Instagram Is Over

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/instagram-tiktok-twitter-social-media-competition/672305/

by dailo10 • 4 years ago

193 220 4 years ago

theatlantic.com

jumpkick• 4 years ago

I wonder if there’s a market for small app, limited in scope, knock off of the original Instagram. $1/month.

pipeline_peak• 4 years ago

I’m sure there’s many but in the world of social media, content is key and users are what make that happen.

I tried using Peer Tube recently, felt like I was on 2005 YouTube...absolute no man’s land

BbzzbB2• 4 years ago

There are reasons why IG has 2B people, part of which is not charging $1/month.

rglullis6• 4 years ago

There are many email providers who are quite profitable by charging just that and are not afraid of Gmail's absolute dominance.

MattDemers• 4 years ago

You end up having a cyclical problem, though:

No one uses it because no one posts > No one posts because they don't expect interaction > No one expects interaction because no one uses it

And then brands or influencers don't join because there's no potential to make money.

Part of the history of these big incumbents is that people were discovering a more user-friendly way to use the web through them; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube all were "Hey, we can now do something we could do before, much easier, in a more accessible way that I can show to my normie friends/my parents."

Alternatives that DO come up, like 500px or Vimeo, end up needing to become more for enthusiasts (people who care about fidelity, rather than novelty), turning away normies in the process. That's fine for them, as long as their goal isn't to "be an alternative YouTube/Flickr."

rglullis6• 4 years ago

https://pixelfed.org.

Tell me you are willing to pay $1/month, and I will stop postponing it and finally add it to https://communick.com

defulmere• 4 years ago

Pixelfed is the droid you're looking for. You can find a server to join at https://pixelfed.org and then support the project via Patreon for $1/month (or more).

nowherebeen3• 4 years ago

Social products all have a lifetime value and it’s incredibly short. The same thing will also happen to TikTok one day. I suspect we will learn in the coming decades that social media companies are very profitable in the short term, but not so in the long term, say 20 years, unless the keep introducing new viral social products.

yogthos• 4 years ago

This is a problem for commercial social media companies. Companies need to make profit to operate, and once they stop being able to show growth then investments start to dry up. There is also no clear revenue model aside from ads and mining of user data.

The situation is quite different in open source world. The only factors that matter for an open source platform are having enough people who are willing to develop it, run servers, and post content. Once the platform reaches enough users to be sustainable then it can exist indefinitely without need for growth or any significant funding.

We can look at Mastodon as a case study. It builds on top of all the work done by GNU Social and the OStatus protocol. GNU Social languished in obscurity for many years, but Mastodon was able to build on this work and create a much larger social network. Now, there's a whole federation of different platforms using ActivityPub protocol that grew out of OStatus. Fediverse will likely outlive every single commercial social media platform in existence today.

dopeboy4• 4 years ago

I think this is a lazy conclusion and needs more depth. What’s huge - seismic really - is that people actually prefer to know more about strangers than friends. On average, these strangers tend to be personalities and as a result are more entertaining / interesting / provocative than my typical friend. Combine this with the average person posting less about their life and you end up with a serious problem.

Twitter first rode this trend, but TikTok really exploited it specifically with the medium of video and their algorithm to serve content.

Networks effects were once seen as the ultimate moat and one reason why FB could never be taken down. But it turns out if the content people “trade” on their “marketplace” is poor, all the network effects in the world won’t save you.

bg24• 4 years ago

Why bother building a network when the whole world can be your network.

nowherebeen3• 4 years ago

What you are describing is the broadcast model. Instagram is moving towards that model to compete with TikTok but that is exactly why people stopped using it because it’s no longer the Instagram they were using.

Influencers (aka personalities) are only entertaining for a short period of time. They have constantly churn out new content to keep engaging users. It is because user don’t know them and are less attached.

Therefore as long as TikTok has influencers that can continue to make new content, it will keep attracting new users. But I suspect that this is also not long term sustainable. People, both influencers and users, will get burned out eventually.

Your argument that network model dies because of broadcast model is just one part. My argument still stands that eventually people will get tired of a social media product and move on to the next ones.

Not sure how my observations are lazy though considering your does not provide anymore insight that others didn’t already know… it’s already been reported on Rolling Stone, Venture Beat, etc back in July. Aren’t you just regurgitating their idea with offhand keywords?

babyshake• 4 years ago

It would be interesting to see a major player in the space really embracing the fashion and seasonality of their products and succeeding with that strategy.

specialist2• 4 years ago

Like the CPG, dating, porn, gaming, and clothing industries?

Some categories of brands can be long lived. Coca Cola and Disney.

Some categories of brands are mayflies. Pop music, TV, fast fashion.

My hunch is the average lifecycle of social media brands and MMORPG properties are roughly the same. Say 5-10 years?

UweSchmidt• 4 years ago

I think it's the opposite: lifetimes for well-established social products are getting longer. People left digg for reddit because of a redesign, people stay on Twitter despite an ideologic shift from left to right! Nerds switch platforms over minor perceived slights and switch Linux distributions over license-philosophies or systemd-controversies; normies stay with the herd, with the audience, with the likes and clicks.

yamrzou• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/Ujltn

x86_64Ubuntu• 4 years ago

I don't know if IG is dead, but that Reels nonsense was an absolute fiasco. They kept showing me reels that were nonsensical and were only designed to lead engagement stats from questions of "what is the person trying to do here". Not to mention, the comments on many of these useless vids were always in Turkish. I don't speak Turkish, I've never been to Turkey, yet comments on videos were always in Turkish.

epolanski• 4 years ago

I know plenty of friends who can spend hours on reels everyday, my SO is an example, but most of my female friends are the same.

I understand that modern IG may not be the greatest, but engagement wise their choices, at least for the 25+ tier, have paid off imho.

Kiro2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I can attest to that. I've went from barely using Instagram to spending a lot of time on it.

viburnum3• 4 years ago

I get the baffling Turkish videos too. It’s a shame, instagram used to show me landscape architecture photos that I was genuinely interested in. And it doesn’t matter how much I flag it as not interesting, the random videos never stop.

