I like that they asked actual users, and provided actual examples; it's something I've always felt off about Instagram's Reels vs TikTok. However the takeaway is that your TikTok feed is curated by hand by artisan robots vs Instagram is curated by lizards who only care about data.
Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome).
My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
As a millennial I can tell you exactly why TikTok is better:
1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
2. Reels are often poor quality. What I see is mostly life hacks that are actually really stupid or jokes that never pay off.
3. TikTok has a creator culture that seems far superior to Reels. What Facebook/Instagram seem to fail to realize is that the problem they have isn’t a lack of a video platform but rather a lack culture. TikTok somehow did foster a really cool culture of people creating content, perhaps using their stitches feature.
4. Instagram is a photo sharing platform. Imagine if every other thing you saw on TikTok was a still photo. It would be jarring. That’s the current experience with reels.
5. I don’t know if this is actually true but it feels to me that you can get a lot more exposure quickly on TikTok than with Reels. I don’t post TikTok videos but know enough people who do and it seems they are very much able to get tens of thousands of views with minimal effort and while being relatively new to the platform. I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
7. I come to Instagram to seek specific kind of content from my friends. I get reels from total strangers. I come to TikTok to get lols from random strangers and sometimes see friends. This is very personal but this is a major reason for me to use both and to dislike Reels.
> 1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you watch one video from some sitcom or cartoon not because it was from that particular show but because it happened to be about something interesting and suddenly YouTube is SURE you LOVE that show and want EVERYTHING IT HAS about that show--but it isn't quite so bad as Instagram, where I've heard a ton of stories about ending up pigeonholed by its algorithm into something they have a phobia for or past trauma related to, and now they are afraid to use the app, because it really does feel like you click on one pimple popping video (which has come up as the SPECIFIC issue for MULTIPLE people I've talked to, INCLUDING MYSELF a while ago) and BAM the app is now nothing but pimples being popped, 24/7.
> 6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
Did they really nail ads or could it perhaps just be that they still consider themselves in a growth phase (perhaps depending on market) where they deliberately try to not use them as hard as they think they could?
> I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
Can you even watch a reel without an account? Because I know I can't watch stories and after clicking one or two pictures my IP is blocked entirely from Instagram for x hours.
I don't have this problem if someone sends me a TikTok link.
5. You can get a lot of exposure on tiktok whereas on Instagram they intentionally lower your organic exposure down to where it's now 1% or so of people who follow you who actually see your posts. Of course people are not going to post on Instagram then.
I agree with all of this and I think the only thing I would add is that Tiktok understood the assignment was to be a mobile app. Everything about Tiktok is streamlined for mobile from the menus, to the time allotments, to a myriad of other design choices. Mobile is the future and, while I don't mean this to be snide towards pc enthusiasts, I find that a lot of people in my generation (millenials) and farther back just cannot comprehend how enjoyable a well designed mobile experience can be because they're stuck in old mindsets and habits. But Gen Z is growing up with phones that don't suck in their hands and the status quo of 'good enough' mobile apps is eventually going to be subverted by apps like TikTok imo that actually embrace mobile as a valid primary medium and not just as a lucrative lowest-common-denominator market.
> I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that's work.
Yes, you in fact get better recommendation as you use it more.
Reading HN, sometimes it feels like I must be the only one in the world enjoying good recommendations from both YouTube and Instagram. I do have many thousands of watches and likes on YouTube and Instagram, but it didn't feel like work, because I accumulated them over years of use.
1. Is on point. I’m just a hobby photographer and follow some people for inspiration. I clicked on a comic from the discover page at one point and after that all the recommendations were just random Reddit like comics and posts. Same was when I randomly saw a picture of a tattoo and after that I only had tattoo pictures and reels in the discover section. It’s insane how bad it is.
I feel like TikTok took the Vine idea to its natural extent. Meanwhile Facebook/Meta shoehorning Snap & TikTok features into Instagram ruined Instagram and wasted their lead.
Many big tech companies don't perform real R&D, instead they're fast-followers - piggybacking off whatever their competitors do, but the truth is that "disruption should come from within" because letting a competitor design your next product feature is f'n foolish (we see this a lot with consumer hardware too).
Imagine if Facebook/Meta actually focussed on Instagram's core strengths, and had cultivated a proper community or reason for being (e.g like YouTube or Twitch), rather than just spending all that time thinking about how they can squeeze more ad revenue: sure they might have not have had such big short-term ad sales, but Instagram would have found its feet and not have been so easily disrupted - heck, this might have led to innovative ways of advertising: two-birds-with-one-stone imagine that! (/s)
I think I speak for many when I say this is a core frustration with Facebook/Meta. There is nothing exciting coming out of their company because they don't make new ideas* and that leaves themselves open to disruption. By being too focused on ad revenue their acquisitions haven't progressed since day one, instead each looks like a Frankenstein's monster of the same app but with loads of ads and competitor's features bolted on.
