[relyio]

>'m not sure that Facebook using Instagram as a way to funnel people back to Facebook is a great strategy

It's a stupid strategy. All my friends (early 20s) are hardly active on Facebook, if at all and instead prefer the likes of Instagram and Snapchat for a simple reason: you can actually share your life with your friends and see theirs.

Speaking for myself, I hardly care about my Facebook account. My feed is plastered with garbage content and tired memes. I understand why they made the shift to being a content-consumption platform but it seem very short-sighted given that the content is low-quality, redundant, and seriously getting boring now.

I wager that people, like myself, are looking for an actual online social network. That's why I like Instagram, I can actually see videos and photos of my friends, whether it is celebrating their birthday, sightseeing, dancing at a party, or simply going through the grind of everyday life.

Not being a product-visionary, I cannot tell what drives Facebook to adopt this strategy but I find it puzzling that they could fail to understand that my demographic is leaving Facebook (in terms of engagement) because it is hardly social anymore. In fact, it is more akin to a worse 9Gag/Reddit/Buzzfeed mashup, with the occasional aunt or elderly family friend sharing some obscure article using CAPS LOCK.

I don't remember seeing anyone I know publish a status or a photo album in the past... what, three or four years?

> think it'd be smart to simply enhance Instagram's ad platform

The amount of ads has exploded over the past few months, it has made the product far less enjoyable for me. I don't mind ads but it bother me that they disguise it as content in your feed.

>If people start to become dissatisfied w/ Instagram because of "Facebook-ification" that may open up a market for a new competitor.

I think Snapchat would be in a nice position to take-over. I do prefer Instagram over it, but at this point I'm just desperate for a platform that doesn't sucks or isn't headed that path.

[rconti]

This comment seems to be all about your network. Just because your network on IG is different from your network on FB doesn't mean that the platform is fundamentally different. I'm ~15 years older than you, and was in college when FB came out. Hence, almost all of my friend are on FB. On FB, I regularly see photo albums and status updates.

I enjoy IG, but I see just as many obnoxious posts with 20 lines of .

.

.

.

.

.

.

so a boring post can contain 30 lines before 500 hashtags you don't care about and will never click on. And I will never want to watch a video on FB or on IG, so the platform doesn't matter.

If anything, it sounds like a more common usage of IG is to follow "influencers" which is code for "people you don't care about". Again, garbage in, garbage out.

It sounds like you've followed crappy people on FB, and that colors your view of the platform. The same way I've never been able to make Twitter work for me. It's not always about the platform.

[relyio]

>On FB, I regularly see photo albums and status updates.

I don't disagree with you as much as you think. That's my point, no one in my extended circles of friends actively uses Facebook. I only follow a couple pages but my feed is 90% recommendations from "Pages I might like" and the rest are likes or comments on content my friends follow.

Yes, you could say "you have the wrong friends" but I will counter that "maybe" they consciously made the decision to optimize for engagement and that the feed curation reflects that: over-exposing third-party content over the one produced by your social network.

And maybe we are using two different websites, it's not impossible that Facebook would turn into a different product depending on your age and location.

I suspect you might be in the opposite situation wrt. Instagram. I have never seen a single post from "influencers" since I don't follow any, that is to say beside the promoted content that is being shoved down my throat since a few months.

>like a more common usage of IG is to follow "influencers"

The bulk of the usage around me seem to be Instagram stories. People still post photos but now the trend is to put them+videos in your story, sometimes along with polls, weird filters, or Q&A (you have a little box to reply). It's actually pretty fun to use!

[rokhayakebe]

https://instazood.com/how-to-hide-hashtags-on-instagram/