Kiro2• 4 years ago

I don't think it's a fiasco. I think Reels are better than TikTok.

kylehotchkiss• 4 years ago

I get a lot of Turkish construction videos, and even more strangely, a lot of Turkish bus driver videos. No idea how I ended up in that cohort ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

whywhywhywhy• 4 years ago

I clicked on some sort of Turkish meat sandwich video once and now get at least a handful of videos showing the same sandwich being made a week.

pelasaco4• 4 years ago

I hope not. I use it as a way to save my moments with my family, in the expectation that It will survive some good years, and therefore my kids can then watch the pics, videos, comments and get a better picture (pun intended) of the context of the photos. Much better than have it in a disk (if its survive) or printed.

ncr100• 4 years ago

This situation is increasingly a concern for me too, and I think replication and shared data ownership is the solution.

Like everyone you care about having a copy of your data, and the copy always being up to date, perhaps encrypted so only those family you want to consume the content have access to those pictures too via user control.

Anyhow it's sad that Facebook has so much of my family's lives hostage... Only there can I see what's up.

I wish I could see a 'family' feed.

rglullis6• 4 years ago

If you don't care at all about popular figures and just want to share content with people you actually know, https://movim.eu would be a much better alternative.

pelasaco4• 4 years ago

Yes, well i just have it private, i just have the real close friends and family.. thats my message in a bottle to the future.. I hope it reaches the shore, someday.

pelasaco4• 4 years ago

Anyhow it's sad that Facebook has so much of my family's lives hostage... Only there can I see what's up.

I'm not the social media kind of people, but I have some friends and family members, that my last words were through facebook. So as a communication tool, I see its value. Said that, I don't have the app installed anywhere. Just messages notifications via email.

standardUser3• 4 years ago

Instagram has functionality to download all of your content, including archived stories.

pelasaco4• 4 years ago

interesting, I didn't know that.

DanCarvajal• 4 years ago

It's because these apps are longer social in the original sense of social media. Most of my family's sharing of what would have been Instagram or Facebook posts are now in a WhatsApp group I admin. Sure I would have loved to get everyone onto Signal instead but the end result has been much better experience for us.

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Group chats are wonderful for two very basic, core reasons: chronological and no ads.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

And for larger groups Discord is not horrible alternative. Just need to give up on tracking everything, but it is very good platform to share and momentarily discuss interesting things.

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

When Facebook bought it, they prioritized growth over the product itself. This kills the product.

dmje• 4 years ago

Eldest son (17) and all his mates use it - very rarely do they post publicly, it's purely for messaging. I've never been sure why, there's plenty enough alternatives, but that's how it is for him and his cohort.

dmix• 4 years ago

It’s used heavily in dating these days. We use instagram as a messenger because that’s what everyone has and it’s socially easier to ask a new person for the instagram rather than their phone number.

Its predictable and not entirely private like a close friend group chat on iMessage or WhatsApp. Plus of course the way it integrates with feeds of photo/videos you’re already looking at casually.

The same way FB used to be.

isametry3• 4 years ago

If data plans weren't tied to them, Gen Z probably wouldn't have phone numbers at all anymore. (Well, at least in those parts of the world where a data reception no slower than 3G is ubiquitous.)

If you think about it, the whole concept really does stick out nowadays. The idea of this unique, static (or at least not easily changeable), non-descript identifier tied only to you and your physical device is very much a product of its time.

Phone numbers only continue to exist by momentum – if a similar thing were to be implemented today, it would never catch on so universally.

dugmartin• 4 years ago

I’m pretty sure your son and his mates all have finstas and post a lot - you are just not seeing it (source: having two teenage daughters)

Vespasian• 4 years ago

Not OP, but going by pesonal experience way back in days of original facebook days a lot of people never posted that much and mainly consumed as soon as it was possible.

Even before that on forums etc. there were many more lurkers than posters.

17 year old me didn't wanted to be compared to all the others "perfect" lives.

Maybe I'm naive but I bet that hasn't fundamentally changed.

throwaway823885• 4 years ago

I’m far from bullish on meta long-term, but reporting like this would have you believe that nobody uses Facebook, and that Instagram is soon to share its fate. Optimists that they are, tech reporters overweight growth to absurd extremes. Maybe reporting on youth trends brings out the insecurities in all of us—you’d rather not look clueless in front of your two cool friends in their early 20s than the 2 billion or so Facebook MAUs.

TikTok is a platform with huge growth potential. IG is perceptibly declining. But Facebook has proven itself fairly durable, mostly to people outside tech and media bubbles. It’d be wise to not call it over just yet.

nightski• 4 years ago

It takes a second to open an app, become a MAU, and then close it in disinterest. I'll admit this is my relationship with Facebook. I never see anything on there I am remotely interested in. Just old relatives spewing nonsense. But I guess I count as one of those 2 billion MAUs. I wonder how many are in the same spot.

throwaway823885• 4 years ago

I’d bet a solid majority, like it is on any social platform. Most users don’t post or engage.

Biggest predictor for Facebook and IG use among my sample of friends is whether they’re married and have families, or in many cases, pets. In my sample, many own homes or property. Not where the growth is, but not worthless from a revenue standpoint.

seydor2• 4 years ago

You keep opening it though

akeck• 4 years ago

Myself and other folks in my friend group are MAU in that we use FB about once a month, maybe once every two months. My IG use became the same after the recent feed changes. Using either platform now feels like work and I have enough work to do already.

pfortuny• 4 years ago

All of us tend to forget that each year there is a whole cohort of people getting a new phone and using fb, instagram, twitter, whatever for the first time.

joshenberg• 4 years ago

Durable isn't a great word for what Facebook has become. It's been LinkedIn-ified - the entire notifications category is filled with useless recommendations and suggestions rather than meaningful updates from connections. And they still put notification dots up for it. Even if there's an opt out option and I could 'filter that' I haven't seen anything else relevant in 1+ year.

throwaway823885• 4 years ago

That sounds like a bad experience, but it’s not universal. It’s challenging to understand a platform from our individual vantage points (without access to internal dashboards), particularly on a network with between 2–3 billion MAUs. And if your personal interests are elsewhere, and your generational cohort is underrepresented. I’m an ‘elder millennial’ who got Facebook when it was still only for edu domains, and I’ve grown older with the service. I just briefly checked in with mine and within the last 24 hours I can see at least a dozen updates (all with decent engagement) from family and friends, some distant and others close. Babies being born, kids doing kid stuff, holiday posts. Pretty typical, particularly at this time of year. All that is to say, it’s all a function of your real world network. If I were the age I was when I started using Facebook, I’d probably find it desolate and boring, too.

But I would say ‘fairly durable’ is an apt description of an 18 year old service still operating at its scale. Exciting, maybe less than it once was. But fairly durable, certainly.