* Even the much hyped metaverse isn't offering anything new.
> I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
For me that isn't the case - I follow mostly "regular" people and enjoy it, but...
The problem I have with Instagram is that when I open the app I want to see the photos that people I've followed have posted since I last opened, it in time order. Yet It's quite a struggle not to see reels or suggested posts or people posting spam. 50% of the time I open IG the first post shown to me is from a hashtag I follow but its an image of an attractive young women with a very loose connection to the hashtag.
By copying other successful paradigms within IG and FB, Meta are destroying what remains of the products and users they have. I occasionally use TikTok but don't want to see a weak version of it on IG
This is an issue that is killing FB/Insta and I am not sure why nobody in Meta seems to get this. Apps attract people with certain expectations and mindset. When I want to login to FB/Insta, I want to see posts from people I know. Unfortunately, I made a mistake to like posts from few groups and that was basically the end of my newsfeed. Now all I get is posts from the grops from random people. Eventually it becomes same-old same-old and you quit.
But here's the most braindead thing FB has done: They actually have feature called "show first" which I tried to use it to force FB show posts from friends and not from groups. But some PM there probably made decision that this is not a good idea and forced to limit to only 30 people! So, now when I log in to FB, I get few posts from 30 people and then it's garbage from groups again.
It is beyond me how no one can see these issue there.
TikTok is banned in India now, but when it was active, my feed was filled with content from daily wage labourers, farmers, and people living in small towns and villages. It was unpolished stuff but delightfully sincere and fun.
Reels just feels way too urbane and polished. Just not the same vibe.
I think there's something profoundly beautiful about teenagers living in tin roof shacks on the other side of the world from kids living in million dollar houses doing the same dances/memes/etc, as if they are equal peers. Maybe there's something for us adults to learn here?
The problem with asking "actual users" in this way, is that it fundamentally ties the user's pre-existing conception of these apps to their responses. If a user had been served the same content on Reels that they were on TikTok, it's difficult to see them having the same reaction.
> My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
This is a good observation. From my IG acquaintances too, it seems that only those with instagrammable lives are the ones still posting. The guy who does scenic hikes, the girl who goes to the exciting parties, those with perfect bodies. The occasional wedding or graduation photo. Many others have stopped posting pictures completely or sporadically post photos.
Maybe TikTok trains on product data and validates on expert human rater data? This is a strategy that search engines used to use. Maybe they still do, but they used to too.
> If Instagram wants to capture TikTok's magical human touch, it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper.
I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram, they're not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave.
Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don't have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.
TikTok is just AI/ML engagement algorithms unleashed, they never gave into the backlash that YouTube and Facebook did after the 2016 election and just continued optimizing purely for engagement metrics.
US tech companies dumbed down their own content algorithms and are somehow shocked that they are now getting destroyed. Social media is a drug, TikTok is providing the purest form right now
I get the impression that TikTok--due in no small part to its Chinese origin--also has an army of people explicitly moderating the community and re-weighting content, whether for reasons we might consider good or bad. I thereby really don't think it is fair to call it "AI/ML engagement algorithms unleashed", and I don't think it has any chance of falling into the content tarpits of YouTube (as extremist content would be removed or shadowbanned by humans) or Instagram (as low-effort content farms are essentially non-existent due to the moderation)... but, they also had a major scandal a couple years ago when we learned they were actively telling their moderators to filter out people who looked too ugly, poor, or disabled :/.
> The makers of TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing app with hundreds of millions of users around the world, instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed “national honor” or broadcast streams about “state organs such as police” with bans from the platform.
yes...this is the trending HN narrative. but do you have any evidence to support this take?
i read certain takes on HN soo often i start to feel i know them for fact, but do we really? Some of them are probably very wrong. Why couldnt tiktok just be doing the same things as meta, but a whole lot better?
For me, the amount of ads and the forced non-sensical recommendations have totally killed my interest in instagram. Right now it's flooded by AI-generated imagery accounts, that if you click on such an item once, you get a ton of these forced down your feed. It's as bad as Youtube with regards to that. With TikTok I can safely venture outside of my interests without having to redo my 'flavour profile'.
The building and launching approach makes intuitive sense, but it runs against the feudal nature of large tech companies.
