The key point here is that TikTok is now beating all the US social networks.
This may be the beginning of the end for what Silicon Valley calls "tech", but is just ads with social content. Peak Facebook was in Q2 2021.[1] Instagram is losing to TikTok.
(If you think the "metaverse" is going to be important in the social space, check out what's happening in China in that area. While the US has been distracted by the NFT clown car and Facebook's rather pathetic efforts, companies in China are actually building it.)
I'm a huge admirer of TikTok and love to use it -- once a week only! -- but I sort of agree with the US government that it's crazy to give that much of (mostly) your youth's attention to an adversary.
However I find it baffling that all the VC in the Global West is unable to come up with a popular alternative, even though it's glaringly obvious[0] what the "secret sauce" is in TikTok and why it works so well.
Instead we get stuff like this, where a quite good photo-sharing service radically undermines its inherent advantages in order to play catch-up, with most of the videos still sporting a TikTok logo.
At some level I'm happy if Zuckerberg destroys my artists' community on IG because it at least opens the door to creating a better one elsewhere. But I'm also a little worried that this coterie of billionaires keeps having their lunch eaten by a pretty straightforward system run on a pretty classic Valley model.
> but I sort of agree with the US government that it's crazy to give that much of (mostly) your youth's attention to an adversary.
In a way Europe has been doing that for many years. The US does not have any privacy protection of foreigners, the NSA is only not supposed to capture data on US citizens.
Only now are we seeing Google Analytics banned in many European countries. But it's a very small step.
That is not nearly the same thing. The US and western Europe have been roughly aligned about geopolitical interests, values (democracy, freedom, mostly liberal, based on a secularising Christian foundation), rules and laws. China is diametrically opposed on all those things.
The cultural influence of the US on Europe is enormous, and the US has often crossed the line spying on European citizens, but the US is not an adversary.
The only values the US and the EU align on are brutal profiteering at the expense of overseas territories. If anything, I kind of hope that China replaces the US as the influential friend and we get less of this war apologism. The US is a big bully and at every turn where it has influenced EU culture the EU has become objectively worse. For it's own citizens, for any foreign powers interacting with it, the works.
I don't think the opposition is as diametric as you may think, when it comes to values. I've been to China several times and from my perspective, US liberalism has embraced quite a lot of Communist China's values and behaviors. For example:
1. Committing acts of violence against people they don't agree with.
2. Silencing opposing opinions.
3. Media and political propaganda, projection, and gaslighting.
4. Vilifying segments of society.
5. A tiered justice system.
6. Consequentialism.
7. Destruction of history to fit a modern narrative.
Not that bad as Chinese investments in European universities. Shaping education by foreigners that not accept democratic principles is far more dangerous.
Sure, we can speak about political correctness from West in campuses, but that has no future by definition.
However... Both trends has similar goal to steal freedom from citizens.
>Sure, we can speak about political correctness from West in campuses, but that has no future by definition.
Why ? political correctness in progressive-dominated spcaces like western uni campuses goes back to the 70s/80s. I was browsing Ted Kaczynski's (better known as the UnaBomber) Industrial Society and Its Future[1], and he spoke about political correctness as an established thing. A 40-year phenomenon seems like something that won't end anytime soon.
>Shaping education by foreigners that not accept democratic principles is far more dangerous.
I wouldn't be too quick to judge. Not all of china is a single brain, maybe the people funding european universities have meaningful ideological differences from the ruling class. And the blanket usage of "democratic principles" irritates me hugely, because most of modern wesern democracies is a pathetic and transparent sham that is trampled at the earliest encounter with any real established power.
>..because most of modern wesern democracies is a pathetic and transparent sham...
I wouldn't argue with that, but advantage of free society is that you, as individual, can do something about it. In totalitarian state your attempts to change something that is against state ideology would be suppressed. If we, in democratic states, let others people do nasty things, than it is only because we let them to do it. Is it laziness? Is it lack of responsibility? Or maybe that image that media told us every day... "Don't stick your nose here and there, you wouldn't be able to change anything anyway. Stay scared."
I have no objections to political correctness being wrong, I was contradicting the claim that it's something that's going away.
>If we, in democratic states, let others people do nasty things, than it is only because we let them to do it
Or because they have vastly more wealth, status and connections than you, and can crush you like a bug (totally legally) if you ever went anywhere near them. That's why you can't do anything, not because you choose not to. Democracy is theatre, it doesn't change the fundamental power structure since Ancient Egypt and Babylon. There is an upper caste, and you're not one of them.
Honestly, I don't want to be one of elites. I believe in different values than being rich or powerful. If that is your goal in life, then sure, democracy could look like theater.
Very concisely: The Media. Every election in a western nation is a huge circus, every referendum a secular holy day. Every elected official speaks of "the people", that mythical monolith who has a True Will that votes supposedly represent. It's a massive dose of ego-stroking deference, it can be hard to see all this and not think you're in some kind of control, after all, you're a voter, and those people speak very reverently of voters, so you must be in charge, right ?
In truth, not only votes are a placebo that doesn't measure anything but the crudest of desires, and not only those worthless votes are further made worthless and pointless by the fact that vast hordes of uncoordinated humans are exceptionally easy to manipulate and control to give their votes to anything, much more than individuals or small groups. The reality is that votes and elections just don't matter. Bush didn't need votes to invade Iraq, he just went ahead and did it. The vast vast majority of anything done by an elected official is due to his or her very own desire (modulo reality, of which you as a voter are not part of untill the next election). Democracy is just tyranny except there are multiple competing tyrants (not a novel feature) and you get an extremly small chance to depose the tyrant every n years.
"But Term Limits" oh you think 4 or 6 years in office aren't enough to form connections and make favors that can last you 20 outside the office ? "But Free Press" oh okay (1) lol, look at who owns the press (2) what good is a voice that can't affect things, you scream and rage and cry and then what ? someone comes along and convinces you they can solve this problem, For Real This Time^TM, and you vote them into office (if you manage a majority) and after an intial 100 days of theatrics, nothing.
You name only negative side of democratic system. Which is good, because you can. That is one of visible principles of democracy. You wouldn't be able to speak publicly like that in China.
But... Do not forget about positive aspects of personal freedoms, individual rights, etc.
>That is one of visible principles of democracy. You wouldn't be able to speak publicly like that in China.
This is the "Helpless Voice" aspect, 'democracy' allowed you to scream at the top of your lungs about how it sucks, giving you the illusion that you're more free than you really are. Imagine if Putin made it legal to insult him on the streets, would that make it any less of a totalitarianism ?
>Btw, what is a perfect system for you?
I'm not sure there is a word for it, anarcho-primitivism is the closest thing, although I don't necessarily agree with them that technology is fundamentally centralized or coercive. Basically, I think that all the ills of society is due to the fundamental idea, the preversion really, of living with people you don't know. That is, to fix society, you have to destroy society, it's a fundamentally unfixable idea. You can't make people who don't feel kinship to each other play by any set of rules. Here's me arguing this from an older comment of mine:
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>>>I'm a techno-primitivist, I believe political units should be extremely small, extremely numerous, with an emphasis on blood ties as the ultimate guarantee of group cohesion and loyalty. I have a burning hatred for and deep distrust of any political unit with more than 1000 persons. There is no way to make a social organization of >1000 persons consistently fair, the rules are always arbitrary and ad hoc, a few assholes always play the meta-game and find ways around them, and somebody is always oppressed and bullied and consistently given the shorter end without a way to be heard.
Family is different, affinity for genetic similarity is deeply hardwired into your lowest level circuits, very few assholes can find their way around the rules evolution built. Every single social organization is a prisoner's dilemma come alive, why cooperate with that stranger you're never going to see again? The answers are always arbitrary and subject to abuse and evasion : Because God, Because Emperor, Because CEO, Because General. Family is the only social unit where the rules stem from your very being : Because Evolution, the very factory that built you, that encoded your love and respect for your own flesh and blood as deep inside as it encoded your liver and kidneys.
In another, and better, universe, we never built nations or states or parliaments or public school systems, every family is an autonomous unit under the leadership of its bread winner, and federations of families handle cross-cutting concerns in a way that leaves as much power to the families as possible.
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Here's another comment of mine from a different forum, arguing the same point in a slightly more colorful (and angry) tones :
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>>>Imagine You live in a cramped and inferior society among countless nameless millions like farm chattel. You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States, composed of people like animal bodies are composed of cells, caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells : not at all, unless relevant to their survival.
You were not built for this perversity, for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors lived among people whose very flesh and blood was molded out of the same language as them. Nobody needed to craft rules on how to live with each other; or rather, nobody needed to craft rigid and easily exploitable set-in-stone (or paper or computer memory) rules. You started with the willingness to live with each other, and a natural affection only life born out of itself can hold, and the rules trickled down and evolved as needed. You look upon ants and bees, they are marvellous in their numerousy and organization, but you're not like them, your place is to live among a hundred or a thousand of your kin, governing no one but your kin, and being governed by no one but them.
The society you live in is a poor imitation of ants and bees. Everytime you complain someone points to some numbers and explains how they have gone up, how it's good that they go up, how your complaints are misguided and irrational because the only thing that matter is numbers going up, and the societies you're nostalgic for are societies where those numbers have not gone up, and thus can't be worth living in.
Can you imagine that ? Some of us don't have to, because we're living it. If you're not, count yourself lucky that you adapted to the life of ants and bees, but don't dismiss or make fun of those who long for the long lost life of humans.
Ah yes, democracy. Is that when you fire up the tanks and shoot natives until they tell you you're a big boy? Or is it the terror campaign of school drone strikes after?
you can have an acceptable domestic government that had made unacceptable mistakes in foreign policies.
It does not change the validity of democracy if democratic nations make mistakes.
And it does not legitimize a tyrannical government just because democracies have made mistakes.
Edit: I'll double down. The whole point of democracies is to hold our governments accountable for those mistakes, something that is (at least by design) much harder in non-democratic governments.
If you want me to actually engage with any of this you're going to have to give me a little help understanding how someone arguing in good faith can imply the US government has ever been held accountable in a way that changed anything about how it operated. From where I'm standing, that descends so far into fantasy we may as well be playing D&D.
You have a point, but the way Europeans see the US is very different from how they see China. The US has done some morally questionable things in recent memory (War on terror, Snowden/Assange, Trump, etc) but on the whole US is seen as an ally, not an adversary.
Only for politicians, it’s been 20 years that I haven’t met an European who consider the us an ally, and I’ve lived in Uk Germany Netherlands and Italy, but so far we’ve voted US allying politicians because of the threat of nationalist parties, but at least in Italy is about to change due to the energy crisis we’re going through thanks to us
For the whole of Trump administration, he was really good at making peace when things where going south, he never said that he would protect for example Taiwan directly in case of attack of China.
