Same probably goes for slot machines if you strip them of all the bright, flashy colours and comforting sounds and make it a black metal box, with only a number display.
Its almost like... it was inherently designed to be as addictive as possible?
I hope the point is bigger than a nit to pick, but a plain slot machine is still bad. Social media used to be good or at least interesting in a good way. Maybe it can be again.
It can be good in the way that meals with green vegetables aren't consumed as voraciously as cheeseburgers and fries. It depends on the quality of what's in the feed.
Snarky reaction aside, and actually reading the article, it says that the problem is something along the lines of "we incentivized and rewarded business accounts to post large volumes, so now if you switch to chronological order you will see more of these posts which reduces user satisfaction".
Well, that just means that the company will have to adapt before their users start unfollowing spammy accounts and the whole "influencer" business takes a hit. Though tbh, not sure how much of a hit it could take but hey, when instagram says engagement falls, I allow myself to feel optimistic for a brief moment.
I think the single best change Instagram done in a decade is the "ad break" that happens once you've scrolled through enough posts, which stops you for N seconds to stare at some random ad. I think I can scroll through 2-3 posts before my scrolling gets locked, and I close the app, and now I barely scroll Instagram at all anymore. Thank you Instagram!
The problem is that they measure this, and if it's true for many they will just change it until they find the right way to keep you there.
It's a giant machine dedicated to turn users into addicts. Regulation (sad) and most of all education is the only things that I believe can help here.
Tax them -> spend in education.... not that I think it will happen though! :)
That's me with old.reddit .com, best change they ever made was starting to block that. I haven't been on reddit in over a month and have, this may or may not be related, felt a lot less depressed and stressed
I don't really see people using Instagram anymore, it seems like it's mostly turned into a static photo album. For example, I've seen people use Instagram links on dating profiles. For more, see IG @...
Plugging the thing that finally got me off IG. Now if I need to see something I use the browser and it’s so terrible that I get pissed trying to scroll after I saw what I opened the page for.
Bluesky likely knows this problem well. The pro is that I never find myself stuck there. The con is that I just end up somewhere else (including this orange website). Time to ctrl-w.
I don't know what the right balance is, but there should be some sort of friction. Feeds shouldn't be infinitely scrollable, for instance, and users could be made explicitly aware of how much time they're spending.
Some people think this should all fall back on personal responsibility, but the way I see it, introducing highly addictive algorithms should've been regulated the same way adding addictive chemicals to food is.
Folks would just continue on page 2, like in the good old days! Pls take that with a pinch of salt.
There is just so much that can be banned and infinite scroll isn’t one of those things. After all, what kind of nanny state do we want and after how much content does the scroll stop?
The symptoms shouldn’t be addressed, the root cause of why folks feel they need to infinitely scroll through content that is probably providing them psychologically no benefits.
Monkeys and colourful marbles comes to mind, although I’m sure the monkeys lose interest after a while.
You know it would happen if they could get away with it. It would start with a study about how cocaine microdosing prevents Alzheimer or heart attacks.
I don't get how instagram is as popular as it is. I made an account last week to try to look for pictures from an event I recently attended.
First I was incredibly surprised and frustrated that their search functionality is effectively nonexistent, then, when I gave up and scrolled, if I tapped on a post to look closer, I had to deal with it interrupting whatever I was listening to.
Then, cherry on top of the shit cake, they suspended my account unless I did some video ID process. Nope, not happening.
Instagram felt like a more invasive and hostile user experience than any social media I've used before.
I think Instagram has gotten quite a bit worse over the past few years. I really only want to see posts from people I follow and they've made that more difficult.
The service that totally baffles me is Tik Tok. I know it's supposed to learn what you like, but it has never really surfaced anything of interest to me. It might even be worse than YouTube for me.
My ideal Instagram algorithm would be to show me only the people I follow, in chronological order. Then show me a marker that I'm at the end of my feed and at that point they can offer me their feed.
> My ideal Instagram algorithm would be to show me only the people I follow, in chronological order. Then show me a marker that I'm at the end of my feed and at that point they can offer me their feed.
I am working on a new social media. I am curious about this point. How would you discover new people to follow initially?
And, is a separate explore page of people you don't follow okay?
The people I follow are mostly people I actually know along with a couple of musicians whose work I'm interested in.
Discovery isn't something that I've ever really thought about because it's not a problem I have. The initial person I followed was a relative. By the end of the first year I probably was only following four or five people. Today (15 years later) I think the number is less than twenty.
A separate explore page is fine. I'd probably open it once to see what it was and then close it. Those types of things are generally made to serve the interests of the service and not the user.
I think social media is generally a terrible idea. I am a fan though of a social network.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 3.0 ms ] threadIts almost like... it was inherently designed to be as addictive as possible?
Snarky reaction aside, and actually reading the article, it says that the problem is something along the lines of "we incentivized and rewarded business accounts to post large volumes, so now if you switch to chronological order you will see more of these posts which reduces user satisfaction".
Well, that just means that the company will have to adapt before their users start unfollowing spammy accounts and the whole "influencer" business takes a hit. Though tbh, not sure how much of a hit it could take but hey, when instagram says engagement falls, I allow myself to feel optimistic for a brief moment.
Tax them -> spend in education.... not that I think it will happen though! :)
Plugging the thing that finally got me off IG. Now if I need to see something I use the browser and it’s so terrible that I get pissed trying to scroll after I saw what I opened the page for.
Some people think this should all fall back on personal responsibility, but the way I see it, introducing highly addictive algorithms should've been regulated the same way adding addictive chemicals to food is.
Folks would just continue on page 2, like in the good old days! Pls take that with a pinch of salt.
There is just so much that can be banned and infinite scroll isn’t one of those things. After all, what kind of nanny state do we want and after how much content does the scroll stop?
The symptoms shouldn’t be addressed, the root cause of why folks feel they need to infinitely scroll through content that is probably providing them psychologically no benefits.
Monkeys and colourful marbles comes to mind, although I’m sure the monkeys lose interest after a while.
2 weeks later
"We are please to announce the acquisition of triple nicotine packets that show incredible product innovation."
First I was incredibly surprised and frustrated that their search functionality is effectively nonexistent, then, when I gave up and scrolled, if I tapped on a post to look closer, I had to deal with it interrupting whatever I was listening to.
Then, cherry on top of the shit cake, they suspended my account unless I did some video ID process. Nope, not happening.
Instagram felt like a more invasive and hostile user experience than any social media I've used before.
The service that totally baffles me is Tik Tok. I know it's supposed to learn what you like, but it has never really surfaced anything of interest to me. It might even be worse than YouTube for me.
My ideal Instagram algorithm would be to show me only the people I follow, in chronological order. Then show me a marker that I'm at the end of my feed and at that point they can offer me their feed.
I am working on a new social media. I am curious about this point. How would you discover new people to follow initially?
And, is a separate explore page of people you don't follow okay?
Discovery isn't something that I've ever really thought about because it's not a problem I have. The initial person I followed was a relative. By the end of the first year I probably was only following four or five people. Today (15 years later) I think the number is less than twenty.
A separate explore page is fine. I'd probably open it once to see what it was and then close it. Those types of things are generally made to serve the interests of the service and not the user.
I think social media is generally a terrible idea. I am a fan though of a social network.
And what is the effect of this on the user?
Oh right, you don't care.
For me this guy is directly repsonsible of all the negative side effects of this attention grabbing engangement BS and he should go to jail for that.
Engagement ~= addiction. Just a more euphemistic framing.
Just one example. It's odd to me that people are willing to put their own byline on obvious slop.
You can't currently turn off the algorithm in Instagram.
This person is talking nonsense.