This point is perhaps clearer if we take Google as an example instead. Mid-level engineers attach themselves to a project or initiate it, then guide it past a certain point. Once promotion is secured, the project is dropped by its initiators. Staffed with lower-status engineers who were enrolled without the prospect of promotion, the project begins a gradual rot and the Google graveyard deepens.
The key concept here is that the projects are launched and fueled at the start explicitly for the chance of promotion. In the strategy you describe, with Facebook higher-ups mandating the top-down creation of various projects as part of the global strategy of the company, it would become risky for mid-level engineers to ever get involved. They would not have their names connected with the success of the projects as higher-ups would have imprinted themselves on it beforehand, but would be connected to its failure, whereas in the Google scene the 'moonshot' culture is well-established and limits this sort of blame. Due to massive opportunity costs, Facebook employees would be better off trying to get promoted through the traditional channels, or to quit and pursue the promising ideas themselves and hope to get bought out eventually.
I don't get what's wrong with running a social media company that caters towards older people. Not everything has to be geared for 15-35 year olds. Presumably younger people will age into this product so it's not like the user base will literally die off. For instance, once you have a kid and people start using facebook to coordinate and communicate, you're kind of forced on it. As more people you know are on it, you're more likely to engage. If anything, the younger crowd is more ephemeral and likely to move on.
I get that advertisers pay more to target a younger audience, but that's fine. It's offset by less competition in the space targeting older people
I'm not sure younger people do age into a social media product. To give an example, I'm about the youngest (~35) that my cohort still uses facebook. people slightly younger than myself (~30) tend to use whatsapp and google calendar for the useful functions of Facebook and instagram for doomscrolling. They have no reason to switch, except if someone slightly older is 'pulling' them towards the platform. But the only time I've seen that happen is on facebook marketplace, where they're interacting primarily with strangers.
I don't think social media is like a minivan, where a different lifestyle suddenly makes it make sense to switch. People are on social media for the other people that are there, I don't see the incentive the other people would have to migrate at a certain age, seems more likely they'd change how they use it (as indeed happened with Facebook). Maybe I'm misunderstanding your premise?
They do its the New Product Experimentation team. They've made a dozen+ apps and none of them have been successful. It's just not in their DNA to come up with interesting products at this point.
you need a creative culture, not let code culture and ultra short term optimization, tiktok spend a lot of time and money making tools for creator, more than any other platform in a long shot.
Facebook just designs too much to data/metrics, doesn't feel like anyone there really has a vision for what they're building. End of the day without that everything they build will ultimately be soulless because building to the vision is what imparts soul into a product.
>because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram
Instagram's getting more and more of the creators--financial incentives. Why post on just Tiktok if you can make more money by posting on both?
I see similar arguments to this one a lot and frankly I don't see how anyone with an active social life can believe it to be true. The userbase for these platforms has massive crossover. Maybe it's a generational thing or something but I can gurantee you the socially active Gen Zers are on Insta and TikTok. If anything they'll be on both of those as well as Snapchat and Discord using each for particular types of social interaction. So the issue clearly isn't a locked in userbase.
So it must be the content creators right? But this is rediculous too! Because virtually every content creator worth a damn on TikTok will have a linked Instagram! What's more, many of them will often have a Linktree or similar url either in their profile description or linked on their insta that will include everything from YouTube, to Patreon, to OnlyFans. People who understand how to make money making content on these platforms aren't one trick ponies, they're using sophisticated marketing approaches that leverage the strengths of different online platforms to compensate for the fact they often have handle their own marketing.
So if the content of the knockoffs is bad or the creators arent finding the competition worth considering then the only question remaining I would argue is whether the problem is in the reccomendation system (TikTok was, and still is, famous with users for doing a solid job at this), the moderation system (TikTok, maybe because it's Chinese, is not so fixated on implementing the SJ nonsense that YouTube, FB, etc. pander to at the moderation level), or the compensation system (Again, probably because they care less about demonetizing you for wrongthink against whatever miniority or "important cause" is the pet of the week. Content competes primarily on its merits as likeable content).
In short, TikTok might have had an early mover advantage but the reason no one catches up in the current environment is because they can't get their heads out of the sand enough to realize it's their own fault no one entertaining wants to produce anything but TikTok reposts for them.
Why bother doing that when you likely can just buy or copy it? Why doesn't Hatebook just make a new complete clone of TikTok, FlibFlab, and push that on users instead trying to half incorporate it into Insta that has a user base that wants to use it as it is?
I think this quote from a recent New Yorker article[1] sums up a subtle difference that’s easy to overlook. Topic has been on my mind a bit lately[2]:
“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””
I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn't really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them.
