Comment by Eric_WVGG 5 days ago
I was a very early Instagram user and would even defend it over the years as "influencers" became a thing. “I don’t see it as a problem… if you don’t like those people then don’t follow them.”
Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is over, it’s because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
It's MBAs on the eternal quest to juice profits. If a social site ran itself lean like Craigslist they could win the entire prize without the need to manipulate content for the benefit of advertisers.
That's an eloquently stated view. I'm not on FB or Instagram, but everything you said somehow resonated with me as a YT user.
Sure, but don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine". Engagement, attention loop, reinforcement, clicks, views, comments, likes, follows, longer average visit time, distraction engine, compulsive behavior, higher advertiser revenue, whatever, but it isn't positive and it isn't really feedback.
If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.
What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
> don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine".
But it is a positive feedback loop in a technical sense. Think of a microphone providing sound to an amplifier, and that amplifier in turn providing amplified sound into the original microphone. It's self-reinforcing.
> What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
The thing is, I don't want to be on Instagram. It's basically TV for me, and I'd rather not engage with content that way because it's passive and messes up my attention span. I already stare at a screen for eight hours a day for work, and I'd rather not have to spend any more time on screens than I have to.
It's in general very negative; it's only "positive feedback" in the ultra-narrow technical sense wrt reinforcing the compulsive behavior, which is negative to the user, negative to the user's wellbeing, friends, family, negative to society.
My analogy to reinforcing any other compulsive damaging behavior stands. It's not "positive feedback" to the dealer or casino.
Let us not let our words do the thinking for us, as Orwell cautioned.
> Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
When a fb exec gave a talk at our then small startup about their 'north star' being monthly active users, I thought maybe they had just given up on serving their customers, that was in 2014. He detailed how they measured 'active' etc.
Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue', again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation. Companies are not making products to solve an end-user issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working well for the investors.
At some point, Facebook (and Amazon and Google before it) were products that delivered what their users wanted.
The essence of enshittification is product leadership losing the plot on their users' desires and piloting everything off the cliff by solely following growth metrics.
I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.
The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok, Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates" many of us would have stayed.
Well yeah, scrolling through and liking a picture of your friend's vacation and commenting "Adorable!" on a video of your cousin's toddler only gives you, say, 10 minutes to see ads, whereas getting fed an endless stream of progressively more intense and precisely-tuned content to tickle at your inner psyche (be it most susceptible to anger, lust, envy, greed etc) means you might spend hours on there scrolling past ads.
Well, in theory they could have just stuck to being a humble social media site, even if the traffic were to plateau or drop slightly. Something like what Craigslist did, but slightly more modern.
But of course if they'd done that Meta wouldn't be worth a hundred gazillion dollars now.
Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".
The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that the most effective way to capture user attention is to give them an algo feed of addictive slop.
Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.
I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:
After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.
This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.