I miss Trump so much, like he was a issue for US , but the rest of the world just could have a laugh and live in peace
It was Obama that started poking Putin saying that he was at the end of a medium power, and it is Biden that is giving all the weapons asked to Ukraine without even asking for a way to de-escalate and find a compromise, it is Biden that is letting Ukrainian lose territory and life just for weakening Russia for US interests
Threatening withdrawal from NATO, withholding Ukrainian defense aid, and not promising to defend Taiwan are not positive features for many in the USA.
As a personal example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was obvious back in 2014 (read accidental superpower). As is the eventual annexation of Taiwan. Both are not the kinds of actions I like to see in the world and support efforts to reduce the occurance of those actions. European nations are aiding Ukraine as well, this not a unilateral US action.
I also don't support prolonged invasion of Afghanistan by the US, just in case you're wondering.
>> Threatening withdrawal from NATO, withholding Ukrainian defense aid, and not
>> promising to defend Taiwan are not positive features for many in the USA.
Correct, in the USA, It it NONE of the world problem, like in EU we have done business with Russia for decades without issues, we got gas, companies got energy and everyone was happy, except US, of course Europeans are also supporting it (politicians) but they are doing it without going through people, they didn't campaign for it, and if everything goes well, they will see the effect of their loyalty to US interest at next elections
I just wanted to say that USA interest are likely to match the interest of EU, but it is not always, EU interests were more likely to keep making business with Russia in peace
There is a deep inconsistency in your argument. Countries bordering Russia should not join NATO as doing so would be a provocation. Yet Russia has shown that they are happy to invade bordering countries (who are not in NATO) and blow their people to bits. How do you think the people in Finland, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine view this situation? What is their right to self-determination worth?
I'm surprised to hear that. Though, I expect your opinion might not be the only one in the European continent. If you can believe the EU polls, support for Ukraine's defense is quite high: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2772
So, either those surveys are lies, or the US has somehow brainwashed EU's citizens, or there actually is broad European support for aiding Ukraine in its defense, sanctioning Russia including reducing Oil and Gas purchases, and welcoming Ukraine into the EU in time.
I don't know where you live, but it is entirely possible that there will be backlash in your country or district, while still maintaining the general support for what's going on across the broader EU.
I am italian, and we have always had a good relationship with Russia, either for energy, housing, boats, textile, etc. so a lot of people were not happy of this whole situation
Well, I'm glad there's a diversity of opinions and hope there's healthy debate and a reasonable outcome is reached that minimizes the suffering and maximizes the personal agency of all parties. Peace is always the best, but not always possible.
Yeah I agree with you that peace is not always possible, but there could be steps towards finding peace, the problem is that I find Zelensky too much idealistic in his view of integrity of Ukraine, and a bit not practical, while his people are dying on the battlefield, so he has to compromise I think, and the guilt that I find in US is that they keep giving all the weapons, without any restrain to force him to compromise, he is a head of a country that wants to join NATO (its in his constitution) and Russia is a power that has beef with NATO, the Russians would feel unsafe to border with a enemy entity, would you imagine if Russia would put its influence in Mexico or Cuba? What would the US do?
So I think the only way to let Zelensky think about making compromise, is to shrink gradually the amount of weapons supplied, because this war can't go on forever on european soil, and we need to get an end to it. The issue is: US doesn't any any interest touched by keeping this war, so the EU and US interests are not matched, and that's why I wouldn't consider them allies right now.
While peace is not always possible, if we balance the amount of support, to compromises, then we can get there, and I think Biden is sucking at making compromises at the moment
> Yeah I agree with you that peace is not always possible, but there could be steps towards finding peace, the problem is that I find Zelensky too much idealistic in his view of integrity of Ukraine, and a bit not practical, while his people are dying on the battlefield, so he has to compromise I think, and the guilt that I find in US is that they keep giving all the weapons, without any restrain to force him to compromise, he is a head of a country that wants to join NATO (its in his constitution) and Russia is a power that has beef with NATO, the Russians would feel unsafe to border with a enemy entity, would you imagine if Russia would put its influence in Mexico or Cuba? What would the US do?
You are pretty much saying that Ukrainian sovereignty doesn't matter and the Zelensky shouldn't try to defend his country but instead roll over, and let Russia, loot rape and kill whatever they want.
Russia must face a decisive defeat on the battlefield, good news is it looks like this may happen, Ukraine will retake Kherson soon, and they can even easily reach Crimea from there.
> So I think the only way to let Zelensky think about making compromise, is to shrink gradually the amount of weapons supplied, because this war can't go on forever on european soil, and we need to get an end to it. The issue is: US doesn't any any interest touched by keeping this war, so the EU and US interests are not matched, and that's why I wouldn't consider them allies right now.
The only way to stop this happening again, is to do the opposite, supply the heaviest weapons possible to Ukraine and push back Russia with such force that even blinking in Ukraines direction becomes unthinkable in the future.
> While peace is not always possible, if we balance the amount of support, to compromises, then we can get there, and I think Biden is sucking at making compromises at the moment
It's easy to say this when it's not your people, country or friends getting killed annex and genocided.
I’ve seen citizen burning cities when there were Americans involved, just think about the g7 and g8 and ttip protests, I really don’t believe polls, but we’ll see upcoming elections I guess
> it's crazy to give that much of (mostly) your youth's attention to an adversary.
You mean an adversary from China rather than an adversary from the US?
There's a small, but not that significant advantage in having the company having ~questionable~ societal effects be from your own country, especially if you're not going to regulate them anyway.
>This may be the beginning of the end for what Silicon Valley calls "tech"
There's something about the way you phrased this that just made me just realize there's a very real possibility that the internet could turn into television part two. If you think about the most popular platforms, they are mostly video and now the other very popular ones are trying to follow in kind. There's also all the streaming platforms that are not really thought of as the internet, but work basically the same. It really might be that the internet as we think of it--text based--might be a bit of a niche interest (not that this is necessarily a bad thing).
>There's something about the way you phrased this that just made me just realize there's a very real possibility that the internet could turn into television part two.
How? I can enter any URL I want and go to any page I want. Anyone can start a website, and I can effortlessly visit it.
Does not seem at all comparable to being locked into what some bosses at a cable/satellite TV/TV channel company decide you have access to, at the time they say you can access it. With no ability to upload.
Boggles my mind how. Unless it is an arts and crafts or mechanical or some other hands on video, it is so inefficient to watch someone talk rather than just read the transcript.
It's well known that not everyone does best with text. It's why most college lectures have a text/notes, a lecture, and a discussion component. Some value the interactivity of the discussion, some the audio of the lecture, and others the text itself. For the longest time the internet mostly gave value to people who preferred to interact in text. Now the internet is wide open to give value to people who prefer interacting in discussion, video, audio, and more.
I do. My time is valuable. And text is also much easier to archive for future reference.
It's also much easier to skip through parts in a written document because you can see the context before and after easily on a written text. Whereas with video you have this kind of catch up every time you skip.
It’s not the only difference. If I think along with a video/audio, I lose tracks quickly and have to rewind, but there is no obvious cue to where. Text has a fundamental property of being in sync with whatever level of attention I’m paying to its parts. Talk doesn’t have it.
TikTok and IG are mostly for entertainment not for learning, not sure how efficiency apply. Also we are talking about an instant stream of short clips, not old school YT where launching a video requires clicking and waiting.
Human attention generally isn't zero sum like that, so I've always been puzzled by this perceived "war" against text on the internet. People who previously didn't want to interact in text probably only used the internet sparingly or only used the internet for certain tasks. I've always been great at interacting with texts but had a strict rule not to try to learn mechanical skills on the internet and checkout picture books from the library, or better yet ask an experienced friend/professional. Now I can pop up Youtube and find out how an electrician changes outlets in a home. I now strictly do more things on the internet.
> Human attention generally isn't zero sum like that
How so? There's only 24 hours in a day, and so many things to do in them. During those hours, one can pay attention to multiple topics but even then, the time limit means only so many details and thinking time can be acquired during them.
TBH, for me this is already happening. I am mostly using Youtube as a source of news and information. News, there are many local news services of places that I lived in that I can't watch on "normal" TV and can now enjoy in this way.
Summary of sport events check). Opinion panels on video games and movies (check)
The discovery algo is still terrible. But the content is there.
Is KitchenAid losing to Tesla? Is BNSF losing to PepsiCo?
These statements are only valid if you think the two things should be comparable.
The backlash is because people want them to be separate, and to serve separate purposes.
The people at Facebook controlling Instagram are making this comparison, but to me (and probably many other people), this is more akin to KitchenAid building an electric car to compete with Tesla, while simultaneously dismantling their kitchenware department.
It's just so frustrating. Tech has this "winner takes all" mentality, there can only be one app to rule them all. That's what people are revolting against here... "make Instagram Instagram again".
I don't understand why Facebook just cannot accept that different apps have different use cases for different people. They're already one of the biggest tech companies in the whole world. Why is that not enough? Is it greed?
Likely waiting on stolen metaverse R&D from American companies given to them from the Chinese government. That's the entire Chinese nation-state backed hackers MO. Steal R&D from Fortune 500 companies to then give it to private Chinese businesses to further the Chinese economy. Why waste your own time/money/resources on R&D when you can just steal it. Same with IP and IP laws.
I don't blame them tbh. On a whole species level, why are we inventing the wheel hundreds of separate times just to satisfy pedantic legalese? Any alien observing earth would think we are idiots and clearly nothing to be worried about because we do stuff like this, in the name of profits usually, instead of just sharing ideas openly with each other.
Actually it's pretty smart to reward the inventive ones and punish the freeloaders, or else there'd be a rush to become a freeloader and stop the hard work of inventing - leading to species-wide collapse.
The reward of a novel invention is enough to keep it going. Look at science. All ideas are published and shared and you don't have this freeloader issue, because the rewards follow innovation even when those innovations are pubically shared. Also take a look at your own work. Chances are you are freeloading on someone else's ideas with everything you do, and there are huge chunks of process that you are only able to do because someone decided to make those ideas freely available to other people.
But science has a big system of distributing money up front to people to do the work of innovating. There is no such system in place to fund people developing innovative products that require significant up front investment.
Also the "product" of science innovation is the actual innovation and being first to publish. An equivalent freeloader problem would not be someone copying the idea/papers after they are released. It would be spying inside the laboratory, copying the ideas and releasing competing papers before the actual researcher releases their own. If that was happening, I am sure you would object.
