Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

https://www.axios.com/facebook-launches-its-tiktok-rival-instagram-reels-56460094-88df-4aa5-b6a1-39695c682508.html

by 0xedb • 6 years ago

417 332 6 years ago

axios.com

mothsonasloth• 6 years ago

Has anyone noticed the emergence of axios.com articles trending on HackerNews in the last week?

Is this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios?

themodelplumber• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what the cause is, but I could imagine that the interview kind of exploded their visibility, especially in the US.

exdsq• 6 years ago

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.

munchbunny2• 6 years ago

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.

zo1• 6 years ago

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.

adventured• 6 years ago

Axios has no paywall, which considerably bolsters the shareability as it pertains to HN.

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.

HumblyTossed• 6 years ago

Is this being engineered or is it because of the Trump interview on Axios?

Are these the only two possible reasons to choose from?

rvz• 6 years ago

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.

epistasis• 6 years ago

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.

Ensorceled• 6 years ago

I think you're actually just experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

circa• 6 years ago

Ahhh yes. More cringeworthy content for us all!

xvector• 6 years ago

Meh, comments like this are cringeworthy. Let people enjoy what they enjoy.

saos• 6 years ago

Ugh

dmitriid2• 6 years ago

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.

catalogia• 6 years ago

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.

0xffff2• 6 years ago

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.

dmitriid2• 6 years ago

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".

OzzyB• 6 years ago

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...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676

[1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

hart_russell• 6 years ago

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.

joering2• 6 years ago

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.

nsilvestri2• 6 years ago

Instagram didn't "win out" against Facebook. They fulfill two different roles with a few duplicated features.

dleslie• 6 years ago

What lesson would that be? Facebook is hugely successful.

mrkramer5• 6 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.

alangibson• 6 years ago

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.

keiferski• 6 years ago

Once upon a time it was quite elegant. Then, like everything Facebook acquires, it grew into a bloated "why not?" monster.

jcmontx• 6 years ago

rep for elegance

Back in 2013-2014 it was a quite simple to use and elegant app. Then Facebook happened.

kovvy• 6 years ago

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.

thekyle• 6 years ago

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.

k__• 6 years ago

"they just tack on the feature to one of their existing social products"

After the rise of Snapchat Facebook tacked on stories to FB, IG, and WA.

tsycho• 6 years ago

And even if they lose some users when they split out the feature to a separate app, they have still slowed down the growth of their competitor.

It's an ugly, but effective strategy.

Swizec• 6 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.

underwater• 6 years ago

This is the strategy Facebook did with Messenger. Absolutely everyone complained when they tried to spin it out.

alehul2• 6 years ago

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.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

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.

tanilama2• 6 years ago

TikTok however is the opposite of WeChat where the interface is dead simple and intuitive.

What is Reels immitating here?

echevil2• 6 years ago

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

Miner49er3• 6 years ago

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?

bobthepanda3• 6 years ago

To me WeChat has more in common with the old AOL or Yahoo web portals in a 2020 wrapping.

didip• 6 years ago

As an American who had to use WeChat for some stubborn friends...

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.

sjg0072• 6 years ago

I can’t use snap chat but apparently it’s very popular!

namelosw• 6 years ago

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.

whywhywhywhy2• 6 years ago

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.

throwaway1777• 6 years ago

IGTV content does show up in the feed also, which kinda proves your point that no one would watch it there.

subpixel2• 6 years ago

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.

Jimjamb98• 6 years ago

Stories are simply for things you want to be temporarily visible instead of permanently visible to your followers.

octernion• 6 years ago

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.

cwilkes• 6 years ago

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.

spike0213• 6 years ago

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...

I can't believe this wasn't on purpose...

harsh3195• 6 years ago

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.

jamestciv• 6 years ago

perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow?

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.

prgmatic• 6 years ago

I’ve used it for 8 years now and it’s fine, don’t think the UX is bad at all. Want to know for yourself? Go ask 10 non-developers.

WhyNotHugo• 6 years ago

Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app.