But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.
It's also stopped me uploading video to Instagram because now "your video will be uploaded as a Reel" and controlling the "share to Facebook" permissions for Reels isn't possible via facebook.com, you have to use the iOS app (which I do not have installed.)
Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
It's their Google+ moment (as a reminder, Google+ destroyed Buzz, Reader, and heavily damaged Talk, YouTube and generally Google's reputation; I liked it, but it went too far on so many things). Or dare I remember when every app was integrating a "story" feature to compete with Snap ? Their are probably other examples of this.
A lot of the comments here about why TikTok does so much better don't mention that the person that opens TikTok is already committed to watching lots of short videos, whereas the person using Instagram still has options other than the short reels, diluting the things people are doing.
I agree. There's something to be said for app/services that decide that medium sized is good enough and they'll stick to doing their one thing well. Flickr springs to mind (although is much past its hey-day). I know people who left facebook for Instagram because of the changes to facebook but the changes just followed them to Instagram.
They did actually create a standalone app, it was called Lasso. They put Lasso out there and did Reels at the same time. Then I guess their metrics made them decide to focus on Reels, possibly they looked at the wrong ones.
They did go through a period of releasing these experiments as extra apps but then they never push them beyond the first week and then wonder why they fail.
Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting related shorts. I think YouTube doesn't have enough original shorts content creators, and like many of Google's side projects, it will go to /dev/null someday.
I use and like you tube for longer content. If I wanted short content I would create an account with instatok and tikagram or whatever the next thing will be called.
Every week or so I have to go through and click not interested on all shorts suggestions.
I second they need an option to hide. I've sent feedback to YouTube numerous times and I know others have, but my guess is it will fall on deaf ears as they try to keep up with the current cool kid.
I hate how I can’t scrub through the video on Shorts. Counterintuitively, I feel like my time is being wasted when I’m forced to watch the whole clip, despite it being not that long to begin with.
They used to have a separate app called YT Gaming.
Per https://www.failory.com/google/youtube-gaming:
"Out of the 11 million people that have downloaded the app on iOS and Android, and the more than 200 million watching gaming videos daily, only a small number used the app to do so. Most preferred the main YouTube app or the site."
>Did you know that Youtube has a game streaming service like Twitch?
Although org wise it's under YouTube Gaming livestreams can be about anything. The option to go live is shown when you click the upload button. Live streams show up in your video feed and the top of your subscriptions. In explore and on the sidebar of every page is a link to the live metachannel. On game metachannels there is a tab to see people streaming the game. Livestreams show up in search and you can filter for only livestreams.
I think it's pretty hard to avoid since streams are promoted more compared to videos. You must just not watch creators who stream on YouTube or are interested in topics that lend themselves to being streamed.
Shorts is really half baked. Almost all content i consume on Youtube is in english, but shorts surprisingly ignores that and show content native to my country (most of the time irrelevant). It boggles my mind how YouTube can screw up something as basic as that.
Tangentially related but when I have lived in countries where English isn't the first language I'm amazed how many big companies ignore the language set in my web requests (English) and serves me content in the county's native language. Google for example and they really hide the button to chsngethe language.
I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
For years several large web properties have been pushing machine translated content.
Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original.
IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
Yeah shorts are getting kinda annoying to me as a youtube consumer. Some of my favorite subscriptions have started uploading like 5 shorts in a row and that fills up my page of new content with trash.
The shorts recommendations are indeed awful. I get solely stuff I really would never watch; I get woke videos or teens being insecure about their lives, neither of which is relevant or interesting to me and YouTube knows that as the normal videos they recommend are usually not bad. And checking quickly now, most of them have the TikTok logo on them. So I agree: it will probably be removed or get worse instead of better.
YouTube is plagued by unnecessarily padded content because I believe creators were rewarded depending on how much time they spent watching their videos (and hence number of ads that can be shown). Vast majority of YouTube videos I come across can be reduced by 90% in length without any loss in information you are seeking. YouTube needs to simply change incentives for the content creators and TikTok will have a massive competition.
I suspect that a big chunk of YouTube’s audience puts it on and lets it auto play, the same way one might turn on a tv channel and see whatever is on. This audience has more tolerance for ads, and so is more lucrative than people seeking short, information-dense videos. And so they are what gets optimised for.
It's buggy enough on my phone that anything which used to be just a short video now gets the static preview for it stuck over top of the video, obscuring it almost completely.
I'm one of the olds, but I wish Instagram would just go back to simple photo sharing with friends. No video, no sponsored posts, no ranking algorithm, just show me what my friends are up to, damn it!