The open/free scientific communities are responsible for most tangible benefit - meanwhile, those reaping the biggest rewards give us... planned obsolescence
I understand the sentiment and even agree to an extent, but the reality is things are abused and wasted as well - to a shocking degree, in pursuit of 'mine'
False. Tangible benefits are frightfully hard to bring about. Nobody does that for free. Newton came up woth calculus, shared it for free, and transformed the world.
But all tangible benefits arising from that involved a lot of people, a lot of work, and a lot of risk. Planned obsolescence, bad as it may be, is a non-issue in the bigger picture.
Within the context of this comment thread ("freeloaders" copying the R&D of the "inventive ones"), it seems like the opposite is true for global innovation: inventive ones are being punished by freeloaders copying their work and being able to offer it for a lower price, due to not having to recoup R&D costs/investments (among other factors).
In a way you can also explain it as standing in the shoulders of giants. Get the stuff that was already done shared out of the way and encourage more to be built on top.
How do you think humans should incentivize R&D without allowing for those who successfully deployed R&D to protect their ability to reap the fruits of their efforts? I’m sympathetic and am very interested in the idea of the government creating public goods out of intellectual property on a national level (ie instead of rewarding copyrights/parents the government would buy out the creator and make it free for citizens to do what they’d like), but that could work because the government has sovereignty over its territory - how do you prevent international free riding on R&D?
For the research part (figuring out something previously impossible)? No need to incentivise, the kick of figuring it out is enough to motivate people, just provide UBI so the nerds can tinker.
For the development/application part? Let people race to figure out the best way to deploy things before someone else does, the way the swiss and Germans and Chinese did in the free for all time. I've heard competition be called something that incentivises people to find edges that aren't easily copied, and trade secrets can still exist
> For the research part (figuring out something previously impossible)? No need to incentivise, the kick of figuring it out is enough to motivate people, just provide UBI so the nerds can tinker.
I think this is only true to a certain extent. We have reached a point where a lot of new innovation and invention is only possible with a truly tremendous amount of financial investment. No amount of tinkering in your garage is going to bring about the next advancement in EUV lithography. You need an entity with a lot of capital and a strong incentive to bring many of these things about. That can come from either the private sector or the government, but it cannot realistically be pulled out of thin air.
Yeah, but we were talking about incentives not about finding capital. Nerds are perfectly capable of writing proposals, budgets, etc. if they have the time, and if there is not need to feed constituents and make a profit of the results, it can be done cheaply and under budget. You might still want to spend time optimising this, but the incentives are there already and need not to be set (provide public goods, have fun doing it)
A lot of government funded R&D e.g. from the NIH or NSF has stipulations actually that say the data and results be made publicly available so that other researchers may benefit. At the end of the day we have to decide where our values lie. Do they lie with individualized benefit? Then we allow people to have protection legally so they may individually profit off of that technology using a perverted market condition (them having the sole rights of distribution for a period of time). If we value the collective whole, then we would share these ideas with others who would benefit from them and further them still, like we do medical research. You have to decide where your moralities lie.
What if they spent $20m to create the innovation? Who judges when an innovation is appropriate to convert in the manner? What happens to the innovations that aren't deemed worthy of conversion?
Profits matter, though! We need them to pay people to do the research and development, which people will not do for nothing - our dependence on food and shelter makes this necessary. If an American firm absorbs all the costs, but gains none of the benefit, it will not survive as long, meaning the research will also disappear alongside it.
China, on the other hand, can spend those funds elsewhere while also poaching the work of the American firm, which would put them at a great competitive advantage.
Profits aren't necessary for R&D, that's just one model where R&D is funded by consumers through direct purchases. Another model is where R&D is simply funded through taxation and grants. That is the model that medical research is often funded through, and it works well because it allows researchers around the world to help our species overcome disease.
How do you deal with an international free rider problem? If the word collectively agreed to fund research then I would love for all results to be released publicly, but how do you stop countries from free riding off of the R&D from other countries? From a game theoretic perspective it seems that countries who are fully self interested (putting aside notions of fairness/ethics, which I wish would be enough to lead to desirable outcomes but is unfortunately not the case) would clearly choose to just free ride off of the developments of other nations, and reap the fruits of reward while spending that money elsewhere (potentially in ways that could end up hurting the researching country, like the free rider spending it on their military).
Totally good point! Though, that is also quite restrictive. Some of the biggest innovations which change society the most are incredibly weird, out of left field innovations that a governmental or grant program would most likely not fund - just because the nascent idea is too crazy.
You get a lot of money funding weird ideas in VC firms, where the incentive structure (of profit) makes it possible to fund a tonne of ideas, where it is expected that most of the ideas will fail.
This still has the free rider problem at a nation state level. Let's say China invests 100 billion a year in innovation, and makes it all open. France then comes along and says "I don't need to bother with spending on innovation, I'll just use China's legwork, and spend my billion on out marketing china". China would eventually run out of cash for research.
Copying is a great source of innovation and industrial development. Take German engineering ('Made in Germany' was a label originally intended to make the German copycats more visible in England, from where the processes were copied, but that sort of backfired in hindsight), the Swiss watch and pharma industries (based on French patents that were practically unenforceable in Switzerland at the time)...
Once you have a process up and running, it's almost human instinct to try and improve it. If you start by copying the latest stuff, chances are you'll find a few new tweaks.
That depends, look at the Soviet Union, they bought Fiat 124 assembly line and they produced the car with just minor tweaks until 2010 (lada 2105).
They made the great Lada Niva and produced also unchanged until 2010.
Improving thing is not a given and not in every culture. It is a trait of the western culture for sure, but not necessarily shared in the world.
And all that Silicon Valley is doing is funding young 20 somethings for the next social groupcrap over and over and over. It's not exactly like Silicon Valley is being innovative.
TikTok is just making Silicon Valley mad because they finally met a bigger VC (the Chinese government) running their own playbook and they can't beat it.
The mere thought of Facebook codebase being usable anywhere else but by Facebook is silly. If someone gave somebody a dump of Google's monolith were to even begin looking?
You need the engineers too. There is no Bond-like blueprint to steal.
Tbh I find this comment hilarious given the story we are commenting on. In this case, it is Meta/Instagram that is trying to copy TikTok, and yet still can't pull off as good a recommendation algorithm.
I won't be surprised the day that Silicon Valley finally sees a real correction. We are due for one, big time. Just look at what Google and Meta have been doing compared to the ability of newcomers like TikTok. China will win, and when reality comes knocking, it will be too late and suddenly that easy money is going to vanish.
If at least the algorithm was any good, people might not have complained as much.
Like, I only follow sport stuff. Some triathletes, professional bicyclists, skiers etc. What does Instagram then decide to show me? A female cyclist with her zipper down and lots of cleavage, a skier in bikini, ass pics of swimmers etc.. Probably that's the most trending stuff related to my interests, but I follow no accounts related to that, anf scrolling through my likes they're nowhere like that, so please show me what I want instead.
Yeah, this is frustrating. My content isn't just my tastes, it's my taste + sex because <20-40 yo male>. So, I don't really feel good even opening the explore tab anywhere that isn't private, because there's a good chance there will be questionable content.
I don't have TikTok, but for 2 years this is what I've been hearing from people who love it. They figured out a way to show you exactly what you're interested in, without you giving them any specific input
There have been many articles about the phenomenon of the "For You Page"[1][2]. But the funny part is Meta sees this and figures - people are looking at videos, we'll do videos. And not - people are seeing what they specifically like, lets do that
TikTok quickly learns what you don't like and the homepage becomes a mix of your subscriptions, new content that you might like and very new kind of content that you haven't been exposed or stuff that you outgrew but you might like to revisit.
Learning the things you don't like is important. It's much more pleasant experience when you are not exposed to the stuff you don't like. Unlike Twitter, the stuff you don't like doesn't mean things you disagree with. You very well might not like politics, TikTok keeps you out of the culture war then.
Interestingly it also seems to mix your content with content your friends tend to view. Or at least it does so tentatively, to see if you share the same interest. When I friended a pilot friend of mine on TikTok, I immediately started seeing pilot/plane content. This is after having had an account since forever and not once having seen pilot content on my For You page before. It's an interesting way to broaden your horizons, but it does turn a little common denominator, depending on what your friends like.
Similarly (and I have no way of proving this, but I believe it 100%), TikTok seems to alter your feed to incorporate videos from other people watching TikTok near you. My friends and I have made a game of this where we cast TikTok to a TV, watch videos, and try to guess which of us the video was intended for.
I've never once had a "oh wow that's a neat content discovery method" moment from Facebook/Instagram/YouTube but it has happened multiple times with TikTok. I'm not saying TikTok is the end-all-be-all of social media, but it's a good window into what social media could be, if they stopped chasing ad revenue and anger-driven content.
Oh it definitely keeps track of you social circle and shows similar content. Bedtime browsing on the same phone often yields some "I've seen this before" reactions.
Most political things don't generate huge amounts of platform advertising money probably on TikTok... The autopilot ad revenue is easy for them to make on political content as well because right now, there's only a few different aspects competing with each other... It's likely that a lot of users don't primarily go to TikTok for political content, it's primarily music and social influencer based as well... This is why TikTok allows users to avoid political content, it's not a "cash cow" niche for them.
Of course, I'm just saying that there are more fart jokes, memes, and makeup tip videos than political ones on TikTok at this particular moment in time.
I think that's probably exactly it. I don't know whether the ad ratio is different, but you're just far more likely to see something new and interesting on TikTok vs scroll pass mountains of uninteresting or meh things until something comes along. I dunno in terms of where you'd see more ads and who knows you probably do see more ads in the low-reward boring app that you have to scroll forever on. But when your thumb is hovering between launching two apps, it's not rocket science where it's going to learn to land.
And I agree with the other commenter that TikTok is good at finding novelty in ways the other is not. Things like YouTube or whatever will just show you endless variations of the things you've already liked. TikTok will throw you things you like from way out of left field.
I think one of the biggest things TikTok does is that it shows completely random videos from time to time. I often get videos with 0 views that were just randomly shown to me. So the platform actually has some randomness that can spontaneously find something interesting instead of having people build up a base first.
> They figured out a way to show you exactly what you're interested in, without you giving them any specific input
They optimized their primary user interaction to provide specific input!
By distilling user choice down to {watch time} or {swipe}, and preferentially promoting short pieces of content that generate more swipes, they get unambiguous and frequent input.
Which isn't to lessen their achievement, but is to highlight that they engineered their entire experience to provide their algorithms more and cleaner feedback.
