[Animats]

"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".

[evo]

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]

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?

[jinushaun]

The original idea is that you can share this same photo to all your friends and family at once. That’s why it’s superior to 1:1 messaging apps.

The problem is you start following strangers which causes the app to transforms itself to promote strangers over friends and family to meet monthly usage goals. It’s a viscous cycle.

[pixl97]

Because in the US almost no one uses WhatsApp and Telegram.

[ProZsolt]

You can use Messenger or iMessage the same way.

[_hypx]

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

[matheusmoreira]

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.

[oska]

> 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.

[matheusmoreira]

Yes, that is what I do. I don't even consider it "leeching" either. They sent me the web page for free, I simply deleted parts of it. They assumed I would look at the ads but unfortunately for them their assumptions just aren't going to work out.

It's ridiculous when I see the "moral duty" argument. Moral duty my ass, they aren't entitled to a thing. Actually it's our moral duty and imperative to oppose such corporate abuses. We are not cattle to be sold to the highest bidder. This neo-techno-feudalism bullshit must end.

AdNauseam is also an ingenious idea since it actually costs them money and directly drives down their returns on investment. Advertising should have negative returns.

[dbtc]

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

[matheusmoreira]

Yes. Advertising should be illegal. Failing that, there should be ubiquitous technology to render it completely ineffective by deleting ads in real time, destroying any and all returns on their advertising investment.

One day someone smarter than me will make some machine learning thing that deletes brands from videos in real time.

[devoutsalsa]

YouTube figured it out, whether it was intentional or not. Let me pay money to not see ads. I watch a lot of YouTub & have a premium subscription. If I needed to watch unskippable ads, or any pre roll ads, I’d mostly stop using YouTube at all.

[matheusmoreira]

No. Paying money not to see ads is completely backwards, it's just extortion. Why should I pay to avoid having my attention stolen or my mind programmed with corporation trademarks? It should be illegal for them to even attempt to invade my mind like this. My mind is mine, it's not a blank slate for them to insert their little brands at will. Advertising is aggression and ad blocking is self defense.

Paying any amount of money just drives up the value of your attention. If you can afford to pay off the advertising platform, then you obviously have enough disposable income to waste on the products the advertisers wants to sell to you. In the end, you're helping them segment the market and paying for the privilege.

In YouTube's case, you're paying to avoid ads but you're still being advertised to since videos now have hardcoded sponsored segments. You're also being constantly tracked by Google's surveillance. So you're still gonna have to use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock if you want to avoid advertising or tracking.

[wrycoder]

You are paying directly for servers, admin, content creators, and bandwidth in real money.

Instead of wasting time watching annoying ads.

I think it’s a great deal.

[bbbobbb]

Advertising being illegal would be completely different story: no ads in the content itself. No 'sponsored' videos, no ads meant for other people (inside a browser in the video, on the street in the video).

Also, it's just not feasible to say 'let me pay money to not see ads'. You can pay for netflix, youtube, google search.. but what about the long-tail of all the sites you visit? I think Brave or somebody tried solving it with micro transactions but automatically deducting money also does not work that way because most of the content is trash I would not be happy to pay $0.005 for.

[Animats]

> Advertising should be illegal.

Arguably, it should not be a tax-deductible business expense for businesses. At least not beyond, say, 20% of cost of goods sold.

[63]

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.

[Mistletoe]

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.

[saurik]

So, while I 100% agree with the original premise--that Instagram is filled with ads and content farms, with relatively few "real users" to be found--this specific complaint is actually "a you thing": Instagram's feed algorithm ranks content in ways that seems to give the wrong players power (such as by giving more weight to people who merely steal and aggregate content than the ones who produce it), but it isn't entirely incompetent.

I am, thereby, going to claim that, if you are getting nothing but half naked women on Instagram on your feed, it is because you actually "wanted" to see half naked women (...maybe "merely" subconsciously! as, while I am not entirely sure about Instagram, TikTok is apparently tracking implicit watch time more so than explicit actions, and maybe you stop for just a bit longer on such content as it catches your eye).

In contrast to your experience, I recently went through a devastating breakup, and my algorithmic Instagram feed seriously has no half naked women on it: it is, instead, nothing but an intense pile of captioned voices (like, an audio with text, but not video of that person) saying pseudo-motivational quotes about relationships ("if she had wanted to make time, she would have" sort of shit) with inspirational background music overlapped with videos of people "making stuff" (such as carpentry).

It is demoralizing to experience: I go into Instagram for whatever reason, start scrolling by accident, and then a half hour later I am at the bottom of a pit of emotions crying my eyes out while clutching a pillow and I am lucky if I escape even an hour after that :(... but, the algorithm does't care about my mental health: it only knows that if it shows me videos that cluster along these axes I apparently am willing to spend the rest of my life watching ads (which make up about 1/4th of the content on Instagram).

[AVTizzle]

My friend - apologies for your experience.

In my experience, you can clean up your feed of unwanted content pretty quickly. Just go to discover and long tap > "Not Interested" on the stuff that's of the genre you want to filter out of your life.

I do this every couple months with IG babes & thot accounts to keep my feed free of sexual imagery. Works a charm.

[Mistletoe]

Wow I did not know this exists.

[raydev]

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.

[iLoveOncall]

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.

[63]

That's true, but I consider "you're all caught up" to mean "it's time to close the tab and do something else." Honestly it's really great of Instagram to provide a convenient stopping point like that instead of an infinite scroll.

[flawn]

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

[fnordpiglet]

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

[coffeebeqn]

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.

[amelius]

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

[elgar1212]

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

[sliken]

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.

[saiya-jin]

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...

[anm89]

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

[HWR_14]

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]

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