AJ007• 4 years ago

Does it? Back in 2021 TikTok was averaging more hours of viewing per month than Youtube (in the US.)

dopeboy4• 4 years ago

Disagree on Facebook being enduring; agreed on TikTok.

The underlying thesis behind FB - that people want to connect with people that they know - is eroding.

barnabee• 4 years ago

Instagram as a social network sucks but I like sharing my photos with people who are already my friends (private account), and seeing their photos too.

rpxio• 4 years ago

my close friends and family have moved to the app Locket for sharing photos. much more direct and less "social" features (likes, follows, reels) that i don't care about.

rndgermandude• 4 years ago

In my German circles, that spot has been covered by whatsapp for a long while now. It never has been instagram or anything else really. For me it went from studivz (long defunct German "facebook" for university students, didn't last long), via facebook (for a short while, and due to lack of alternatives) straight to whatsapp, and has stayed there ever since, with the exception of some photography interested people sharing larger sets of photos on flickr at times, and some dating/sexting happening on snap (but most of that still was/is on whatsapp). Instagram was always understood as a place where you go if you want to see celebs, influencers and the "wannabes".

Granted, I am a bit older, a millennial (as much as it hurts me to admit) and an older one at that, but I regularly take the tram in my city at times when all the teenagers are going to school or coming from school, and you can see a damn lot of whatsapp on all those phone screens, a lot of tiktok, and a good amount of discord.

prpl3• 4 years ago

Instagram was over when all the “kids” were on Snapchat, except it wasn’t.

Maybe it is, but it will be a death by 500 million cuts, not a max exodus. There is no clear successor.

coldtea• 4 years ago

There is no clear successor.

Successor to what? As if it serves some purpose? This is like wondering what will "successfully replace" a tumor that's to be removed...

(And, yes, you can have millions of users without service a purpose, at least not any useful one. All kinds of crap has).

warkanlock• 4 years ago

This is one of the biggest jibes I have ever read, given that Meta's MAU is the highest of all time (2.9b, if I remember correctly)

Instagram it's not over, and I bet will win the battle against TikTok

jibe2• 4 years ago

Jibe?

chihuahua• 4 years ago

Jibe

(verb): change course by swinging a fore-and-aft sail across a following wind.

(noun): an act or instance of jibing.

GP believes that the Atlantic article constitutes an instance of changing course by swinging a sail across a following wind, presumably metaphorically.

pixl976• 4 years ago

MAU doesn't mean much if they are losing users in primary markets and new users are from places where the ads don't pay.

raldi• 4 years ago

Instagram used to be about seeing what my friends were up to; now it’s all my friends resharing made-for-IG takes and re-re-re-re-re-sharing group photos I’ve already seen seven times.

I want an “OC Only” toggle.

Edit: And the above was referring only to Stories. I haven’t looked at the feed regularly in over a year.

itake• 4 years ago

Walking through the mall yesterday, I was shocked to see 5+ adults watch FB Reels / IG / TikTok. I think FB might be right about video being the future.

mkl95• 4 years ago

Instagram is "transitional" technology. It peaked at a time when traditional social networks had started their slow decline, and things like Snapchat and TikTok were gaining some popularity. These days it's a bit too open for traditional users, and a bit too boring for the average TikTok user. It will always fill a niche, but it will inevitably shrink by at least an order of magnitude.

viburnum3• 4 years ago

“In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever”

This was so ridiculously judgmental that I couldn’t keep reading.

0_____0• 4 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, it's not the hat's fault.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

found the fedora-wearer

isametry3• 4 years ago

There are currently two comments in this thread reacting defensively to that fedora mention – which is two more than I would've preferred there to be.

viburnum3• 4 years ago

It’s not the fedora, it’s the utter shallowness of it

bsnnkv• 4 years ago

My anecdata is that all IG is really used for anymore is messaging due to inertia and cross-posting content from other platforms. Very little original user generated content.

Fundamentally, these old apps that are built on the "create an account and manually follow users" model cannot compete with TikTok right now, and I don't think they'll be able to change to be competitive with TikTok in the future.

coolbreezetft22• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm ignorant of what TikTok is but it seems to be mostly about video sharing and less about "social networking" with friends and family??

I also think TikTok has serious risks going forward re Chinese government. Already a lot of grumbling from lawmakers in US about banning it as CCP growing more belligerent in recent years whereas Facebook products aren't at all influenced by it.

chrischen3• 4 years ago

Tiktok is short addictive videos from randos.

Youtube is long addictive videos.

Instagram and facebook is still primarily focused on content from people you know, though they are also trying to copy some of TikTok’s randos content via the Reels feature.

At the end of the day they just want to get attention by giving content, whether using friends or essentially crowdsourcing.

I prefer Netflix, because I’m paying them and they are not just manipulating me to show ads.

slowmovintarget• 4 years ago

This reminds me of a related article discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32482523

The Three Trends:

1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR

2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate

3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay

TikTok is at the video/recommend/swipe stage.

api• 4 years ago

The trend in social media for years has been away from social and toward just addictive content and finding the best way to crowdsource that content. The purpose is becoming simply to get you to spend as much time as possible staring at the phone to sell ads, and nothing more.

I predict the next advancement will be pure AI generated content, just a continuous adversarial attack on the human brain programmed to maximize viewing time for each individual. This could be packaged as things like virtual friends (Replika) or games with constantly evolving game play punctuated with ads or even as something that looks like TikTok.

Pure refined 200 proof addictive emptiness is the logical apex of “free” mass media. We will look back on TV and early generation social media as high culture compared to what’s coming.

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

I prefer Netflix, because I’m paying them and they are not just manipulating me to show ads

Sorry to break it to you but Netflix is absolutely manipulating their audience in trying to convince everyone to watch Netflix productions.

When Netflix came into the market they had a unique platform and were burning money to get good content in. Now studios realized there is money in streaming and are squeezing Netflix prices.

Making their own productions means it is all vertical for them, less risk and more profitable.

By the end of it you're stuck watching something, just not exactly what you wanted in the first place.

jsemrau2• 4 years ago

In my eyes, TikTok is a social entertainment app where simple user-generated content is created with the purpose to provide enjoyment. It's not focused on the needs of other users, but entirely about one's own needs. Hence, I call this new version of social Eigensocial.

kodisha2• 4 years ago

I think it's safe to assume that it's purpose is to gather data.

haunter• 4 years ago

The Atlantic is more over than IG

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

And yet, here we are commenting on an Atlantic article and not an Instagram post.

daveevad• 4 years ago

FWIW (not much) - I've never used IG or read The Atlantic.