There was a talk I went to a few years back where the speaker (Genevieve Bell) discussed the idea of "systems of delight" - that most recommendation engines fail because they just tell you things that you know, or that someone wants to sell.
What they're bad at is working out what you don't know what you want: the example that she gave was: you land in a new city, you're on your way somewhere. A recommendation engine might already know that you drink coffee and point out the cafes on the way to where you're going - but will it "know" to suggest that there's a public sculpture and that you wouldn't think to look at ordinarily, but you would be happy to see.
TikTok seems much closer to that notion of "systems of delight".
(However, for a great deal of social media I want to be running what I look at anyway.)
Yep, TikTok learns really fast and after it has learned it shows you mostly stuff it knows you like.
Then - maybe one video in 20 or something - you get stuff that's either completely different, completely new (under 100 likes/views) or related to something you liked a long time ago. And then the next one is again something you actually like.
The Instagram model is just shoving "recommendations" to every 3rd slot on my screen. And every 4th one is an ad.
What I like also changes frequently. I think that is the magic of TikTok that they adjust quickly to what I want to see and now like Twitter / YT / etc what I have looked at in the past
I'm not open to discovering new content in social media, that's it. If I want to see someone's posts, there's a handy "follow" button for that. If I don't want to see someone's posts, I don't follow them. Force-feeding me content from people I don't follow in an attempt to manipulate me simply annoys me. The best algorithm is "ORDER BY `created_at` DESC".
If I want to see content from people I don't know, I use YouTube, Reddit or HN — simple as that. I don't use TikTok out of principle.
I think this is interesting for two reasons. One, I tend to agree that, in my main feed, I want to see just what I've subscribed to, in the most to least recent order, that's it. I come in to see what's new, and am probably done after that. Two, on the chance that I want to spend more time in the app, there is a "Discover" or "Explore" tab for exactly this. The feature they're forcing into the main screen exists, but apparently doesn't drive enough views by itself.
That's interesting. The algorithmic feed, even though I'm not a fan, shows me stuff that I'm actually genuinely interested in, and I'm not generally interested in the pop culture so it's not that, it really is targeted and successful.
Having said that, I used to love Instagram much more when it was a photo, forget reels, not even regular video/IGTV, platform.
Instagram's biggest failing in trying to copy Tiktok is their feed algorithm.
Tiktok has nailed the delightful "stumble upon" effect of getting users of all ages to keep going to the next and the next video. I don't mind how each new piece of content is paged because the content is better for the format and it doesn't feel clunky when I do want to skip to the next one.
Instagram couldn't switch their algorithm because people think they still want to see the content they've been seeing... otherwise they'd just be using TikTok.
In insta, we are used to scrolling really quickly until something catches the eye and THEN we engage. That is because the content in the insta feed is not as good and there are more ads. The new scrolling/paged UI in Instagram feels terrible because I can't fly through bad content to engage with what I want.
> Tiktok has nailed the delightful "stumble upon" effect
Am I the only one who hates this usage of the word "delightful"? I think of delightful as nearly a synonym to the word "serendipitous", in that there's a rare joy to it -- difference between those two words that serendipitous is unexpected while delightful could be expected. I associate this with events like running into close friends or family, or just having a beautiful day and being able to have fun outside. It needs an element of rarity, whereas TikTok and Instagram are novelty on demand, and so that serendipitous joy fades into habit-forming addiction.
I am probably making an old-man-yells-at-cloud argument here, but I recently read an article that described the Android Compose toolkit as a way to make developing Android apps a "delightful experience" and it made me realize how much I despise that usage of the word for fairly mundane things.
Yes, delight has been overused and dumbed down to industry vernacular for any positive user emotion.
It has a connotation that includes rarity or almost... (and I am putting on my over the top sales person hat) "something to be treasured". But I chose the word intentionally to reference stumble upon which I think a lot of folks on HN feel nostalgia for.
Reminds me of the CS Lewis quote, "Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."
You're right, the meaning of the word has been bastardized by tech and design people. In fact it feels like the only time I ever even hear it nowadays is from a tech press release or from an overwrought tech conference presentation.
> Instagram couldn't switch their algorithm because people think they still want to see the content they've been seeing...
This will differ a lot based on the user. I only use Instagram to keep tabs on activities in a few venues I frequent. I follow those and I only see what they post. Perfect. For it to show me random crap that's trending would totally break it for me. I haven't noticed this yet but I'm not even using their app, only the website.
Similarly, Facebook killed itself for me when it moved from the timeline to the algorithm driven feed. The feed showed me more random crap and less of the people I was interested in. Eventually I left and replaced it with nothing.
I wonder if we will see a trend of moving away from algorithmic feeds and more towards services that allow for the humanization of the content aggregation process. I know from my personal habits, I have a list of about 5-10 different sub-reddits that I frequently visit to find content instead of the content coming directly to me. The people posting within those communities sort of act like a humanized algorithm for determining what content is worth seeing. I’ve noticed in particular that the communities of the content creators that I follow being some of the best aggregators for sharing content of interest to me. I find that the communities that form around the creators being some of the strongest and most tightly knit in the modern web.
I’ve actually been working on an app https://aurdia.com to better organize and facilitate the growth of the communities formed around content creators. I’m hoping to help build a healthier web less reliant on advertisements and the data collection that comes along with it.
I switched back to the website from the app, because although it's a bit clunkier, for whatever reason they push far less random suggested stuff on you there.
I didn't understand the appeal of Tiktok until just now when I read your comment. I was a StumbleUpon.com addict in 2006-07. I spent hours a day on it, saw really interesting content and even made some IRL friends.
I have no idea why they killed that site. I'll give Tiktok another try.
I don't get how that description sounds like a good way to spend your time. Why do you need hours of throway content in your life from people you don't have any connection to? Why not like go to the gym or hike or cook your self a healthy meal.
I think Reddit also kind of replaced it. Back then, Reddit was more of a social bookmarking site like del.ic.ious but with expanded community features. You would go to the front page, and see a pretty similar selection of links to what you would get smashing the Stumble button that day, only it's been curated and sorted by the community through the karma system. Each link also came with a very well designed comment section where users could discuss it.
Correct, it was a mix of Digg, Slashdot and old-school message boards. As far as I remember, it was the comment section that most people were interested in. The link itself came second.
Probably a part of it, but a not insignificant part was the buying of it by eBay who had no clue what to do with it, then selling it back to the founders.
By that point or soon thereafter Garrett Camp had co-founded Uber which obviously worked pretty well and had less interest in the site.
I think there's a little too much focus on the algorithm in these comments, and not enough focus on the content itself. The quality of content on Tiktok is just worlds better than anything on Reels. Reels is full of visually interesting content like hydraulic presses, food preparation, construction timelapse, etc. And that content is engaging for a few minutes, it's unique, it's fine. But it doesn't keep you coming back.
Tiktok has a rich mix of content that's silly, educational, political, impressive, sexy, etc. The amount of things I learn on Tiktok and bookmark is incredible. And Tiktok's features like stitches, duets, and shared audios make it really easy to keep a conversation going, letting creators reference each other async. Tiktok has its own unique multimedia language, using audio and visual composition to express memes. Creators choose the tone they wish to present a meme (eg use a joke audio like 'insert cash or select payment type' but pair it with serious commentary on how mental health professionals request payment at the end of a therapy session). That's why it's endlessly interesting and engaging, and to me that's the real 'secret sauce' that the copycats never can capture.
I haven't checked recently and I don't have the phone with the new version of Instagram on it with me (so maybe this changed) but for a long time (and I think still) I have one account that has the paged UI and one account that still has the fling UI logged in to the same copy of Instagram simultaneously (as in where I can switch between them using the account selector).
Yeah, I am sure there is some strategy to rolling out such a big change. It limits a Day 1 blast of complaints and media posts when they slowly roll it out. Plus it lets them eliminate any issues (according to them hah) before it reaches the masses.
It's fascinating how reactionary and directionless Instagram and Facebook have become. Instagram in particular has become Frankenstein's monster over the last few years, pathetically trying to reproduce functionality from other apps. The latest cloning of TikTok's feed is almost embarrassing. It's a testament to how deep the lack of a creative culture at Meta runs.
My impression back in the day was that Facebook bought Instagram for the same reason. They couldn't get the younger crowd to stay on Facebook. It's more of a testament about to how much youth are not interested in living their lives on their parent's platforms.
It's sad that they keep trying to bolt this functionality onto existing apps. Why not leave Instagram and Facebook alone as functional tools with purposes -- posting statuses, photos, keeping in touch with friends and family -- and then create a separate TikTok competitor? And a separate Snap competitor? Is it just because FB's awful awful Snap clone crashed and burned and nobody used it, so they're afraid to launch a new app these days?
> It's a testament to how deep the lack of a creative culture at Meta runs.
This seems to be it. Meta only "innovates" to copy competitors. WhatsApp was a threat and was bought. Same for Instagram. Snapchat couldn't be bought, so it became stories and is now part of every product Meta owns.
TikTok is the latest threat, and history repeats itself. Instead of creating a superior product that people want to use, Meta is sacrificing Instagram to replicate TikTok's every feature (including finally paying creators).
What creative culture? A billion user beast does not know, need or want creative or culture.
It wants profits and more of them, every quarter.
TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos. Instagram isn't losing to TikTok's 'creative culture', it's losing to American elite's favorite move - throwing money at a problem until everyone else quits, at which point you give talks and write books about how it was due to innovation, freedom and democracy, oh and LGBTQ+ or whatever the term is nowadays.
Source: know a couple of people who could barely scrape by on Instagram/youtube, switched to TikTok and are all of a sudden making more money than me. The infinite money faucet at TikTok will soon run dry and it'll become just another shit social media platform, like all the rest.
>TikTok's only 'innovation' is paying billions of dollars to teenagers to create meme videos
TikTok has at least done three innovative things. One is the frictionless sign in that doesn't require an account, secondly the well done video editing tools and most importantly abstracting away the social graph.
And on the finance site this doesn't check out either. TikTok is on track to triple revenue this year alone and top creators generally make more money from outside sponsors and deals than from the company itself. Of all the social media site TikTok arguably chips in the least amount of money themselves.
It's interesting that they don't care, it's a Marie Antoinette-esque attitude to their lifeblood, and ultimately what will end their dominance.
The truth is they converted a free service into a pay service (the gas-lights creators and businesses into paying for visibility). The visibility, even when paid for is not very fruitful for many as well...
