch effort.
It's the other way around - Friendster was the incument that Myspace unseated.
For this alone they deserve to be dethroned and forgotten.
Mark Zuckerberg : Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
MZ: Just ask.
MZ: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
MZ: People just submitted it.
MZ: I don't know why.
MZ: They "trust me"
MZ: Dumb fucks.
I actually still remember when my university was added to Facebook - I was studying/procrastinating for my final exams.
I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
So, the social platforms have failed historically because of engineering issues that their competitior excelled at.
Sorry for being so critical, but I would find it quite interesting if you had hard evidence to support a scaling law like n log(n) for the value of a social network.
That said, the argument and result is intentionally informal, and intended to be a better rule of thumb than Metcalfe's law. Which was itself even more informally reasoned. However its key flaw we explained with:
Metcalfe’s Law is intuitively appealing, since our personal estimate of the size of a network is based on the uptake of that network among friends and family. Our derived value also varies directly with that metric. We therefore see a linear relationship between the perceived size and value of that network.
That said, different social networks may well have different scaling laws. In fact I pointed out privately that eBay likely was a counter-example which is closer to Metcalfe's law for the simple reason that you derive value there from connections to random strangers. And indeed eBay successfully maintained a market leading position for a long time despite charging significantly higher fees than competitors like Amazon Marketplace.
And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too when the idea of having a high quality networked camera and fun filters with you all the time was revolutionary, and Instagram was the way to take advantage of it. Now that phone power, storage space, network bandwidth, and good editing software have made watchable short video easy to shoot, TikTok is that platform.
I don’t think chasing the current hot thing is necessarily a terrible idea but I think pivoting your app constantly to chase the hot thing is. “Be willing to cannibalize your user base” doesn’t mean “force new things on your user base”!
It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)
Also, Instagram adds value as an app that people truly enjoy from a consumption standpoint.
It’s not going anyway.
“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-an...
[2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/
(Facebook owns Instagram)
The lead reports show where they are coming from.
Overwhelmingly from Instagram. I think we got about 20% of leads from core Facebook and the rest from IG.
The core old timey Facebook is actually dying pretty quickly. All the traffic is going elsewhere.
And all the bugs on Facebook.com is not helping matters. Especially on desktop.
We really started to examine all of this and it’s startling the quick decline.
But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.
Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app)
A lot of the comments here about why TikTok does so much better don't mention that the person that opens TikTok is already committed to watching lots of short videos, whereas the person using Instagram still has options other than the short reels, diluting the things people are doing.