There is simply far too much stuff on the Internet that's not memberwalled or paywalled.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

unlike most digital apps The Atlantic has been around for almost 170 years. Based on that fact alone I'd give it a good shot to outlive not one but the next five to ten successors of IG.

open-source-ux• 4 years ago

There are different segments on Instagram. Perhaps the "lifestyle blogger" or "influencer" has lost it's popularity. However, other audiences are still following different interests on Instagram. There are still thousands of artists (maybe millions) posting their art and illustrations, and still popular on Instagram.

onetimeusename3• 4 years ago

I am surprised people expect these apps to remain popular for a long time. The internet has changed so much. I've watched social media apps come and go every few years and I personally think they are all short lived trends with maybe a few exceptions. They capture a young market first, who provide the value (photos, videos, memes) and then older generations start joining after the young market is captured. Then after five to 10 years, they age out, the fad is over. A new app captures the younger generation and the cycle repeats.

Some smaller social media networks have maybe kinda sorta survived more than one generation to some extent but it's debatable. Twitter seems like it has the most staying power so far but the present situation is evolving rapidly.

fullstackchris• 4 years ago

I also have seen and beleive this is an accurate picture of how these things go. But I'd ask, what about pseudo- social network apps like airbnb? They have a minimal social aspect, but to me app like that will have a longer possible lifetime. I guess even in airbnb's case there are competitors encroaching and stealing market share...

fasthands9• 4 years ago

I mean I think the people who predicted they would remain popular for a long time were actually right? They may stop accelerating but they are still as popular as ever.

YouTube is the second visited site in the US and FB is the third - and they've been at the top for over a decade. E-mail is not a social network but has stuck around for 20 years. I've used Reddit since 2010. I've been on Instagram for six years now and probably use it more now than I ever have. Even Snapchat which to me seemed like a fad - is massively popular among teens.

I think it is true there are lots of smaller sites like Vine or Digg or YikYak which peter out but it seems like if you hit the critical mass then you can maintain popularity for decades.

bostik• 4 years ago

YouTube likely has staying power despite of what the company are doing with the UI and user experience flows, because it sure as hell can't be because of it. And at least their search is not trying to actively work against the user. (Their recommendation engine is a dumpster fire, for sure.)

A mostly usable, generally accessible, and fairly easily discoverable video hosting platform. I can think of a lot of worse product pitches.

arnvald• 4 years ago

I'd actually keep using social apps more if they stayed closer to their original versions.

My Facebook feed turned from updates from my friends and family to garbage filled with politics, ads, suggested pages, and I stopped using it.

My Instagram feed turned from photos of my family and friends to garbage: again ads, recommended pages, later videos. Eventually I deleted it.

Twitter was close to that when they introduces algorithmic feed which showed stuff I didn't want to see and I was close to deleting the app, thankfully there's a way to still have the chronological feed without all the "likes" and "recommendations".

I keep using Reddit because I still can use it the same way as years ago - join communities that interest me and not see the stuff I don't want (even though they regularly push some more useless stuff to show me)

I believe social media can last long, but they need to find balance between monetization, innovation, and staying true to their users. Facebook and Instagram went way too far in alienating their users, and while they're still popular, they're declining.

onetimeusename3• 4 years ago

What you're saying is interesting. I think part of that is the tension between older and younger generations which is why I don't think these things last.

Reddit is kind of a notable standout. Maybe that and Twitter's features are what guarantees a sustained viewership. I don't know, this is all kind of new.

At least for photo and video sharing sites, it seems like these tend to be trendy and have a population boom and bust cycle. But then again I don't want to speak authoritatively. But looking at FB it reported it's first decline in daily visits this year and the decline among teens and younger generations is even more pronounced. Certainly looks like a population peak.

grishka• 4 years ago

The desire to "grow", and the lack of a defined end state for that growth, is the problem. It's not hard to build a social media service that pays for itself and then some, but they all are run by greedy people and so they want more money all the time. These people have no notion of "enough money". That's the fundamental problem behind all social media services going to shit.

The fediverse won't be like that though.

pixelrevision• 4 years ago

I’m surprised Reddit is even considered social media. The anonymity of the users and focus on subjects over people make it a very different experience. With Facebook and instagram you have a limited pool of people that interest each other and if they stop posting they have to figure out what to show you. That’s… really hard, especially if you signed up with these people in mind.

With Reddit meanwhile you can easily select the subjects you are interested in and there’s a bottomless pit of people who can post and comment on that. While it being mostly text based will probably limit how big it can get compared to something like TikTok I suspect there’s a better slow and steady business model with less churn.

I also really like that they offer a monthly sub at a fair price that removes the ad problem. I really wish more companies would take this sort of approach.

jrm4• 4 years ago

In a very broad sense, I'm glad to see things like this happening; I think a (relatively) high rate of turnover in social media is probably orders of magnitude better and safer than "one app to rule them all, forever."

It additionally makes me bullish on federated deals like Activitypub/Mastodon.

It's funny that the above presently tend to be "lefty-crunchy-hippie" -- because, I think if corporations get it through their hiveminds that the above enables them to have their own "official source of truth," thus preventing doofiness like blue check marks, this would all take off in a beneficial way.

winternett• 4 years ago

They keep starting out with a free service then they focus on turning it into a paid service... In Instagram's case, just like with Twitter and even TikTok now, they charge users for visibility, or they trickle it out just enough to make users constantly and feverishly ask what they're doing wrong. It's mental manipulation that just doesn't work, and the paid advertising format leads platforms to their death, but just like users keep posting, investors are flocking to put money onto the next social media platform.

I hope that independent web communities return, and that people start making their own web sites, tracking music and entertainment across multiple platforms and dealing with their content payola schemes and repetitive marketing is ruining everything fun and useful about the Internet.

TylerE• 4 years ago

Figures.

It recently passed the mom test. My 70-something mom signing up for something is a strong signal it has peaked.

syllablehq• 4 years ago

I think the key to a massively successful new social network will be a fallback API of just email/text.

Why not let your shiny new social network UI parse any dumb input into a fancy thread format? Zero adoption friction. Federation baked in.

Example: You run a mastodon-like service that can receive email. When it gets an email, it publishes a twirt with the contents. Truncates as needed.