If you run a small business like a restaurant in the US, but get 40,000 views directed to your profile of people who live in Russia, it is unlikely to turn into a pipeline of sales that can sustain your business... This is just one way modern social apps gaslight people who are working very hard to build business... It undermines the very model of business success, to keep people working very hard... For no reward. These site let memes and non-business-related things flow all day on feeds provided they are not promoting anything, which makes the sites appear "full of life".
People seem to be catching on that it was all one big gaslight after they've spent tons of money on ads, they are slowly realizing that it's a rigged carnival game, but social apps like Instagram have pitted the rest of the Internet, and they constantly play a dictatorial role. The carpet can get pulled at any time if they don't take these complaints seriously though, and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out.
I really don't think TikTok is much better now either, these apps all use the technique of phasing adds and slowly reducing (external) visibility for creators, and just judging from comments I see on Twitter, the economy is imploding as a result.
With the economy as bad as it is, this current creator economy is not sustainable, and not fruitful. We'll all see the quality on these platforms decline as creators quit and protest, while platforms will burn up cash reserves and disappoint investors as their overhead for hosting and operations increase.
We've praised the arrogance of social platform leadership for too long and now it's coming back to bite all of us. The biggest worry is that there will not much to gravitate back to if social media implodes... But it's also a great opportunity for IRC and web sites to re-emerge, and for someone to invent hopefully something better than these giant platforms that really aren't "social" at all any more.
I can't see IRC coming back as there's just slightly too much friction for the common person to get up and running.
I could see websites coming back (I mean like the way people used to actually browse websites instead of social media). The problem with websites at the moment is discoverability. Google's SEO is a major roadblock to this at the moment. A way around it might be a "web of discoverability", with meaningful, relevant links on each website curated by the site owners themselves. At the moment, this seems to be a void filled by ads, which is a sort of tragedy of the commons.
Yeah, chat and email basically prove that the vast majority of the public don’t actually want to run and maintain a server themselves, which basically leaves
* carriers (universally disliked by the population, tolerated at best, and pretty scummy trying to trap you into their own networks or bloatware if they can get away with it)
* apps that monetize using ads
* apps that monetize with payment
* an OS-level standard (iMessage is very successful, the Android chatting less so, and nonexistent on desktop OSes)
Those are music picks I regularly update... It would be really cool if there was the ability to standardize the format for small web sites like this and then be able to follow others with similar interests... Pretty much reviving the old Myspace in essence, but with independent micro-sites for hosting curated links and other content from each user.
I like that, Bandcamp lets artists do something similar in that they can suggested albums/tracks ahead of the payment algorithmically selected suggestions.
In the early 2000s I remember lots of blogs about music where they just posted links to mp3s because there didn't seem to be a better way to embed tracks. I appreciate people based suggestions.
Not quite it seems. I was a kid when Facebook came out. I remember what it was like to find websites that had real, bizarre, and innovative content, but I was too young to pick up on the terminology or appreciate how any of it worked.
Wouldn't a search service that blacklists the giant players -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. -- also serve as the same kind of "web of discoverability"? I imagine a search engine where the stewards manually whitelist websites that aren't full of SEO-speak, spam, and ads. Hell, I'm sure my own blog would rank pretty well!
IRC, not in the classic essence of connecting to chat servers, but browser-based options exist. It would be really cool if someone made a tool like Twitter spaces, but for one-on one conversations with random people... e.g. A voice-only chat tool that paired you with random people within different fields for conversations.
> I really don't think TikTok is much better now either, these apps all use the technique of phasing adds and slowly reducing (external) visibility for creators, and just judging from comments I see on Twitter, the economy is imploding as a result.
Exactly. Every single social media company with VC capital has thrown their small users and creators under the bus in favour of the ad driven corporations, mainstream media and boosters coming in and ruining the platform for everyone, hence why the small creators complain about the changes made to the platform, especially the very early adopters and the hyper-active users.
I expect this to never change.
> With the economy as bad as it is, this current creator economy is not sustainable, and not fruitful. We'll all see the quality on these platforms decline as creators quit and protest, while platforms will burn up cash reserves and disappoint investors as their overhead for hosting and operations increase.
That is the basic power law that is being applied here. The early and successful creators on their have already reaped most of the rewards and the attention on there and will need to escape to other platforms in the long term, or find other ways of getting income (partnerships, deals, guest appearances, etc) to continue to be relevant. TikTok is no different to this and it doesn't matter how many users it has.
The outcome is going to be exactly the same as it was for Facebook today and the company (TikTok) is driven in the interest of its shareholders and to make money. Not its users as they are not the priority, so no-one should be surprised to see how the company will screw over its users and throw them under the bus if they ever did a redesign.
Rinse and repeat for current hyped social network of the decade.
99+% of ads are unethical thought manipulation. Until citizens recognize this and take a stand with their wallets against the businesses who profit from unethical ad tactics, we're going to keep slipping deeper into the abyss.
I've noticed (on multiple accounts) that TikTok stops view counts on videos after a point... Even though they can still be viewed directly, TikTok does not update view counts. Many creators stay in agonizing limbo even though they are getting views. It's pretty crazy how much TikTok gaslights everyone, there no better than anyone else.
A major "Aha!" moment for me was when I had it pointed out to me that the social media companies' algorithms that get and keep users attention by showing them what they want can easily be exapted to manipulate the metrics and ad buying behavior.
Yep, the algorithms are all geared towards serving company revenue, not towards finding the best content contributors... What you see on most platforms is now override by who pays the most to boost their posts. There's a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors goin on.
If wonder if TikToks success is just not doing this. Like "viral" articles and videos used to work on Facebook in like 2014, when "likes" actually mattered and could make something a chainmail-ish between friends.
I’m a little late to seeing your reply (my apologies) but the easiest point of reference (and where I’m drawing my prognostications from) is of course “Simulacra and Simulation”
That's a great theory. But judging by the number of people I see mindlessly scrolling instagram and TikTok I think they are going to be just fine.
I think YouTube might be the one with the problems in the future. The younger generation seems to prefer the 30 second video clips, rather than the longer form YouTube videos. I think at some point Youtube is going to have to start deleting content, or restricting uploads. Their unlimited uploads for everyone strategy doesn't seem sustainable to me.
Facebook is absolutely dead. Nobody under 25 cares about it.
Anecdotal, but I've seen a few people say "I don't really use Instagram anymore" since these changes. For me it's pretty bad, and I'll probably only look at people's reels from now on. They really did just completely butcher the app, and I would bet money on their usership among young people going down over the next year or 2. Of course, older people are still signing up for instagram, so it's possible it just sort of replaces Facebook.
For most creators, the though of moving a volume of videos to a new location is terrifying. Also, a lot of the content on Youtube is formatted and made only based on YouTube (logos, watermarks, screen format, etc..).
Right now YouTube uses downgraded storage for less-viewed content, that's why a lot of older low-view content takes time to buffer when it's played... If they delete stuff, creator hell might break loose.
Instagram also has a strange infinite scroll that greatly impairs and discourages users from looking into older content... Facebook does it too. I wouldn't be surprised if they are planning on switching to these new formats as a springboard/catalyst for eliminating tons of older content posts, and that will also be a big problem, it's not just pictures of grandma that will be lost.
Maybe it'll show up in their usage numbers. I stopped using IG because it's near impossible not to prevent the sound from blasting from accidentally scrolling or clicking on a reel.
I feel like a product team that gave any shit whatsoever would give people a mute button that stays put. People use their phones in lots of different locations (with other people around). And phones are constantly blasting music at random points because of Reels.
What boggles my brain is when someone wants to show me a video on Instagram, but there is no way to play it from the beginning. So have to wait for it to loop around.
Typically the "solution" is to scroll up/down to the next/previous video and then back to the desired video. Though that only works for reels, not non-reel videos (whatever those are called).
There is some way to mute it. I've already forgotten how exactly, but I think you have to open a non-reel video and mute that. Then all the reels are muted.
This means that I now have the opposite problem. I can't selectively unmute reels in my feed even if I want to. Instagram is 100% silent for me, even though my phone is not muted and doesn't have the volume turned down.
I really don't get it why they don't have a mute button on the reels themselves.
The volume control issues on IG are crazy. Having to mute and unmute everything is painful, I think TikTok wins a bit for just playing everything at whatever device volume is set at, but some content is manipulated to be loud, and some is low volume, it may even be an engagement algorithm driving that to keep people focused on the app.
I also think with a lot of people on anti-work time these days, within these companies they may be having a hard time finding staff to manage the development issues, bugs and features may not get fixed any time soon simply because of that alone.
I feel like it’s even worse. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and I haven’t figured out how to get it to do what I want 100% of the time. Just have a mute button on the player!
No matter how many "users" Instagram has, TikTok is absolutely destroying Instagram in terms of minutes of user engagement. People are spending way, way more time on TikTok than Instagram and the trend is accelerating.
Meta is in full panic mode. They see the sand slipping through their fingers. They are trying to turn Instagram into TikTok because they think that is the only move. After all, it worked for them last time when they copied Stories and beat Snap.
But this time, not only is that strategy failing, but it is making their still enormous user base revolt.
Stories was a relatively useful extension to Instagram that didn't break the core app, so adding it worked. TikTok is a different thing and doesn't slot into Instagram as cleanly. Meta already tried making their TikTok clone a new "tab" in the app, but that didn't get the kind of results they needed. So now they are trying to make the whole app into TikTok because they don't know what else to do .
I'm not really sure where they go from here. Instagram isn't satisfied being Instagram - they need to lead the world in order to attract ad revenue. But they are losing ground quickly.
In the social media game, momentum is everything. TikTok has way more watch time so creators get more user engagement and can build their profiles much more quickly. Instagram is behind in engagement, so there is no incentive for creators to jump ship and get worse results. Instagram gets less fresh content which leads to less engagement and less ad sales. It's a vicious cycle that puts TikTok further ahead.
Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow. Last night a photo from my step daughter flickered briefly and then was lost. I couldn't find it again until this morning. I literally can't find their content anymore without scrolling and dodging videos that keep popping up.
Youtube broke entirely a few months ago. The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent. Several content creators I follow have their business dying from sudden drop in ad revenue due to the changes.
Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home. Stuff appears from friends or family days after posting, now at the top of my feed.
Twitter is, surprisingly, the least broken, at least I mostly still see the people I follow. I still miss stuff because of the algorithm, but it's not, yet, forcing a ton of stuff I'm not actually following down my throat. And the ads are still clearly ads.
Twitter has a button with stars where you can select to show only the tweets of people you follow in reverse chronological order. Called Latest Tweets.
Stop blaming users for problems introduced by massive tech companies.
Yes, I know how to find my subscriptions, that's how I know the channels I like are dying; they are posting "my channel is dying videos" and only a subset of their users are finding them.