Me too. Its interesting, I work with a group of visual artists (about 300). Instagram was by far the most popular way for them to share what they were working on.
It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)
Same here. The addition of Reels and how hard they push it is really annoying. If I wanted to use Tik Tok, I would use Tik Tok. I'm on Instagram because I want to use Instagram.
Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like.
We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill.
And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them.
Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.
Has there been research done on negative value from scaling, the uncool participants effect? Where teenagers/young adults leave (or reduce their activity/start looking for other networks) when mom and grandpa join?
One negative effect of scaling I’ve noticed is that mature social networks (eg Instagram) seem harder to break into. Only established influencer content is surfaced so a new creator has trouble.
TikTok seems much better at promoting newer creators, possibly because it doesn’t have as many large existing creators. This means all the new talent goes there, and then the established talent eventually follows.
I'd love to see actual research on "the uncool participants effect" but anecdotally it feels like a real thing that's impossible to avoid. Any social network will start to favor a specific culture - enforced either by the algorithm or by its participants.
Once that culture starts to go out of fashion (which is inevitable) either the algorithm will have to shift to meet the culture (because the existing participants are probably not going to be fast enough to change) or new users will find another platform to start using. That's why even though people are saying Instagram will die if they start to prioritize Reels, I feel like they're going to die if they don't and this is a last ditch effort.
Btw I have wondered for a long time why search on Facebook is such an atrocious mess. But then it struck me: it must be intentional, so you would spend more time scrolling feeds to find that one post you've missed.
For this alone they deserve to be dethroned and forgotten.
Did that ever happen? Was it a US thing? I've heard of Friendster, but I thought it was something that MySpace killed and then MySpace went global and then got overtaken by Facebook.
In some countries, Friendster was extremely popular before Facebook! In others, there were other dominant social networks, like Orkut. Facebook was the first to dominate in all countries.
You are missing a huge point. MySpace and Friendster didn't got out of fashion suddenly because social is not "sticky". Friendster was heavily burdened with scaling issues, design complexity and bugs that basically force moved users to FB which remained fast, slick and extremely usable. Similarly, MySpace just couldn't engineer features faster that users wanted. The big point here is that social is very hard engineering problem and FB excelled it in early days. They are currently failing, in my opinion, because their newsfeed algorithm shows too much content from groups and much less from friends. The group content is something people will like initially but becomes monotonic later and so they quit.
So, the social platforms have failed historically because of engineering issues that their competitior excelled at.
Aren't you just rephrasing the GP's point? If social media was "sticky", users would suck up the poor UX and missing features and stick with platform X because 'that's where everyone is'. The fact that users are willing to 'start over' their accounts over such issues just shows that the moat offered by being the place where everyone is is more shallow than one would think.
It's an interesting thesis, but I'm a bit confused by your methodology - how can you propose a law without looking at any data yourself? You just seem to collect a few unrelated observations ("librarians have observed X", without giving any reference there) and laws that were developed for different contexts (Zipf's law), and from there you argue your way quite informally (mathematically speaking) to your proposed n log(n) formula.
Sorry for being so critical, but I would find it quite interesting if you had hard evidence to support a scaling law like n log(n) for the value of a social network.
We were applying a variety of other scaling phenomena which have been long observed, and then applied it in terms of networks. Most of the actual analysis of data, such as mail delivery was done by Andrew Odlyzko. There is also another form of the paper out there with Bob Briscoe added, and he had quantitative data not previously published from British Telecom. (See https://spectrum.ieee.org/metcalfes-law-is-wrong for a link, but you'll need a subscription.)
That said, the argument and result is intentionally informal, and intended to be a better rule of thumb than Metcalfe's law. Which was itself even more informally reasoned. However its key flaw we explained with:
Metcalfe’s Law is intuitively appealing, since our personal estimate of the size of a network is based on the uptake of that network among friends and family. Our derived value also varies directly with that metric. We therefore see a linear relationship between the perceived size and value of that network.
That said, different social networks may well have different scaling laws. In fact I pointed out privately that eBay likely was a counter-example which is closer to Metcalfe's law for the simple reason that you derive value there from connections to random strangers. And indeed eBay successfully maintained a market leading position for a long time despite charging significantly higher fees than competitors like Amazon Marketplace.
TikTok is not the same offering as Facebook though right? It competes in the Instagram and YouTube space. One thing about FB though is that it was the first social media platform that my mom and dad joined. FB was big enough for the boomers to join it. And I figure that is the moat, the boomers who for the first and only time in their lives joined a social platform and they ain't changing it up now.
Ostensibly their core use cases don’t overlap 100%, but as long as you accept that textual medium is just a means to information and is replaceable with video, you can actually get everything you get from Facebook on TikTok — news, commentary, entertainment, friend and family updates, messaging, etc. Plus, on a deeper level, everything competes with everything for your time and attention.
Maybe they will leave it on like a tv news channel in the background.
If those they came to follow are gone they will still scroll a feed increasingly filled with ads. When they complain, their friends/family will install something and say touch the dancing penguin/barfing unicorn/whatever to see the latest, it's just like Facebook used to be.
> But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win.
I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
It's often said the value of social networking is O(n^2), which is basically impossible to overcome, versus n lg n, which makes the difference between 2 million and 20 million users a lot smaller (too tired for the math, sorry, maybe 20x?) instead of 100x.
If the total value of the network is O(n log(n)) then the value per user is only O(log(n)). So comparing a 2 million user network with a 1 million user network, if the second one is on a product that is 10% better, users should find switching an improvement.
Wait, I need to ask about the sample data & methodology here:
- these 100 users they asked, were they already frequent users of TikTok and Instagram reels?
This experiment makes no sense if users spent a lot of time training the TikTok algorithm, prior to running the experiment while they didn't train the Instagram Reels algorithm?
Of course the results are more interesting and less generic if they had used TikTok a lot before...?
Readit News
Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but why is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the "wholesome" lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don't think tiktok is 100% wholesome).
My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don't have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn't going to pan out because "regular" people aren't posting to Instagram.
1. The Reels algorithm is simplistic as fuck. I was scrolling through Instagram recently and a three reel “ad” came up. I accidentally tapped on the center one and it turned out to be a pimple popping video. Now every reel I see is that. No exceptions. I am sure if I actually watched more Reels I would get better content but that’s work.
2. Reels are often poor quality. What I see is mostly life hacks that are actually really stupid or jokes that never pay off.
3. TikTok has a creator culture that seems far superior to Reels. What Facebook/Instagram seem to fail to realize is that the problem they have isn’t a lack of a video platform but rather a lack culture. TikTok somehow did foster a really cool culture of people creating content, perhaps using their stitches feature.
4. Instagram is a photo sharing platform. Imagine if every other thing you saw on TikTok was a still photo. It would be jarring. That’s the current experience with reels.
5. I don’t know if this is actually true but it feels to me that you can get a lot more exposure quickly on TikTok than with Reels. I don’t post TikTok videos but know enough people who do and it seems they are very much able to get tens of thousands of views with minimal effort and while being relatively new to the platform. I don’t think you can get those numbers with Reels.
6. TikTok nailed ads. They are obvious, easy to skip, and not jarring at all. Instagram is a mess.
7. I come to Instagram to seek specific kind of content from my friends. I get reels from total strangers. I come to TikTok to get lols from random strangers and sometimes see friends. This is very personal but this is a major reason for me to use both and to dislike Reels.
OMG this... a million times this :/. YouTube has similar issues--where you watch one video from some sitcom or cartoon not because it was from that particular show but because it happened to be about something interesting and suddenly YouTube is SURE you LOVE that show and want EVERYTHING IT HAS about that show--but it isn't quite so bad as Instagram, where I've heard a ton of stories about ending up pigeonholed by its algorithm into something they have a phobia for or past trauma related to, and now they are afraid to use the app, because it really does feel like you click on one pimple popping video (which has come up as the SPECIFIC issue for MULTIPLE people I've talked to, INCLUDING MYSELF a while ago) and BAM the app is now nothing but pimples being popped, 24/7.
Did they really nail ads or could it perhaps just be that they still consider themselves in a growth phase (perhaps depending on market) where they deliberately try to not use them as hard as they think they could?
Can you even watch a reel without an account? Because I know I can't watch stories and after clicking one or two pictures my IP is blocked entirely from Instagram for x hours.
I don't have this problem if someone sends me a TikTok link.
I keep seeing obviously reposted popular tiktok videos. The same ones, over and over again but with different accounts. Same on YouTube shorts.
they were the only place you could post and share a video of yourself dancing / lip-syncing along to licensed music without getting DMCA'd
Yes, you in fact get better recommendation as you use it more.
Reading HN, sometimes it feels like I must be the only one in the world enjoying good recommendations from both YouTube and Instagram. I do have many thousands of watches and likes on YouTube and Instagram, but it didn't feel like work, because I accumulated them over years of use.
Many big tech companies don't perform real R&D, instead they're fast-followers - piggybacking off whatever their competitors do, but the truth is that "disruption should come from within" because letting a competitor design your next product feature is f'n foolish (we see this a lot with consumer hardware too).
Imagine if Facebook/Meta actually focussed on Instagram's core strengths, and had cultivated a proper community or reason for being (e.g like YouTube or Twitch), rather than just spending all that time thinking about how they can squeeze more ad revenue: sure they might have not have had such big short-term ad sales, but Instagram would have found its feet and not have been so easily disrupted - heck, this might have led to innovative ways of advertising: two-birds-with-one-stone imagine that! (/s)
I think I speak for many when I say this is a core frustration with Facebook/Meta. There is nothing exciting coming out of their company because they don't make new ideas* and that leaves themselves open to disruption. By being too focused on ad revenue their acquisitions haven't progressed since day one, instead each looks like a Frankenstein's monster of the same app but with loads of ads and competitor's features bolted on.
* Even the much hyped metaverse isn't offering anything new.
For me that isn't the case - I follow mostly "regular" people and enjoy it, but...
The problem I have with Instagram is that when I open the app I want to see the photos that people I've followed have posted since I last opened, it in time order. Yet It's quite a struggle not to see reels or suggested posts or people posting spam. 50% of the time I open IG the first post shown to me is from a hashtag I follow but its an image of an attractive young women with a very loose connection to the hashtag.
By copying other successful paradigms within IG and FB, Meta are destroying what remains of the products and users they have. I occasionally use TikTok but don't want to see a weak version of it on IG
But here's the most braindead thing FB has done: They actually have feature called "show first" which I tried to use it to force FB show posts from friends and not from groups. But some PM there probably made decision that this is not a good idea and forced to limit to only 30 people! So, now when I log in to FB, I get few posts from 30 people and then it's garbage from groups again.
It is beyond me how no one can see these issue there.
Reels just feels way too urbane and polished. Just not the same vibe.
This is a good observation. From my IG acquaintances too, it seems that only those with instagrammable lives are the ones still posting. The guy who does scenic hikes, the girl who goes to the exciting parties, those with perfect bodies. The occasional wedding or graduation photo. Many others have stopped posting pictures completely or sporadically post photos.
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I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn't Tiktok and it's never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram's algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won't be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren't on Instagram, they're not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave.
Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don't have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.
US tech companies dumbed down their own content algorithms and are somehow shocked that they are now getting destroyed. Social media is a drug, TikTok is providing the purest form right now
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
> The makers of TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing app with hundreds of millions of users around the world, instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed “national honor” or broadcast streams about “state organs such as police” with bans from the platform.
This point is perhaps clearer if we take Google as an example instead. Mid-level engineers attach themselves to a project or initiate it, then guide it past a certain point. Once promotion is secured, the project is dropped by its initiators. Staffed with lower-status engineers who were enrolled without the prospect of promotion, the project begins a gradual rot and the Google graveyard deepens.
The key concept here is that the projects are launched and fueled at the start explicitly for the chance of promotion. In the strategy you describe, with Facebook higher-ups mandating the top-down creation of various projects as part of the global strategy of the company, it would become risky for mid-level engineers to ever get involved. They would not have their names connected with the success of the projects as higher-ups would have imprinted themselves on it beforehand, but would be connected to its failure, whereas in the Google scene the 'moonshot' culture is well-established and limits this sort of blame. Due to massive opportunity costs, Facebook employees would be better off trying to get promoted through the traditional channels, or to quit and pursue the promising ideas themselves and hope to get bought out eventually.
I get that advertisers pay more to target a younger audience, but that's fine. It's offset by less competition in the space targeting older people
I don't think social media is like a minivan, where a different lifestyle suddenly makes it make sense to switch. People are on social media for the other people that are there, I don't see the incentive the other people would have to migrate at a certain age, seems more likely they'd change how they use it (as indeed happened with Facebook). Maybe I'm misunderstanding your premise?
I thought you were going to call this out. It should read "something more shallow"
Nah. Buy the good ones early enough.
So it must be the content creators right? But this is rediculous too! Because virtually every content creator worth a damn on TikTok will have a linked Instagram! What's more, many of them will often have a Linktree or similar url either in their profile description or linked on their insta that will include everything from YouTube, to Patreon, to OnlyFans. People who understand how to make money making content on these platforms aren't one trick ponies, they're using sophisticated marketing approaches that leverage the strengths of different online platforms to compensate for the fact they often have handle their own marketing.
So if the content of the knockoffs is bad or the creators arent finding the competition worth considering then the only question remaining I would argue is whether the problem is in the reccomendation system (TikTok was, and still is, famous with users for doing a solid job at this), the moderation system (TikTok, maybe because it's Chinese, is not so fixated on implementing the SJ nonsense that YouTube, FB, etc. pander to at the moderation level), or the compensation system (Again, probably because they care less about demonetizing you for wrongthink against whatever miniority or "important cause" is the pet of the week. Content competes primarily on its merits as likeable content).
In short, TikTok might have had an early mover advantage but the reason no one catches up in the current environment is because they can't get their heads out of the sand enough to realize it's their own fault no one entertaining wants to produce anything but TikTok reposts for them.
“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-an...
[2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/
But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.
Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.
The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app)
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A lot of the comments here about why TikTok does so much better don't mention that the person that opens TikTok is already committed to watching lots of short videos, whereas the person using Instagram still has options other than the short reels, diluting the things people are doing.
I use and like you tube for longer content. If I wanted short content I would create an account with instatok and tikagram or whatever the next thing will be called.
Every week or so I have to go through and click not interested on all shorts suggestions.
I second they need an option to hide. I've sent feedback to YouTube numerous times and I know others have, but my guess is it will fall on deaf ears as they try to keep up with the current cool kid.
Neither did I.
They've hidden it so fucking well that even though they pay (tens of) millions for exclusive contracts, people can't find it.
But shorts they keep pushing on every UI.
Per https://www.failory.com/google/youtube-gaming: "Out of the 11 million people that have downloaded the app on iOS and Android, and the more than 200 million watching gaming videos daily, only a small number used the app to do so. Most preferred the main YouTube app or the site."
Although org wise it's under YouTube Gaming livestreams can be about anything. The option to go live is shown when you click the upload button. Live streams show up in your video feed and the top of your subscriptions. In explore and on the sidebar of every page is a link to the live metachannel. On game metachannels there is a tab to see people streaming the game. Livestreams show up in search and you can filter for only livestreams.
I think it's pretty hard to avoid since streams are promoted more compared to videos. You must just not watch creators who stream on YouTube or are interested in topics that lend themselves to being streamed.
I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.
Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original.
IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.
I never thought YouTube would do something this idiotic and actually drive away their users, but here we are ...
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It seems like it was perfect for that sort of thing, but now it feels like its not sure what it wants to be (stories, and reels and ...)
Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you've got there, you don't have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like.
We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill.
And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them.
Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta's dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.
TikTok seems much better at promoting newer creators, possibly because it doesn’t have as many large existing creators. This means all the new talent goes there, and then the established talent eventually follows.
Once that culture starts to go out of fashion (which is inevitable) either the algorithm will have to shift to meet the culture (because the existing participants are probably not going to be fast enough to change) or new users will find another platform to start using. That's why even though people are saying Instagram will die if they start to prioritize Reels, I feel like they're going to die if they don't and this is a last ditch effort.
For this alone they deserve to be dethroned and forgotten.
Did that ever happen? Was it a US thing? I've heard of Friendster, but I thought it was something that MySpace killed and then MySpace went global and then got overtaken by Facebook.
> Did that ever happen?
No, it didn't. Friendster was older than MySpace.
So, the social platforms have failed historically because of engineering issues that their competitior excelled at.
It's the other way around - Friendster was the incument that Myspace unseated.
Sorry for being so critical, but I would find it quite interesting if you had hard evidence to support a scaling law like n log(n) for the value of a social network.
That said, the argument and result is intentionally informal, and intended to be a better rule of thumb than Metcalfe's law. Which was itself even more informally reasoned. However its key flaw we explained with:
Metcalfe’s Law is intuitively appealing, since our personal estimate of the size of a network is based on the uptake of that network among friends and family. Our derived value also varies directly with that metric. We therefore see a linear relationship between the perceived size and value of that network.
That said, different social networks may well have different scaling laws. In fact I pointed out privately that eBay likely was a counter-example which is closer to Metcalfe's law for the simple reason that you derive value there from connections to random strangers. And indeed eBay successfully maintained a market leading position for a long time despite charging significantly higher fees than competitors like Amazon Marketplace.
If those they came to follow are gone they will still scroll a feed increasingly filled with ads. When they complain, their friends/family will install something and say touch the dancing penguin/barfing unicorn/whatever to see the latest, it's just like Facebook used to be.
I don't follow, did you mean it's O(log(n))? Otherwise a social network with 2mil users is still more than twice as good as a social network with 1mil users.
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This experiment makes no sense if users spent a lot of time training the TikTok algorithm, prior to running the experiment while they didn't train the Instagram Reels algorithm? Of course the results are more interesting and less generic if they had used TikTok a lot before...?