If it's a new email address, spin up new user with email username. No password needed, cause it came from the email address you own.

Conversely, in the fancy interface, you can @soandso@gmail.com and it will email them for you. Doesn't matter if they've "joined twartordon." So it has a dumb-simple user growth model baked in.

I've been promoting this idea for years in the man-yells-at-clouds format, but folks don't seem to get why it's so powerful...

cardamomo• 4 years ago

SMS is how I used to use Twitter, back in 2008 or so. You could text 40404 with your tweet, and you could receive Tweets from that number too. It was great in that era before I had a smartphone, and it felt like something halfway between a group chat and microblogging. I miss that mode of interaction.

pixl976• 4 years ago

Have you ever ran a mail server?

When you're blocking 99.93% of incoming messages as spam you'll learn to be more selective.

impulser_• 4 years ago

They moved on from Facebook being over to Instagram being over lol.

Instagram isn't over. It's still the most popular social media app on both App Store and Google Play in the US.

For the past couple of years you always see articles popping up about Facebook being dead, then you look at the actual data and people are using Facebook more than ever.

Look at the last report from Meta, more people on a daily and monthly basis are using Facebook and Instagram than ever both.

Nearly 3b people use their apps on the daily basis. It going to take on hell of a long time before they become over.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

Look at the last report from Meta, more people on a daily and monthly basis are using Facebook and Instagram than ever both.

It's more nuanced than that.

If you're losing traction where it matters - in younger generations & high-value markets like the US that have higher future cash flows - it doesn't matter if you're making up for it with usage from old people or people in poor countries without good advertising infra.

Facebook is definitely not looking rosy for the future.

And Instagram seems like it's on a similar path to Facebook 4 or 5 years ago. It doesn't look bad, but it also doesn't look great...

throwayyy479087• 4 years ago

I went on Instagram for the first time in a few years yesterday. None of my friends post anymore and it’s all ads or sponcon.

Group chats have been slowly growing for the last decade, and now have become completely dominant. I wonder how much of it is fear of cancellation leading to defaulting to private communication.

com2kid2• 4 years ago

in younger generations & high-value markets like the US that have higher future cash flows

People in their 30s and 40s earn more money than college students and new grads in their 20s, and they are spending that money right now. Facebook groups for home decorating, design, cars, fitness, parenting, all of those are really popular. You can go on Facebook and find a large community dedicated to literally any style of home decor you can imagine, and those people are quite willing to spend money.

Same with the parenting groups. DINKs don't spend money at anything near the rate parents do. DINKs have higher free cash flow, but that is because they have free cash, parents are buying stuff all the time.

Honestly, 5 years ago I barely used Facebook, now that I am older I am using it a lot more.

Also, with that entire population decline thing, each new generation is, at best, the same size as the generation that came before it. If constant double digit growth is desired, sure, need to get that next generation on board, but at some point Facebook may have to be happy with "just" earning hard to imagine amounts of money each year and only seeing single digit growth in revenue.

taf2• 4 years ago

Gonna say between my three daughters and their huge network of friends and family I can’t see “insta” fading away anytime soon… maybe as an investor we could say expected growth is going to slow due to market saturation or something but “insta” is here to stay from what I can see

deltree7• 4 years ago

I like how HN crowd falls all over for an article that caters to what they want to believe.

Where is Anecdotal vs Actual Usage Data rage?

Ah, that's right, it doesn't fit their narrative. So, everyone is happy to Fox-News this.

purec• 4 years ago

Author points to data showing 300m active users in 2013, 2b active users now, yet claims that Instagram is over. What is the replacement? Where is the decline?

achenet• 4 years ago

Author is in what some would call an NYC cool kid media bubble, and you know, those cool kids aren't using it anymore, which means no on who matters does (2billion active dorks notwithstanding)

racked• 4 years ago

Honestly I never understood the appeal.

A social network that forces you to wedge your content in images and short videos, while on Facebook you could share YouTube videos, music, interesting links, write-ups, you name it. How can anyone in their right mind prefer something as limiting as Instagram? Even its instant messenger is limited compared to Facebook's.

pwython• 4 years ago

People said the same thing about Twitter with its original 140 character limit. Just easily-consumable content you can scroll through. I enjoy the artwork I find on there. If I want YouTube links, music videos, news articles, etc I'll hit up Reddit.

mertd• 4 years ago

Instagram's formats feel nicer for getting updates from friends and family. No rants, just happy photos against usually a nice background.

Performative or commercial accounts make the experience worse though, and from what I understand these are being prioritized in the timeline.

standardUser3• 4 years ago

The simplification is (was) part of the appeal. It felt clean and refreshing to mostly look at pretty photos with minimal text. And it was a much more positive space. Photos of vacations, food, clothes, pets, friends. No political fighting or conspiracy theories or bitching about an ex. The comment space, a usual cesspool of unmitigated negativity and cruelty, was conveniently tucked away.

I miss the pre-pandemic Instagram. Now, it feels like it's transformed into a more general-purpose, Facebook-like social network. Which I guess should have been predictable!

cainxinth• 4 years ago

Instagram isn't over, but it is becoming passé, which is not a positive sign for an app built around making people look cool.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

When the percentage of ads (sponsored posts/stories) is higher than the content you want to see, it becomes a pain to actually use the app, and you slowly use it less and less until you stop using it alltogether.

denton-scratch3• 4 years ago

something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.

There seems to be a thing that some people hate "fedoras". I think it's to do with the "Fedora guy" meme. The hat Jerry Messing appears in is not a fedora; it's a trilby.

A trilby is a hat with a quite narrow brim, and stiffened; it's often woven and patterned. It can be made of just about anything (such as leather). You can't really mess with the brim; it's flipped up at the back and down at the front, and it stays that way.

A fedora is a soft felt hat with a wide brim. The hats worn by both the cops and the robbers in 30's gangster movies are all fedoras. Felt hats are not woven; they're felted, and that means they have to be made of wool or fur (I guess a panama fedora is an exception, but then I think a panama fedora is just a panama hat that is the same shape as a real fedora).

Where I come from, a trilby is associated with racecourse bookies and the criminal fraternity, as well as tacky seaside "kiss-me-quick" hats, made of something like cardboard. Fedoras, on the contrary, are stylish.