They have lists of channels by similarity. That one is the list for the Y Combinator channel. You can look up a different channel in the search bar on top of the page.
I've definitely found a bunch of new channels through it, like Yannic Kilcher and pretty much the whole AI section of YouTube. Despite watching stuff like Robert Miles and Lex Fridman YouTube never showed me the depth of the AI section on its own. After I found it the YouTube algorithm started showing me videos in the new areas I was discovering which brought even more content.
> The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent.
The solution is to go to your subscription feed. This also wasn't a few months ago. This changed many years ago. I remember hating having to put the subscriptions page in my list of URLs because it was harder to go there. Previously there was a section of the YT home page for your latest subscription uploads, I think? I don't remember exactly.
You also need to actively watch content from your subscribed channels in order to get their videos recommended to you. I have a ton of channels I'm subscribed to but not all of them show up in my recommendations because I don't watch their content enough.
I feel that's actually better because there are channels I'm subscribed to that I don't watch all of their content, e.g. conference channels, but I do want to occasionally see if they uploaded anything I want to watch. Channels I actively watch frequently have their newest uploads pop up in my recommendations almost immediately.
>> The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent.
It is, and I presume so is everyone's. I wasn't asking for help, I was explaining a bunch of problems I'm seeing.
> This also wasn't a few months ago.
No, something seriously changed a few months ago. 5 different channels are all suddenly have the same problem where their views are all down to 50% or less without explanation.
I got super excited for that YouTube functionality, then I clicked the link and realized that either I follow way too many people for this to be useful, or the people I follow are producing way more content than I can handle. I guess maybe if I "un-ring" the bell for a few of the bigger channels this could be useful...
People harp on social media algorithms but this right here is the actual problem. Your stated preferences, to see and be notified of all those videos, run contrary to your revealed preferences. And services catering to the former will lose to services catering to the latter. By harboring these mismatches we train these systems to ignore what we say we want or risk losing profits and market share.
Every morning I to go youtube and check my subscriptions for new videos. I have zero bell notifications because I just find it really annoying. I work from home most days so I play the interesting new videos that day from my subscriptions and really don't bother with anything else.
It's painful, but I have pruned my subscription list of people who upload often but I rarely watch. At this point my YouTube subscription list is channels where I open the video more than 50% of the time.
I don't know if that's "fair" or not, but it's how I keep the subscription page useful.
Yeah I did the same. I find the best way to use YouTube with a lot of subscriptions is just to click the subscriptions list and it shows you who has a new video and you can decide what you're in the mood for based on the channel.
> Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow.
I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it.
Facebook has suddenly started flooding me with posts from political meme groups I never joined and have never even looked at.
Twitch's recommended section used to be spot-on. Now they're trying to push me to watch women in hot tubs for some reason.
For me, YouTube is the only one that still manages to surface things I actually want to watch.
I don't know what changed (I've really only noticed this in the past two months), but this is starting to feel like the old broadcast TV model of executives deciding we should all watch the same thing.
Twitch has a situation where they are trying to improve discoverability of underperforming streamers. The directory used to just be sorted by live concurrent viewers, which I guess does do a lot to ensure that the front page is full of streams that people will watch (by virtue of them already being watched) but it also leads to the site being dominated by a very small group of people.
Youtube does very well but it's a lot easier to categorize and tag 10-minute videos than it is to do so to a currently active livestream... and I will point out that discovering livestreams on youtube is abysmal. I've got one person that I follow pretty closely and if they arent super good about setting up the stream beforehand it is real easy to miss because youtube will make zero effort in informing you.
But the thing is, a year ago, Twitch actually did a good job suggesting people with only six viewers. *Now* for some reason, they're pushing people in hot tubs who already have thousands of viewers. That's what I'm complaining about.
> I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it.
They've stopped using it to serve their users. They use it to serve their customers. The content they show you is what they want you to see so they can sell to advertisers, not what you want to see.
When in the Instagram app, click on the word Instagram. A select menu appears, and you can choose "Following" - you have to do this every time you open the app, and who knows when it will get the axe, but it's made this terrible platform a little more usable for me.
I agree that they're "broken" in that they don't work the way I want them to - but they're functioning perfectly normally to maximize profit. I think TikTok kinda broke the dam on this and we see it in more apps now, but it seems like we've found out that people will spend more time on the app when you show them random new people based on their interests compared to showing them just the people they chose to follow.
I think the main solution to this would be some sort of public social media platform that isn't trying to be profitable. As long we we're requiring companies to prioritize profit we're not going to get outcomes that go against that
VKontakte is the least broken of them all. There's still chronological feed and 95% of it is posts from people and pages you follow. But I imagine it's not very popular, or even known, outside of Russian-speaking countries. Don't get me wrong, there are product managers now and they do keep on relentlessly pushing their agenda (the TikTok clone aka "clips" no one asked for), but compared to what Facebook/Instagram routinely pulls off, VK feels extremely conservative.
Twitter has an algorithmic feed at all? I tend to forget that. There's a small button at the top right that I never click. One thing that DOES annoy the crap out of me though, is their insistence on exposing me to people I don't follow. Those "%user% liked" and "%user% follows" things. If only there was a dedicated button for showing someone else's tweet to your followers!
All entertainment seems to be broken. Let me watch something on netflix my recommended list is almost identical to comedy, adventure, etc. Their machine learning must show that people will just watch what is in front of them.
Facebook served me an ad a couple of months back urging me to apply for a job at the hospital I've worked for since 2015, WHILE I WAS ACCESSING FACEBOOK FROM MY WORK VPN. I have it listed as my workplace and I was coming from a IP addy owned by it and still the computer thought it should show me the ad. I just don't get it.
Spotify transitions to a “song like those in your playlist” when a playlist finishes…and 95% of those songs are from the playlist I just finished listening to…makes no sense.
>> Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home
This switching to similar 'stuff' because you looked at one thing seems to be common on social media and my guess is that this is due to 'wrong' application of recommendation engines. Twitter, LinkedIn does it too.
While logged in to Twitter, you click a 'one-off' tweet and suddenly your timeline is filled with those types of tweets and those type of topics. If you go to your settings/topics, you will see that it is now populated with variations of that topic.
Same thing with LinkedIn. You view a job and your feed/job recommendation is now populated with those type of jobs.
Social media companies don't seem to be accounting for - oh, maybe I was just being curious about this tweet or this job or this company. It's especially bad for Twitter given that you already follow certain people so they have an idea of your interest
Using Twitter as an example, it ran into the problem around 2010 or so where it, in my opinion, had found the perfect set of features. All of the tweets from the people you follow would be shown in chronological order for you. Liking a tweet simply showed support for that tweet, while retweeting it would repost it for all of your own followers. It was simple and clean. However they then ran into the problem where they felt the need to do something to maximize user retention on the site. Algorithms dictate what order things are seen in, new users and tags and trendy things are being shown to you, your likes are now also shown to the people who follow you but only sometimes, anything they could do to try and get people to consume more. It's not just Twitter; these long running social media networks are so afraid of becoming stagnant that they are chasing every trend they come across, and at some point it's going to catch up to them.
As a casual user of both Facebook and TikTok, I would share my impression of how they share videos:
TikTok
- Their algorithm seems to very quickly hone in on things I actually want to see.
- e.g. if figured out that I like to see comedy clips, some woodworking videos etc
- I suspect that they do this by a combination of showing you some "test" videos that quickly bucket your interests and then using additional data based on other videos that have paired well together from other users
- Keep doing the above and I would imagine you get to a pretty good graph of what I'm into
Facebook
- Have been a user for YEARS
- they have almost all of my personal relationships mapped
- choose to show me videos with "Wait till you see what happens!" titles that are ~10 minutes of build up to an incredibly anticlimactic ending
- As a user and a SRE/Developer, I ask myself: "The smartest people in tech + essentially limitless computing power and this is the best you can do?"
I would guess one of two things is going on:
1. I remember seeing those video ads about 10-15 years ago that went on for about 20 minutes and there was no fast forward or skip etc. Someone pointed out: "Advertisers care a LOT about people who are willing to just sit there and watch a 20 minute video"
2. What I'll basically call the "Groupon Effect" (based on [0]) which is basically "Well X is good, X+1 is better so X*1000 must be great". Andrew Mason talks a lot about this in the linked article and how Groupon just blindly followed the "metrics" rather than thinking through "Ok, what is really the best for our users/community". It seems the tech giants have gone for "What makes the most money RIGHT NOW!" vs "How do we build a larger LTV over the next couple years"
For me, it feels like the recommendations from Youtube, FB, Instagram, Spotify, etc, are really what they would want you to see, not what I would want to see. Never listened to those shitty podcasts, and that's what recommended for me on Spotify. The Youtube search is flooded with "recommendations" and "what's hot" that are hot garbage. Google search is getting useless, with tons of spam and obvious duplicated content.
Just give me a way to blacklist Google results. I know there are plugins, but Google, I am willing to augment your AI with human level intelligence when I accidentally click some blog-spam-SEO-bullshit and can't hit the back button fast enough. Hide that site for me permanently. Downrank it globally if enough users do it. Use the feedback on your AI models.
> are really what they would want you to see, not what I would want to see.
I think that there's also a huge amount of gaming of the algorithm by third parties. I doubt that Google are desperate for me to watch Jordan Peterson or the piles of other neo-fascist crap I get pushed as a recommendation any time I look at a video about cars, for example.
It could be that the deep bench of high quality content is not there on reels yet. Most of the power user base of ig (horology, woodworking, crafts, fine arts etc) knows how to take high quality pictures and need to adapt to making videos (i don't think it is that easy to do - totally different medium + style + maybe your current followers wont like it).
otoh, learned many things about the behavior of cats with dogs, dogs with rabbits, mammalX with mammalY, bears crossing the road, ducks crossing the road (no other types of mammal cross the road).
Social media companies are in a bind. They're companies, so they have to grow or die. But they're invested in their current platform, and the likelihood of a particular innovation being successful is low, so it's tough for them to do radical R&D, they're limited to tweaking their current platform. This opens the door to startups, which can capture the new (young) users who aren't committed to a platform. A small number of startups succeed and experience exponential growth that starts cutting into the growth of the established players. The Instagrams of the world have to chase features to retain growth (a strategy ultimately doomed to fail), or they will have to acquire the upstarts. Because of its close ties with the Chinese government any kind of merger or acquisition with TikTok is fraught with potential problems. Instagram is taking the only path available to it, as unlikely to succeed as it is.