Wait, there's a separate app for IG messages? For iOS? Link? I can't find _any_ references to it.

ffpip• 6 years ago

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.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/threads-from-instagram/id14738...

sixhobbits• 6 years ago

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.

mc32• 6 years ago

Same here I understood it as sending insta reeling from the decision.

addicted• 6 years ago

That’s exactly how I read it as well until I noticed the upper case R.

samizdis• 6 years ago

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 ;-)

DrBazza2• 6 years ago

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.

wy352• 6 years ago

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.

DrBazza2• 6 years ago

You're right my post isn't that relevant.

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.

whalesalad• 6 years ago

Instagram is the beta test environment/battleground for Facebook.

identity0• 6 years ago

Haha no. Facebook is where successful instagram features go to die.

pletsch• 6 years ago

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.

notacoward• 6 years ago

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.

zackhsi• 6 years ago

How powerful is the video editing compared to TikTok?

nikofeyn2• 6 years ago

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.

linsomniac• 6 years ago

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.

snowwrestler• 6 years ago

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.

nikofeyn2• 6 years ago

just as a note, tiktok was not an entirely new service. they bought and then transformed musical.ly.

wy352• 6 years ago

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.

dilap• 6 years ago

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.

dimitrios12• 6 years ago

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?

robbyking• 6 years ago

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.

exolymph• 6 years ago

As an avid user of the product, I agree.

blisseyGo7• 6 years ago

I think people might find it interesting on how Twitter was formed:

Scandal and Betrayal: The Story of How Twitter Started

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8N0xN0ihMA

kristopolous• 6 years ago

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.

TruthSHIFT• 6 years ago

A crucial feature of new things is that they are often better. Not all new things beat incumbents. Only the good ones win.

look_lookatme• 6 years ago

It's easier when the incumbent shuts down before the competition even begins...

mrkramer5• 6 years ago

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.

asutekku2• 6 years ago

Tiktok didn’t really exists at the same timeline as Vine so I wouldn’t say Tiktok won against it.

jimbob453• 6 years ago

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.

abc-xyz3• 6 years ago

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.

basch• 6 years ago

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.

hn_check• 6 years ago

"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.

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

parliament324• 6 years ago

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).

rsa255193• 6 years ago

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.

ngold• 6 years ago

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.

throwaway5752• 6 years ago

How much money was Vine losing or making? I honestly am not aware of their unit economics prior to the shutdown.

bzb3• 6 years ago

You cannot believe that Twitter did something terribly stupid?

“Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” - Mark Zuckerberg

bobwernstein• 6 years ago

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.

adelpozo• 6 years ago

Couldn’t they just rebranded it? Like venmo:paypal?

yelloworangefog• 6 years ago

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.

fendy3002• 6 years ago

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".

jbay808• 6 years ago

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?

carlosdp2• 6 years ago

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.

TikTok has had AR filters for a long time now...

derivagral• 6 years ago

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?

chishaku• 6 years ago

The average Axios reader does not use TikTok and the average Axios reporter probably doesn't either.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

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.

Traster• 6 years ago

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.

tozeur• 6 years ago

Half the people writing articles about these apps have never actually used them.

distrill• 6 years ago

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.

carlosdp2• 6 years ago

They are comparing it to Reels, which also shows you content primarily not on your social graph.

xster• 6 years ago

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.

razster• 6 years ago

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.

Thorentis• 6 years ago

Probably because that's what the majority of the content on Instagram is. It's likely that content you enjoy hasnt been created yet.

jquery• 6 years ago

nothing but women jumping around

That’s basically how TikTok started.

whateveracct• 6 years ago

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.

bennesvig• 6 years ago

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.

surround• 6 years ago

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.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...

jug• 6 years ago

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...

kyawzazaw2• 6 years ago

people use it in my country. it's quite popular. But here facebook = internet.

blisseyGo7• 6 years ago

For me, I know majority of my younger friends use IG stories and have abandoned snapchat.

vitorgrs• 6 years ago

In Brazil, Instagram Stories basically killed Snapchat.

blisseyGo7• 6 years ago

slightly unrelated but does anyone else find TechCrunch navigation to be absolutely unbearable? Also hijacking the back button on my browser.

mrkramer5• 6 years ago

They should've chosen better name.

r00fus• 6 years ago

Instagram is gonna be constantly surprised and reeling from successive announcements.

euix2• 6 years ago

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.

zelphirkalt• 6 years ago

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?

euix2• 6 years ago

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.

reedwolf• 6 years ago

You wrote your comment on social media.

baby4• 6 years ago

This reads like a negligible anecdote

samcheng• 6 years ago

Comedian Jeff Wright had a great commentary recently on how Instagram has a history of copying upstart social networks (Vine, Snapchat, and now TikTok).

https://twitter.com/JeffRightNoww/status/1287842365126914048

(Coincidentally, I think Jeff Wright had his breakthrough TikTok...)

Firebrand• 6 years ago

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:

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?

bigpumpkin• 6 years ago

Yeah, I was trying it out too and found it confusing as well.

I think they are trying to make old users suddenly discover reels while flipping through photos, but it feels very messy.

reggieband• 6 years ago

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".

heyheyhey• 6 years ago

Official announcement: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-i...

ffggvv2• 6 years ago

why does everyone think they can beat tik tok just taking their existing content and changing the navigation to clone tik tok?

people use it for the content, not the navigation style

baby4• 6 years ago

That’s what they said about Snapchat

staycoolboy2• 6 years ago

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?

ffggvv2• 6 years ago

78% of internet users aged 18-24 use Snapchat

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/

plibither8• 6 years ago

This is it's worldwide launch. Reels was already launched in India a few weeks ago when the Indian government imposed a ban on TikTok.

sidcool• 6 years ago

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.

kashyapc• 6 years ago

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."

joemi• 6 years ago

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.

drusepth• 6 years ago

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.

Izkata2• 6 years ago

but I still just think about fishing reels every time I see it.

The goal is to hook you after all...

ClikeX5• 6 years ago

Instagram "Reel our users back in from Tik-Tok" didn't really roll from the tongue, I assume.

staycoolboy2• 6 years ago

How can there be room for so many social media apps? One option is that all of them carve up the social media demographic in such a way that they have enough users to be profitable, but no majority. Another outcome is that teens are fickle, but if the platforms move from content creators to individuals, then it is no longer a social media platform and just the new MTV(s). I have no idea how this is going to shake out and I am fascinated by it, despite HN being the only social media platform I use.

kart23• 6 years ago

I think influences, celebrities and other people that teens look up to have a massive effect on these platforms. Look at clothes, streetwear brands that celebrities wear instantly become popular and sell out. The purpose of social media is to interact with your friends but also see celebrities and their pages. Even if a platform is better or cooler than another, nobodys going to switch because none of your friends are on it and there's no point. But if your favorite artist and a couple of popular youtubers get on, you might make an account to see their content. And then you see that some of your friends have it, and start using it more. After a while, maybe people stopped posting on the old social media app and you delete it because the people you follow aren't active on it anymore.

praveen9920• 6 years ago

..popular karaoke app TikTok..

Never heard it that way.

parliament324• 6 years ago

The entire article is filled with things that are flat-out wrong, I'm not sure how this made it past an editor.

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

TikTok is all about showing you content tailored to you. Compare your TikTok feed to any of your friends' and it'll be super different.

Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos

TikTok's had this forever.

nilkn• 6 years ago

Reels isn’t going to compete with TikTok in any real way for a few simple reasons.

First and foremost, as a non-Instagram user, I flat-out can’t use it. A while back, when I was curious about TikTok, I downloaded it and was instantly swiping through a video feed that was already getting customized for me. I downloaded Instagram this morning and was presented with a wall to create an account. Nope.

Second, TikTok is new. Instagram is old. Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated.

parliament324• 6 years ago

People also want to use the apps that corporations haven't infiltrated yet. Notice how there's very little advertising / sponsored posts / product placement on TikTok. See: IG is basically the Home Shopping Network now, with an ad between every third post and sponsored products in every mainstream account's feed.

powerapple• 6 years ago

Lol. I use IG mainly for advertisings from local restaurants and hotels. It worked pretty well for me so far. I have discovered so many businesses.

rattray2• 6 years ago

Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated.

There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW.

I definitely agree that TikTok's no-login-wall NUX was wonderful. You can even watch on a laptop without logging in.

rsa255193• 6 years ago

There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW.

And the beauty of TikTok is that's okay. People over 30 can join the app without disrupting my feed of age-relevant content. This is unlike a lot of other social networks (e.g. Reddit) where content is shows from outside my social graph

jimbob453• 6 years ago

How long will that fly though? Won’t TikTok run into the issue of ensuring that kids must not see adult content?

BraveKenny• 6 years ago

A while back, when I was curious about TikTok, I downloaded it and was instantly swiping through a video feed that was already getting customized for me.

Has this been definitely proven though? I tried finding evidence of whether TikTok tailors content for unregistered users (based on their location/device for example), but so far, I could not find a page that would even clearly ask that question. Every article about the algorithm I have read only considers registered users...

tommoor• 6 years ago

Reels isn’t going to compete with TikTok in any real way for a few simple reasons. First and foremost, as a non-Instagram user, I flat-out can’t use it

Huh – Reels isn't going to compete because you need to download Instagram?

UberMouse• 6 years ago

I can attest it tailors content to at _least_ location. I installed TikTok for the first time yesterday and saw content local to my country (New Zealand) pretty soon, before I signed up.

seppin• 6 years ago

Account creation is so damn outdated. With device fingerprinting you don't need an account to know who is who, and with algorithms pinpointing interests you don't have to ask anything about age / sex / etc. You can figure it all out in a few sessions.

Apocryphon• 6 years ago

The Congressional antitrust hearings were a week ago.

RedditKon• 6 years ago

Which is probably why Zuk is doubling down on Reels instead of trying to buy TikTok - he know it'd never get approved.

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

How to appeal to Gen Z; name the thing after a form of video playback that was totally obsolete before any of them were born.

daenz• 6 years ago

People seem to underestimate how important a name can be. "Instagram Reels", "Reels", "IG Reels"... they have no buzz, they're clunky to say, and like you said, it already implies ancient uncool tech. The marketing people must have been phoning it in when they named this.

ttamslam• 6 years ago

I obviously don't speak a generation but I'm in the target demo and I like the name. "Did you see X's reel the other day?" to me feels better than "Did you see X's tiktok the other day?"

arkitaip• 6 years ago

The people who launched Reels are probably in their 30s and 40s and working against serious organizational biases that prevent them from innovating. So not surprised that they named this Reels.

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

I'm in my mid-30s, I still think Reels sounds... very old-fashioned.

tengbretson• 6 years ago

Distribution on film was still incredibly popular up until 2012/2013.

rjkennedy98• 6 years ago

Can't tell if the OP is being sarcastic. Just want to point out that "Tik Tok" is the sound an analog clock makes - which is also obsolete technology - except for the odd grandfather clock.

rampant_ai• 6 years ago

It's closer to the sound of a metronome, which is pretty fitting and likely where the name originated.

ClikeX5• 6 years ago

People are still more likely to come across a ticking clock than a film reel.

Most places I go to will still have an analog clock in multiple rooms.

thehappypm• 6 years ago

Just like the tick-tock of a mechanical clock.

tqwhite• 6 years ago

I wonder if Zuck included the Suppress Biden Tags feature?

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/instagram-relat...

chessmango• 6 years ago

"Instagram Reels" in this headline reads like present simple tense. But then you realize that Instagram isn't a competitor to Facebook, and well...

Touche2• 6 years ago

These types of articles are so frustrating and show why media is failing so badly.

This is an article about a product launch that:

* Barely talks about the product at all.

* No demos of what the product does.

* Not even a single picture of what the product looks like.

* Does not link to the actual product's page.

* Very few links at all, and mostly to their own pages.

* Is 50% about the competitor's legal/political issues.

* IS 50% about the parent company's strategy in launching the product.

I don't understand why there can't be 2 articles here:

* Information about the product launch.

* An opinion article about Facebook strategy vs. Microsoft TikTok Trump.

I'm pretty sure everyone just skims these articles because they are so uninformative. Can I be the only person who feels this way?

chris_va• 6 years ago

This reads to me like it was written by Facebook PR (indirectly) via a press packet.

A lot of "news" articles are just PR departments lobbying journalists. The journalist tweaks stuff slightly, then dumps it over the wall. This sort of thing is very cheap to produce. And, to be fair, it isn't actually new. The more useful/novel/investigative content has slowly declined, so this is all that's left.

There just isn't any money in writing news. Newspapers were never paid for news content, but rather delivering ads to everyone's doorstep daily. E.g. subscription revenue was much less than ad revenue, to the point that it was never clear to me why subscription prices were non-zero (though they were usually separate departments with their own P&L, so it's probably just historical).

There are better ways to find classifieds, job listings, and brand advertising these days... So now we have this junk. If one could find a way of financially or otherwise incentivizing real journalism, you'd be a folk hero.

Touche2• 6 years ago

I'm not expecting investigative journalism here. I just expect the article about a product launch to be mostly about the product being launched. Like pull out your phone install the app and take a screenshot or two. List what it does and how it works.

Save the corporate strategery and political intrigue stuff for another article.

tus88• 6 years ago

That's a reel bad name.

beepboopbeep• 6 years ago

I can't help but feel that zuckerberg has unduly influenced the president to ban tiktok in order for them to further corner the social media market.

This feels wrong.

jimmaswell• 6 years ago

Not a catchy name at all. I'd forecast failure on that alone.

cboornaz17• 6 years ago

Jumped on my Instagram explore page to see what Reels actually looks like since the article doesn’t show any screenshots..

Of the first three posts I saw, two of them were cross posted from TikTok. Not that it’s new to see social media content posted to another app, but is there anything to be said for the fact that Facebook can now monetize TikToks in another fashion?

Seems like even if they don’t win in terms of creators moving platforms, it would still be in a creator’s best interest to post a successful TikTok again as a Reel.

ogre_codes2• 6 years ago

It seems like Instagram is Facebook's anti-competitive tool. Whenever some new social network crops up, Facebook bolts on a clone to Instagram. Eventually it's going to be such a bloated mess it's going to cease being useful to anyone.

holler• 6 years ago

Might simply be due to IG's popularity vs Blue app... If there's ever an exodus from IG I don't know what they'll do (probably try to buy the other company).

ClikeX5• 6 years ago

Is going to be?

Instagram already lost me a while ago. It started to hamfist Snapchat stories in there. I also believe they tried to force in Facebook Messenger features at some point.

It also totally ruined any proper disoverability. You like one Comic Book post and suddenly you only get stupid text only posts about superhero facts. With no way to manually configure your interests.

And to make things worse, my personal feed got messed up because they thought it was best to no longer show the feed chronologically. Because hiding new posts lower in the feed, and keep showing me week-old posts on top was obviously a good idea.

All I want is sharing pictures I took with my friends, while also looking at photography from random people.

ogre_codes2• 6 years ago

All I want is sharing pictures I took with my friends, while also looking at photography from random people.

Sharing pics & stories with friends/ family was why I started using FB years ago. I think Instagram became popular because FB had become a polluted mess before young people even had a chance to try it. Older people just stuck around out of habit.

I never liked IG because generally my FB posts and images are hosted on my blog first and crossposted, something you can't do on IG.

Fully agree that IG is already a mess. But people haven't really abandoned it yet in numbers. They just stopped attracting new people.

collegeburner• 6 years ago

Instagram has a real shot at out-doing ticktock here. It's got much better penetration among youth and can take serious advantage of that. Ticktock is basically a subculture, used by the same people that used vsco a few years ago. Just my two cents.

rconti• 6 years ago

I was going to say "I can't wait to have a second row of crap across the top of my Instagram feed that I don't care about" ... and I open the IG app, and now "stories" takes up two rows. haha.

fatjokes• 6 years ago

Facebook launches its TikTok clone, Instagram Reels

FTFY.

I'm being facetious of course. The real clone here is being done by the US gov't, who is copying the Chinese playbook: keep out a foreign company by political means, thus encouraging local competitors.

I guess it's really true that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

l33tbro• 6 years ago

keep out a foreign company by political means, thus encouraging the domestic tech oligopoly.

FTFY ;)

shuringai• 6 years ago

wow we can finally get back to being spied on by the US as usual instead of china!

magic7s• 6 years ago

I have a hunch that TikTok fakes the amount of likes that users post. I’ve heard people say their first post goes viral. It’s an interesting strategy. Young person posts a TikTok, “get famous”, keeps posting.

snazz3• 6 years ago

It could also be that they give more prominence to people's first or second posts to get them off the ground. That effect doesn't have to be caused by artificial like inflation.

corford• 6 years ago

I don't think it's faking. That behaviour sounds broadly inline with https://www.veed.io/grow/reverse-engineering-how-tiktok-algo...

blisseyGo7• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

nikolay• 6 years ago

What a huge favor to Microsoft, which now can acquire TikTok for a lot less!

verst• 6 years ago

Today I tried posting a Reel. This wasn't intuitive as the flow for doing this is similar to creating a Story. When selecting an existing video as a reel I do not have a way to edit it or add overlays and the total reel duration is 15 seconds vs 60 on TikTok.

Discovering reels is tricky also. I have to go to search and click on the word reels within the random suggested reel at the top.

What is more - I want reels to be separate from whom I follow on Instagram. I want to follow certain content creators for their reels, but do not want to see their stories or photo stream. I also don't want them to show up as people I follow on my main Instagram profile.

The TikTok features for creating content, discovering it, replying to it (remix / duet etc) and just the responsiveness of the UI make it much more fun and pleasant to use.

Reels does not meaningfully compete with TikTok. It will only appeal to some of the existing user base, but not attract TikTok users.

FYI I'm 34. I post music, running, travel and random adventure clips to Instagram, TikTok and other places.

f1ying_1otus• 6 years ago

"log in with Tik Tok" will be their aim. They'll push their decentralized identity platform with this and advertise that your data is safe and you aren't being tracked.

chris_wot• 6 years ago

I read this as "Instagram reels" from the fact that Facebook launched a rival...

holografix• 6 years ago

Instagram is what it always was for Facebook: a clear sign of the decline of Facebook’s original product into irrelevance while it slowly mutates into infinite town square forums trapped in valley of echoing stupidity and a less anonymous craigslist/gumtree. The Instagram acquisition was the first clear sign Facebook never could innovate it could only steal and perfect existing ideas. Now they decided that outright copying is cheaper than buying, so they copy Snapchat and now TikTok.

Panini_Jones3• 6 years ago

Facebook came out with the Oculus Quest last year which is hugely innovative.

ngokevin• 6 years ago

You could say that evolved out of the "buying" era as the above commenter said, as Oculus was an acquisition.

ClikeX5• 6 years ago

Apart from Quest being a standalone device, it was just an iteration on the original Rift. And it was another company they bought, and I'd be more inclined to give credits to the Occulus team than to Facebook.

throwaway4715• 6 years ago

This strategy has made Apple very successful

switch11• 6 years ago

hats off to Facebook for being absolutely shameless and zero ethics

they don't even pretend to be honest (unlike Google) and it's a miracle so far they haven't had to pay damages for all the 'inspiration' they have found from other people's products

wmeredith2• 6 years ago

I'm sure 'Zuck is very sorry.

wmeredith2• 6 years ago

For reference: https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...

Mupuff• 6 years ago

I wonder if they waited for after the congress testimony to launch this. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg was questioned[1] about this strategy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyI3ixI1xSk

esotericsean• 6 years ago

I truly hate that Instagram is owned by Facebook. It's genuinely the best, most positive social media platform that I've been a part of. I've made genuine friends and found an amazing community in my niche.

Please don't destroy it, Facebook.

Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

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