They're also very functional. They shed rain like an umbrella, without dumping it down your neck. The only thing wrong with them is that they make a good aerofoil - you have to "hold onto your hats" if it's windy.

phillipcarter• 4 years ago

This comment is imperceptible from a parody of a hacker news comment.

denton-scratch3• 4 years ago

Indistinguishable?

the_only_law2• 4 years ago

I think it’s a copypasta but I can’t quite recall.

brian-armstrong• 4 years ago

It perfectly captures the original characterization of the meme. I really hope they are in on the joke.

Jun8• 4 years ago

I usually just upvote and move on, not to add a noisy comment to the discussion; however you comment was so informative and well-written that I felt compelled to comment on it.

For those who want to try the fedora, I recommend the “Indiana Jones” look (https://herbertjohnson.co.uk/collections/indiana-jones-colle...). I had one of these but unfortunately the parent’s comment about them being aerofoils is true: lost it to a gust in the Grand Canyon. It fell tantalizingly close to the fence, re-creating the “Let it go!” scene :-)

danrocks• 4 years ago

This looks like it has been written by ChatGPT.

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

On the topic of social media in decline, TikTok also appears to have peaked in content already.

Following people isn't that interesting since most content creators that hit it big are One Hit Wonders. After they hit that big growth spike, they either follow the herd with the latest dance or trend, or they keep doing the same thing that made em famous with slight variations.

How long can you milk the same dance routine by switching out which celebrity does the silly little dance?

There were a few interesting educational channels for a while, but most people just don't have that many interesting things to keep posting about at the rate which is expected of a platform like TikTok. Quality content takes time to produce.

TikTok really only has a few buckets of content types. Some examples include thirst traps from sex workers that are looking to promote their OnlyFans and cute animals doing cute things.

Instagram isn't that different. I mostly use the app to see cute pictures of people's pets and the occasional human picture.

throwaway823885• 4 years ago

It is remarkable how hard it is for a business to simply last a decade. To do it at the scale of the incumbent apps is astounding to me.

While TikTok is growing quickly, we still don’t know its long term potential, how ‘sticky’ it is. I’d predict it has a trajectory more like Twitter and less like Snapchat. But it could well become a YouTube. All we can do is wait and find out.

chadlavi• 4 years ago

It's almost like these businesses don't actually provide any value (the users do, but the users aren't motivated to provide value, just motivated to drive engagement)

nickthegreek2• 4 years ago

TikTok has a creator fund that incentives and rewards their creators. It is much closer to YouTube than Twitter or Snapchat. And I’m pretty sure it’s DAUs are way greater than both of those as well.

spaceman_2020• 4 years ago

You have to commend YouTube and Twitter's longevity as social networks.

YouTube has better and more content than ever. Twitter also has the best and most relevant content, provided you curate your feed. All the stuff happening on academic Twitter, for instance, is hard to find elsewhere.

Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy. The content is increasingly mediocre and hivemind-ish.

coffeebeqn2• 4 years ago

YouTube has matured and now has professional YouTube-first content. The first time I was on YouTube it had every imaginable show (illegally) and that’s how they hit their incredible initial growth. Then it was amateurs for the next ten years doing silly stuff and now it’s quite a enjoyable platform for information and niche entertainment

dageshi• 4 years ago

Reddit always had a hive mind, it's just the hive mind no longer agrees with you so you think it's irrelevant?

Nope, frankly given how long reddit's been around and how it continues to gain in popularity I expect it will outlive everything on that list except for youtube. It's the webs default forum and there will always be a demand for a forum on the web.

matheusmoreira5• 4 years ago

Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy.

Reddit's irrelevance is only a matter of time. They're jacking up the advertising and banning anything that offends the advertisers.

Consider also how imageboards managed to remain relevant to this day.

imbnwa• 4 years ago

Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy. The content is increasingly mediocre and hivemind-ish.

If you're just looking at the 'popular front page', sure, but there's a reason people now search Reddit from Google: there's value in a 'centralized hub' for communities versus Twitter's loosely coupled social graphs.

Reddit replaced all vBulletin-backed forums. You could argue Discord might usurp Reddit but Discord isn't searchable from the web and is logged in a terribly inconducive format.

I follow MMA, and the MMA reddit is the biggest forum for MMA on the English-speaking internet, especially for live events, there's no substitute, and I'm sure its like that with a lot of niches.

_hypx2• 4 years ago

Both Twitter and Reddit might be in decline. I know people keep on saying that some subset of those platform are still useful, but that doesn't attract eyeballs nor advertisement. Once the main page declines, the rest should follow. This is quickly accelerated if there is some alternative platform that provides a similar experience.

prpl3• 4 years ago

This just reminds me of music in the 50s/60s and radio (without the payola)

Some bands were one hit wonders, but some were able to transition to a career, usually help behind them - writers, producers, and everything else from the record label. Chubby Checker always makes me laugh with the song Let’s Twist Again.

Something similar happened with Youtube, I think. Especially with media for kids. Popular channels turned into a productions, but usually it was much slower.

TikTok will be like Youtube/Radio Hybrid. Some people will take their one hit wonder and transition to a career, but not without the help of something like a record label or production company.

And if there’s payola, it’s going to click farms.

csdvrx• 4 years ago

Chubby Checker always makes me laugh with the song Let’s Twist Again.

Can you explain the joke? I don't get it.

andirk2• 4 years ago

I consider Tiktok content to be a sign of what the next generation has to offer. That frightens me.

indymike• 4 years ago

Instagram was really nice until a few years ago. I could keep up visually with family and friends, and didn't have all advertorial, news and political garbage get in the way. Still good for talking to people, but a lot of that is moving to messenger apps not from Meta.

Animats2• 4 years ago

"To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be."

That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This is called "pulling a Myspace".

amelius• 4 years ago

And even the non-advertisement posts are still self-promotional posts.

elgar12122• 4 years ago

this is even more infuriating than actual ads, because at least actual ads have the "sponsored" label and don't try to hide it

fnordpiglet• 4 years ago

When the accountants make the decisions, the company must die.

coffeebeqn2• 4 years ago

Hey don’t blame the accountants. The root problem is that these services don’t actually have a business plan other than grow, sell ads. Instagram is 12 years old and their leadership hasn’t come up with anything that makes money.

632• 4 years ago

This isn't my experience with Instagram at all. I only follow people I know personally, check in once or twice a day and see posts and stories from them and really nothing else. No sponsored posts, no reels, etc. Maybe some ads. I don't use the discover page and stop scrolling my feed once I get through all the new posts so maybe that's it.