This is a failing of modern corporate culture. There is nothing wrong in reaching a stable equilibrium, becoming profitable, and if you are a public company, paying dividends.
It’s unfortunate that it’s become growth at all costs, there is something to be said about public companies just stabilising, and paying out profits to shareholders.
Now, that’s not to say Facebook is able to reach a stable equilibrium. I think they are struggling to maintain that, and that’s the problem. It’s a case of not loosing market share, especially when you have promised your shareholders the world.
> a failing of modern corporate culture. There is nothing wrong in reaching a stable equilibrium, becoming profitable, and if you are a public company, paying dividends
It’s the failing of a culture. Plenty of companies do this. (I cautiously venture that most American companies do this?)
Plenty of capitalists are happy running businesses at steady state. Some, even to wind down. (We tend to have nasty names for the latter.)
Growth at all costs is not a problem with our commercial culture at large nor with capitalism. It’s a convenient bogeyman for when we want to punt on a problem.
>Plenty of capitalists are happy running businesses at steady state.
There are plenty of business owners who are happy to run at steady state---sole proprietors and family businesses, for example. These kinds of businesses can exist without capital per se, they can be financed with debt. But for businesses with investors, which is to say businesses backed by capital with the expectation that there will be a substantial return on the investment, growth is imperative.
So no, I don't believe there are plenty of capitalists happy to run a business at steady state, because one of the requirements of a capital investment is that the value of the investment grows, and the more rapidly, the better. A business owner may philosophically believe in capitalism, but that does not make them a capitalist in the active sense.
> business owner may philosophically believe in capitalism, but that does not make them a capitalist in the active sense
You've defined capitalism circularly to your argument. A steady-stage investor, whether a sole proprietor or outside investor in a business throwing off healthy dividends, is by definition not a capitalist by your book. Fine. Let's abandon the word for now.
The broader system of private ownership--the one we have in America. That doesn't require growth at all costs. Neither do outside investors. There are entire categories of outside investors who specialize in zero-growth or negative-growth companies. We can call it capitalism, as most people do, or private property or peanut malanga, the system and its mechanisms remain the same.
Growth-oriented investors need growth. And if you've spent your life around leveraged folk and venture capitalists, it may seem that's most of the capital in the world. But it's not. They're called alternative assets for a reason. The main universe of assets broadly accepts–in fact seeks-preservation of real value plus income.
>You've defined capitalism circularly to your argument.
Not so much a circular definition as a practical one. Technically an investor could invest only to get dividends or rent, but in today's world, in both the stock market and real estate, growth and appreciation dominate. Maybe this is a cultural preference that could be changed, but I think it's deeper than that: the growth imperative emerges from the competitive nature of capitalism itself, so that the system is inevitably and unavoidably growth-seeking. I hope you're right, and that a more essential asset preservation + income system can be sustained. But without significant wealth regulation, I have my doubts.
> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be,”
Uh, no. I stop and close app as soon as I realize I'm being fed "videos you just can't stop watching."
This unfortunately means I only use IG for about 2.5 seconds before I give up and try another day.
Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate:
They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products.
Keith Rabois (top VC), mentioned that FB has always prioritized optimization over new products because of the Ad business. That also could explain their inability to do anything but copy other business ideas.
The opposing point of view would be that Ads on FB/Google are so profitable that working on anything else pales in comparision (in terms of profit generation). And so they dont innovate, but iterate and optimize.
My vote is that excessive leetcode testing selects for employees with no creativity. And while these companies are massive, lower level engineers hired ten years ago do rise to the top and run whole divisions
EDIT:
Counterpoint on how good early Google employees were:
the above maxim does not apply because that was before leetcode became huge, people passing those interviews were actually brilliant, they didnt spend six months studying in a basement
> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products.
I don't think this is necessarily true because the people designing products are not the same people creating/implementing them. Even the most innovative company of the planet has some programmers and sysadmins doing "bookish" jobs as you say.
Don't fall in the trap of thinking a smart and well trained tech can't be creative; there's some code out there that is a work of art and can inspire awe in everyone. Don't think that if their work is not evident or easy to comprehend it is not creative.
Theres a difference between creating beautiful creative code and creating an innovative product that people want to use. Its a different type of intelligence, and why you dont see Math professors starting ecommerce/product/clothing businesses. The classic dichotomy between steve jobs and wozniak.
I have worked at a few big tech companies, I have regularly seen engineers drive huge innovation in how something is done. Product people cant always do that, they dont have enough understanding of large scale systems.
Admittedly I'm over a decade out of university so things might have changed, but when I was getting my masters in mathematics several of the math professors had various 'side hustles' doing cool and advanced stuff at startups and in industry or finance.
universities are dominated by anti-capitalist sentiment
I know this is trendy to say and I'm sure there are individual universities where it is true, but I see little evidence for it at large. If nothing else every hedge fund and investment bank in the world basically only hire university graduates, and they can hardly be accused of being anti-capitalist. Every economics course I ever took was based, almost axiomatically, on the premise that capitalism is awesome.
University graduates are not the same as professors.
The econ class I took at Caltech was taught by an award-winning leftist anti-capitalist professor, and if you didn't regurgitate his ideology on the tests, you got a bad grade.
Hedge funds only hire a particular subset of graduates. A lot of left-wingers set aside their ideology to get those high salaries.
My father was a finance professor at two colleges. He was the only faculty member who believed in free markets. He was constantly challenged in this by students and faculty. One time the faculty even challenged him to an open debate - the faculty against him. He took them apart. Faculty and students came up to him later saying they had no idea there was even a case for the free market, and thanked him for opening their eyes.
I wonder where you suppose Sanders' constituency comes from?
>there's some code out there that is a work of art and can inspire awe in everyone.
and the people who wrote it didn't spend thousands of hours memorizing the same stupid leetcode exercises to pass lame interviews for 6 figures job, they worked on real projects
tell me the fast inverse square root from Carmack would have been praised in an interview...
Disagree with the thousands of hours. The tasks are actually pretty easy and take about maybe 5 hours for any competent coder to brush up on.
But that's the problem. If a few hours of exercise can dramatically change someone's results then it's not an acid test and it speaks poorly to the quality of whatever team the candidate would be joining.
All interviews are two way streets and the problem is everyone knows what kind of results pass through the leet code filter and so if it's a bad process, perhaps your best candidates will decline to proceed or accept.
You want people whose time is more valuable than your money. That's kinda the whole point of employee/employer social arrangements.
Leetcode isn't an alternative to real world projects, it's an alternative to textbooks and lectures for beginners.
Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook because he got a good education and understood graph theory enough to apply it to social networks.
In the past, the only people who really understood concepts like graphs were people who endured rigorous four-year computer science curriculums. And only top students at elite schools would learn this. The average CS graduate has a very poor understanding of fundamental data structures and algorithms.
But with Leetcode, anyone can solve 5-10 graph problems and obtain the same knowledge. It's extremely efficient. In a couple of days, you can learn what used to take years.
Zuckerburg stole the idea of the product and knew php. I don’t think he needed graph theory to build it and his education was really only Exeter at that point.
The ones coming up with products are usually executives looking to advance their career. e.g. everyone I know who worked on Google Stadia who cared readily pointed out all the problems from idea to implementation. Management & product design waved off the concerns, said they were in for the long haul, and that the product would be a huge success regardless. And then they got cold feet after realizing how much of a flop it was, and how money they needed to spend to make a real entry into games.
I am no fan of leetcode. I think Google's engineering interview process is mostly RNG. But have you seen mock interviews for the product designers? They're even more inscrutable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTcXXGJiunA
I was actually impressed at how well Stadia worked. My impression is that they did an excellent job at the technical implementation. A lot of games don't require millisecond response times or amazing graphics and Stadia would have had one of the best anti-cheat systems for multiplayer games, basically for free.
What sank Stadia before it even launched was their asinine pricing strategy. It should have been clear to anyone with a basic understanding of computers that playing a game over the network will be inferior to playing local, but they could have made up the difference with pay as you go pricing and an emphasis on multiplayer games where the graphics don't matter as much. Of course they did the exact opposite, and then decided to double down on bad ideas by ignoring indie developers.
I still think the technology has a lot of potential (well in Stadia's case had a lot of potential), but with that kind of management, even the Covid lockdowns and the GPU shortage weren't enough to save a product that was designed to fail.
You're writing like Stadia's already dead, which it isn't and far from it. I've tried all the cloud gaming platforms and none touch the ease of use and pick-up-play quality of Stadia.
People today are even playing Stadia without knowing it thanks to Google's new white-labeling strategy.
I've had a couple young people complain to me about leetcode interviews at Google. I replied that they could spend a couple weeks going over the leetcode books, and if that was what it took to get a $250,000 job, then that will be the best investment of time they'd ever make.
Besides, one cannot help but learn programming things from examining leetcode solutions.
Google probably also wants to hire motivated people, and people who will study up on leetcode will be a better hire than a lazy one who doesn't want to put in the work.
Nevertheless, it's an empirical question as to whether this method of recruiting produces the employees that maximize long-term profits for the company.
I don't doubt that a major reason for asking these types of questions, as opposed to an IQ test or something, is that it is basically illegal in the US to do so.
It's an empirical question about every method of recruiting. Making a bad hire can cost a company dearly. If there was some obviously better way of doing it, wouldn't companies do that?
Avoiding expensive lawsuits is likely another reason for leetcode gates.
I agree, in the sense that it's less about leetcode skills and more about company politics. I can tell you for a fact that the programming geniuses don't make product decisions, much less so strategy decisions. These products would look VERY different if that was the case.
Instead, the important strategic decisions are left for various opportunistic short termers, like product managers, directors etc. They are incentivized on shorter time scales and are motivated by prestige, visibility and career advancement. What looks good in a slide deck will be rewarded, basically. These people are much more in touch with internal company politics first and the industry at large second. They are shockingly oblivious to their own user base – (YouTube rewind is the best irrefutable proof for this).
Big redesigns and product changes are rewarded for way too early, imo. Common tenure for a PM is 1-1.5 years, enough for a promotion, and short enough to weasel out before they have to deal with the backlash.
> The opposing point of view would be that Ads on FB/Google are so profitable that working on anything else pales in comparision (in terms of profit generation). And so they dont innovate, but iterate and optimize.
This argument is basically the same posed in the Innovator's Dilemma, and IMO it's more on the money at least for Google. The high hiring bar for Google was arguably much higher in its earlier years, when they were still innovating like crazy. Becoming a larger company, having a larger executive team instead of Larry and Sergey, and optimizing for profits rather than moonshots and "creative" projects like Loon, Wing, and even projects with a lot of internal support like Inbox all have an effect trending towards "less entrepreneurial".
People also seem to generally have a pretty big bias towards Cloud not being considered "entrepreneurial", while still having a huge engineering opportunity cost. You're comparing Facebook and Google but Google has spun out a #3 Cloud provider in the last ~7 years that people largely ignore despite that making up almost half of Google's employee count at the moment.
This seems like wishful thinking. Why assume that academic intelligence makes you less creative? Do you think that people who graduate with high grades out of Harvard/MIT/Stanford are less creative than people who graduate from second-tier universities because they are too bookish?
I think the reality is probably that it's hard for any large company to be truly innovative. Once you get to a certain size, red tape and size make you slower. You also have an existing golden goose that you don't want to kill (for these companies, ad revenue), so you are more constrained. Furthermore, you only care to take risks that have massive payoffs... new ideas at Google need to be $1b+ to make a dent and $50m ideas don't really matter much anymore. In any case, are there any large companies that don't do leetcode that you would consider innovative? I'd argue maybe Amazon (1 day delivery) and Apple (M1 and M2 chips), but not so much in their software divisions where the leetcode happens.
> Why assume that academic intelligence makes you less creative?
Perhaps it’s not the academic intelligence that makes you uncreative, but the lack of willingness to play those games means that anyone who does endure the process is bound to be both intelligent and uncreative.
The most intelligent and creative people I know are beyond uninterested in big tech (one even went as far as foregoing millions of dollars after their company got acquired by a FAANG because they couldn’t motivate themselves to turn up after their induction and quit). They have plenty of career and lifestyle options, and most of them are way less driven by money than the average.
You won’t find any of them at Meta.
I don’t think this is just about the environment you find once you get there. I suspect these companies are unwittingly selecting for dullness and failure to innovate from the very start of the process.
I posted this elsewhere, creativity with regards to creating and intuiting what will be a good product is completely different than creating a beautiful algorithm. Math professors arent known for their sense of style. And I agree, size hampers it, but here we have Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all creating new products that people like. And who you hire as engineers permeates through the culture.
> here we have Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all creating new products that people like
And you think that those companies don't test proficiency of working with algorithms when hiring? What?
Two of them (arguably all three) make operating systems. That's just one of many parts of what they do where proficiency in algorithms and data structures is a strong prerequisite.
Im not saying they dont test, but not anywhere near to the same degree. You absolutely need to be able to solve some of these problems, but FB takes it to another level. Its almost not even comparable in terms of the rigor.
This does not make sense just in the light that every division, every team probably, tests differently according to their needs. I have a suspicion that you are trying to extrapolate some small anecdotical experiences to whole massive companies.
I think OP, and others like myself, are questioning something else. It's not that being creative is different from being "bookish," it's that the two are not mutually exclusive.
> This seems like wishful thinking. Why assume that academic intelligence makes you less creative?
Unfortunately - it's common on HN - I've seen all sorts of hobby-horses tied to creativity. Everything from the economic system (capitalism vs "socialism"[1]), to "freedom", wealth and race (or something close to it as one can make on HN without being flagged - which is close indeed).
In all these scenarios, the commenter's favored group are creative and predestined for success because of their affinity, and the others should fail and therefore will fail and the author will resort to all forms of justifications, despite not having any evidence (or while ignoring the existence of contrary evidence)
1. Once, I couldn't get an answer why DJI was kicking all American drone companies asses (back,when they existed in comparable form), despite all the alleged inherent creativity from living in a country overflowing with freedom.
Having spent a good number of years in these companies, I can say that there is no shortage of creative and skillful employees there. What kills innovation is the lack of real ownership and the feedback-driven politics. Employees with great ideas and ability to execute can't go ask for funding and work on their ideas - those ideas would be either stolen (politics), or priorities would change (no real ownership), they would still have a manager to answer to, and they'd still have to be careful to not cross anyone's feelings for the inevitable complaint will wreck their careers (no real competition). So everyone plays it safe, wears a fake smile and cheers the team even when that team is surely going to sink the ship. The bigger a corporarion gets, the more pronounced this risk-averse safetism becomes. The terminal stage of such corporations is a gov-like bureaucracy where safety is the idol and risk is a slur word.
You really think Google have a failure to innovate? Obviously search was their first, core innovation, but over the years they’ve delivered so many other successful products (many acquired, true, but even those they’ve evolved really well). Off the top of my head:
- Maps
- AdWords
- Gmail
- YouTube
- Analytics
- Translate
- Calendar
- Sheets
- Docs
- Drive
- Meet
- Slides
- Drawings
- Forms
- Trends
- Alerts
I’m sure I’m missing a bunch too. IMO they’ve pushed the envelope in a massive number of spaces, and continue to do so. That’s an incredible number of insanely successful software products for a 23 year old company.
Edit: I was thinking web/mobile apps there, missing obvious big ones like Android, Chrome, self-driving cars, a bajillion Google Cloud products, Chromebooks, Go, Dart/Flutter, AMP, Bazel, Protobuf, gRPC, Quik/HTTP2/3-related innovations, etc.
Many of these started as acquisitions, but they massively transformed them. For example, they acquired some products in the mapping space, but none of them remotely resembled what Google Maps have become.
Taking some starting point, hugely evolving it/transforming it, and growing it into a dominant market leading product, I personally consider that innovation.
I agree with you on how much innovation occurred at google, but I think the timeline of when these innovations occurred vs when leetcode interviews really took hold is what the commenters are addressing. In the old days they had crazy hiring processes where riding a unicycle helped your case. This ushered in a group of very brilliant creatives that innovated. Now, most hires are required to memorize data structures and algorithms- things that a lot of the smart creative people loathe to do, and as a result the pace of innovation has slowed to almost a halt.
My personal opinion is that there were too many chefs in the kitchen and google is now trying to optimize the “creative leader” to “can pump out rote code” ratio.
Google Maps, the web application, was not an acquisition. Google bought two companies that made desktop mapping tools (One of them lived on as Google Earth Pro and was a commercial product they kept selling for years) and used that as a basis for developing the web based Google Maps.
Also based on everything I can find, Gmail started as an in house project. reMail was acquired 5+ years after Gmail launched.
Aren't they also mostly just web2.0 versions of Microsoft Office products? Like Docs and Sheets are just Word and Excel right? I feel like I'm missing something. Certainly putting them in browser plus some cloud storage is innovative, but doesn't it seem kind of obvious?
The other big thing is that Zuckerberg is really good at seeing the business value in other people's ideas. He chases financial value by copying what other companies do.
Instead companies like Amazon and Apple are obsessed with generating real world value for the customers and let financial value follow.
Without a doubt Zuck sets the business culture, people that think like him and solve the problems he sees get rewarded. This has a massive trickle down component to the entire org.
> Instead companies like Amazon and Apple are obsessed with generating real world value for the customers and let financial value follow.
While I would argue that even Apple is mostly about execution not innovation (many of Apple innovations had been around for a while, but apple took execution to a different level), but Amazon?! What are the big Amazon innovations? The one click checkout? Having pushed selling books online (arguably failing to become profitable for a long time)? I would say amazon is of all these companies the example which shows that you don't need to innovate anything as long as you have enough finances to push massively into any market you want.
Time-sharing was the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, it's really not that different from cloud computing. Seems like a stretch to say that folks at Amazon invented it. I do take your point though, Amazon was the first to market with what we now view as "modern" cloud infrastructure.
While amazon may not be as innovative as other FAANG companies, they do have execution down to a science. Supply chain, AWS, etc. all work WAY better than competitors in the market
That is a hopeful idea but I feel it might be our naivety that propagates it.
To my understanding Google's interviews have gotten easier and more arbitrary perhaps over time. The competition is high and thus there is the expectation of having studying to pass. Google is famous in the end.
Consider there are the following cases (kind of complete):
a) New employees hired are not brilliant
b) Google doesn't want to hire brilliant employees thus the leetcode interview
c) Leetcode has little effect on "they are brilliant" check, so a different trait is selected and indirectly brilliance distribution inside of Google is different but not the main one affected
d) Even if Google was full of brilliant people it wouldn't matter; they have no power over what happens by design (or inadvertently)
Google is huge. The main job of everyone there, I claim, is to not screw up the money maker: ad auctioning. After that they can do as they wish. The job of every manager there is to make sure that doesn't happen. Innovation is next. And they do innovate but not on things that make enough money to sustain. There is no direction thus.
As evidence I provide the following. They have been throwing ideas at the wall for years trying to see what else sticks even as close to the ad auctioning and data collection scheme and they kill what doesn't appear to. Thus, their reputation of killing things.
I have a few friends at Google, all of whom got in many years ago. They all claim the interview has gotten a lot harder, and that there's no way in hell they'd pass the current level of scrutiny.
Although FWIW, they also say they also would not have passed the interview for the time period they got hired if they had to do it again a second time.
I have no opinion on the quality of any particular employees, but the thing about Google interviews is that they seem to optimize for a certain kind of personality. Lots of people are "bookish" but Google seems to somehow further optimize for people with high IQ but low emotional intelligence. That lack of empathy is further reinforced by the needs of the advertising business, which is actually Google's primary business.
a) Meta can be accused of so many things but failing to build new, ambitious products is not one of them. They are literally pivoting the company to AR/VR and betting the future of the company on it. Quest2 is a huge success and their demoed R&D work on new headsets looks genuinely exciting and innovative.
b) You are clearly ignorant of how product management works in a large company. Bookish engineers which you weirdly use as a slur are not solely responsible for inventing and releasing new products. And so if they hired people who had less understanding of how to write scalable code you wouldn't suddenly get better products.
Small caveat there… they didn’t build AR/VR … they bought it then poured tons of money onto the smaller and more innovative company to get growth before trying to put a bullet though it’s customer base by forcing Facebook accounts in order to get greater synergies with the rest of Facebook only to backflip because the gaming market hates it so much it was hurting sales.
I disagree and, in fact, there's a whole website dedicated to its failed innovations[0].
Google's problem is not a technical one. It's a social and cultural one. Google is way ahead of the pack in terms of innovation but it's stuck in the past (and by past I mean present). Remember Google glasses? Remember how that turned into the Glasshole meme? (And apparently it's coming back[1].)
The rate of innovation is greater than people's willingness to adopt them. And also let's not forget that Google has a very specific modus operandi.
Google in particular is great at tech but grew from a very simple product (simple as in product surface area - a search box – the supporting infra is a different story). Their biggest issue is inability to deliver complex products that are coherent (1) with each other and (2) with itself, over time. I think mainly this is because they're not respecting the user (ironic, since that's officially their core tenet). