[subdane]

Also a daily subscriber to Stratechery. Ben (Zuck?) under-indexes on the feeling of good will associated with a good product experience. But I agree that we over-index on it here on HN. IG won on speed, usability and UX over early competitors like Hipstamiatic and Flickr. But for sure the network was the addictive glue that brought users back, new users in and made the entire product grow. FB feels like the opposite experience to me - crappy product decisions, bloated UX, bad will. My best guess is FB pushed IGTV on Mike and Kevin. They did their best to implement it, but it feels tacked on, like a FB feature, and it became clear that more and more feature pressure was going to be put on the product until it too became bloated and incomprehensible. I don't think Ben sees this, but the poor product choices (in deference to business and strategy) will pile up and the vein will collapse, just as it is starting to do in FB's main product. IG had a good run, it's hard to imagine a future where it gets better from here.

[cpeterso]

An example of how little UX can matter:

Facebook ran an experiment where they intentionally crashed their Android app to discover the threshold at which users would give up and go away. But someone familiar with the experiment said: “The company wasn’t able to reach the threshold. People never stopped coming back”.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/05/facebook-...

[obmelvin]

Isn't that sort of contradictory? The rest of the UX is so great that people want to use it despite the crashing.

[dzonga]

That's when you know you're peddling a powerful drug, eh product I mean. & simply right there that's Facebook's moat. I don't use FB, but gotta give to them anywhere I peek at someone's smartphone in public spaces, they're using a FB product e.g FB, Whatsapp or Instagram. Hell, right now FB pays my rent, cause of the tools I make at work that integrate with FB

[krebby]

It's funny you call out FB for having a bloated product. Early in its history Facebook was the restrained option vs Myspace, Friendster, etc. The fact that you couldn't add custom CSS, sparkly unicorn gifs, and auto playing music was a major differentiator from the other personal homepage / social networks of the early 2000s. In a similar way, Instagram was very restrained compared to the other photo apps of the time. No albums, no video, no stickers.

I think this is a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma: you start by making something worse than existing products on the market but that completely address the features your customers care about most. Eventually your customers demand more features and you have to turn a profit, so the product gets bloated and the p90 experience suffers.

[sutterbomb]

I'm not sure he totally underindexes on experience. He was long Apple at a time it was very common to think that Android + OEMs would soon be "good enough" and thus price would be only factor and Apple would suffer. He recognized the importance of user experience and that "feeling of good will" more than most industry analysts.

[colmvp]

> FB feels like the opposite experience to me - crappy product decisions, bloated UX, bad will.

Which almost feels ironic given that they tend to hire some of the best designers around the world.