Mistletoe2• 4 years ago

All mine has devolved to is trying to get me to watch absurd reels posts from half naked women trying to send me to an OnlyFans. Asking around to people I know they have experienced the same. I just stopped using it. It didn’t help that I realized every post on Instagram authentic or not is really just an ad. Even for people I know, it is an ad trying to sell me that their life is different than I know it is.

iLoveOncall• 4 years ago

I am in the same situation as you but as soon as you have caught up with the posts from friends (which if you only have a few hundreds and check everyday goes very quickly), it's literally only sponsored posts.

I just checked right now, I scrolled through 10 posts of accounts that I follow, which took 30 seconds, before getting "You're all caught up" and having literally only spam posts.

And I don't even go on Instagram every day.

raydev• 4 years ago

How many people do you "know"? Because I follow about 50 people I know, and only around 20 of them post with any regularity, and Instagram injects "Suggested Posts" throughout my feed. I'd say it's majority "Suggested Posts" on most days. And then I'll stumble on a nice photo that a real friend posted, and it's from 3 days ago.

flawn• 4 years ago

I true that. That article seems like a big cap to me, younger generations including me still use it pretty avidly. Interesting that there is such a different perception on that

evo• 4 years ago

I feel like there’s a natural adoption curve to social media:

1. The growing social media platform balances the needs of two user groups: the consumer’s need for fresh content and the neophyte producer’s need for a slowly ramping trickle of validation. This is possible because the people don’t know how to produce content in the new format yet.

2. The mature social media platform has picked winners. We know who the successful youtubers are, the successful twitch streamers, etc., and they know how to create the optimal media for their platform. At this point we’re maximally satisfying consumer demand, but we’re actively repelling the neophyte producers because the bar is now too high. They form a growing untapped market for the next social media platform.

3. Decay. A competing platform has stolen the limelight by restoring the dynamism of the consumer/producer balance. The successful producers of the platform start flexing out to the new upstart, though they’re unlikely to repeat their successes there, they’re too late to the game and bound to old habits. Chasing feature parity with the new platform does nothing because now you’re just upsetting the existing balance but that’s not suddenly going to pull new people into the game, they’ve already written you off.

pmontra• 4 years ago

Some social media are like that, others are not. When I read “It’s that I don’t see my actual friend’s posts and they don’t see mine.” I thought that my friends do see my posts and viceversa because we use channels on WhatsApp and Telegram. If all I want is keeping in touch with friends, why should I use media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok?

_hypx2• 4 years ago

Agreed. I can't help but feel that many current social media platforms are on step 3 right now.

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

This is 100% my experience with facebook. It used to be bearable, but once covid and WFH hit globally, they changed ratio of adverts massively overnight, making the use of product a sufferfest for people like me who are allergic to ads. Unfortunately not even ublock origin can handle all of their embedded ads.

Well, I certainly will never ever miss FB but those contacts would be nice to preserve somehow...

matheusmoreira5• 4 years ago

It's how everything on the internet dies. Advertising infects and ruins pretty much everything. Even normal websites are just as bad, they even have the exact same escalating ads problem. By now the web is unusable without uBlock Origin and Instagram's problem is we can't install an ad blocker on it.

There should be a way to speed up this cycle to make them fail faster. These corporations are making way too much money selling off our attention to the highest bidder as if it was their property.

dbtc• 4 years ago

We should stop letting them have it as if it was their property.

oska• 4 years ago

There should be a way to speed up this cycle to make them fail faster

One way is to consciously leach off them. Use their resources while blocking all of their user tracking and display of advertising. A strategy somewhat stymied however by people who consider it their 'moral duty' to allow themselves to be brainwashed by advertising so as to 'support' these companies.

anm89• 4 years ago

I would agree up until the myspace part. Myspace died simply because facebook was percieved as way trendier at the time. The transition happened while myspace was more or less at its peak and I don't remember many adds or major changes to the platform until more like 2007 2008 after it had sold and was basically completely irrelevant

sliken• 4 years ago

Indeed, seems to be a very common pattern. Poor search, low signal to noise, try to reinforce doom scrolling for more eyeball minutes.

I didn't realize how big an impact that had, till I tried Mastodon. No ads, no patterns to try to keep you online longer. Just posts from who you follow.

What's worse is apparently cell and bluetooth tracking of all customers in realtime is becoming more common. So retailers can optimize their floor layouts so you have to go through as much of the store as possible to get what you want. Trying to stretch out the experience, show you the most ads/products, and lower the signal to noise down close to zero, just like ad driven social media.

HWR_142• 4 years ago

I thought "pulling a MySpace" was selling out for an over $1 billion (inflation adjusted) payday and deciding to enjoy life.

Maybe that's "pulling a Tom from MySpace"

aprdm• 4 years ago

That summary nails down my experience to a T. I don't know how anyone can use it.

yupis• 4 years ago

Instagram is the new Tumblr

svnpenn• 4 years ago

the login wall is what killed it for me. try this link in a private window:

https://instagram.com/p/ClCFeRSjOXo

if you hit refresh 5 times, even slowly, you get blocked until you login. I shouldn't have to login just to view a post.

jrnichols• 4 years ago

I think it's more accurate to say The Atlantic is over before Instagram is.

We've been using Instagram more than any of the other social networks. Not making a TikTok account. YouTube lost me forever with their invasive ad push. Facebook lost me with its over the top moderation and irrelevant & useless ads. My Twitter account was suspended for a SNL quote.

Instagram currently has relevant and generally well done ads, if anything. The videos are also captivating and addictive and currently not littered with ads. I think that if they put ads in the Reels, they'd drive away a lot of traffic. Right now you almost don't notice some of the ads, and the ones you do notice are generally well done. That's a big difference right there, in my opinion.

Instagram has a lot of fun educational content & accounts. TikTok seems to lack that - it's a pool of misinformation more than education in my experience.

Definitely going to disagree with The Atlantic here.

nickthegreek2• 4 years ago

Atlantic has been around for over 150 years. The kids are moving away from Instagram, so unless Instagram is going to wait out the next generation and hope the grandchildren are going to make accounts, they are going to run into issues.

elgar12122• 4 years ago

Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.

A "youth-culture consultant" trying to predict the future? How scientific

Since this whole article is just one big hot take, here's another hot take: eponymous social media as a whole is on the way out. The only stuff anyone can put on eponymous social media is personal brand stuff (think LinkedIn), never anything actually genuine

It's impossible for people to have real engagements under eponymous social media because anything they can say could be turned against them

IG is predominantly just marketing, whether it's people showing off (like LinkedIn), pages trying to build a following with e.g. pet videos so they can make money from ads, annoying influencer "content", or actual overt ads

risingsubmarine• 4 years ago

On more than a few occasions now I have loaded up my infrequently checked instagram accounts and been presented with something awful. They were always attention seeking reels from random accounts I don't follow; showing people being hurt or accident footage. I swipe up on the app and kill it pretty much straight away, then I consider deleting my instagram accounts once again.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Instagram, like many social networks, is what you make of it and who your friends are.

Pick friends and who you follow well and it's a great experience. Pictures and video are equally supported, discovery is good, search is the best of any social network IMO.

And pro-tip: if your discovery is too full of stuff you don't want, click stuff you don't want and click "not interested". It'll then remove similar posts from your discovery page in the future.

system16• 4 years ago

That's hardly the case anymore and it's one of the main points the article is making. It doesn't matter who you follow when well over half your feed is composed of ads, suggested reels, and two week old TikTok reposts from random strangers.

citizenpaul• 4 years ago

Instagram is doing just fine at the job it morphed into. A high end escort advertising board.

A 20yo guy cannot afford to spend $5K a day for a beautiful girl that has posted scantly clad pics exactly for this purpose. They are not the market. The market is middle age wealthy men and the women they pay for their "time." Then the women they pay go back to Instagram to find things to buy for "bragging rights" which satisfies the advertisers.

seydor2• 4 years ago

"cool people are bored of some media consumption format"

What will be the next one?

A: hand drawn postcards

crossroadsguy• 4 years ago

And there’s no use relevant/usable alternative on the horizon. Except a few utopian (or shall I say purist) ones.

I guess one reason could be - even if someone wants to give it a shot they pretty much know that one of these behemoths will copy and drive them out, or buy them out but for that they need to have audience which is locked in vast corporate silos.

noveltyaccount• 4 years ago

I have two Instagram accounts: one that only follows friends and family. Another that follows brands, influencers, and such. It completely fixed my Instagram experience. I can choose the (low volume) social network of friends, or endless scrolling and discovery. Never do they intermix. The friends-only feed is so low traffic, I never get sucked into sponsored or suggested posts. Highly recommend.

lmedinas• 4 years ago

There are 3 reasons why Tiktok succeeded and Instagram struggles.

1) The focus of the Social Network is normal people, doing anything it might be interesting to others. Which is pretty much the contrary of Instagram which focus on Celebrities and "Friends".

2) Tiktok has an amazing fine-tuned Algorithm. Its like even a mirror of your subconscious, it tries very much to play anything you desire to see.

3) Instagram, Youtube and Twitter are full of ads. It just breaks the user experience. Youtube experience sucks too because they show Videos with higher probability of views which in turn are tipically big youtubers playing sponsored content.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 4 years ago

I never installed Instagram, but as I remember, it's an app to apply nice filters to photos you took with your phone. Do I confuse it with some other app or am I just getting old?

shaggie76• 4 years ago

As an avid photographer I thought Instagram would be a good place to share my work but was amazed to find just how photo-hostile it is: I loathe the forced 4:5 portrait aspect ratio and I die inside every time it ignores the embedded ICC profile and my colors get warped slightly after I post.

I loathe reels and the recommended posts but their recent addition a mode for only viewing people you follow has more or less solved the other problems; I just wish they'd put a bit more of effort into the basic functionality.

andirk2• 4 years ago

An increase in ads seems to be desparation. It's an easy throttle when a company needs cash but there's a tipping point.

Protip: interact with a couple ads you like and you'll see mostly those instead of rando

Gigacore• 4 years ago

I stopped posting photos on Instagram. It takes a lot of effort to compose a good shot, process the RAWs and upload them. The interaction rate has gone down considerably. A decade ago, people genuinely commented on photos and provided feedbacks. Like counts has gone down as well. It feels discouraging to post photos with such less of a interaction and feedback. I don't care about the likes, but the platform that originally built to share photos no longer values them. Photos are replaced with stories, reels and ads. The influencers are pushing all sort of crap that gets boosted by the algorithm.

Gazoche• 4 years ago

Today I did an experiment.

I opened up Facebook (the desktop version), scrolled down 40 times, and categorized every post I saw in my timeline. The result was roughly 30% ads, 30% "suggested" posts of random memes, 30% updates to pages I'm subscribed to by necessity (local clubs and such), and only 10% "real" content published by friends. An that last 10% was mostly people sharing or commenting on random pages I don't care about, not anything about their life.

So Facebook, which is still marketed a social network and a way to stay in touch with friends, is now to me 90% irrelevant (or mostly irrelevant) garbage. I'm only using it as a mailing list for the few communities I'm still subscribed to, and despite having close to 200 "friends" I have not interacted with any of them through Facebook in years, save for the occasional birthday wish. Maybe I would if my timeline had some of their content, but either it's being pushed at the bottom of the algorithm or maybe like me they just don't bother posting anything at all anymore.

It wasn't always like this. I'm old enough to remember Facebook's rise but young enough to have joined it when it was "hype", in my final years of high school. It looked nothing like today, your home feed was a constant buzzing of people sharing updates about their life and interacting organically. Yes, there were privacy concerns already, but it also tremendously helped me broaden my social circle and feel part of a community. It was very effective at the "social" part of "social network".

But then came the engagement maximization algorithms, the ads, the brands, the sponsored content, the atrocious UI updates...and slowly but surely people started leaving, because it was becoming harder and harder to parse signal from noise. I'm sure there's a generational rift element too (teenagers pretty much ignored Facebook after their parents started to join), but even people who grew up with it are leaving because it's a fundamentally different platform than it was back in 2010.

Seems like Instagram is taking a similar route. Makes you wonder if it's the fate of every social network to eventually decrepit and die.

ionwake• 4 years ago

So what does the new generation use these days if not instagram?

panda888888• 4 years ago

TikTok

nvarsj• 4 years ago

Next time you're on a bus, or other public area, peek at what people are doing on their phones. I'd bet it will be Facebook or Instagram like 99% of the time. Maybe WhatsApp outside of the US, and possibly Youtube. These are the apps people are on almost all the time. They have absolutely massive user bases and are integral parts of most adult humans' lives. The idea these apps are "dying" is out of touch with reality.

Instagram Is Over

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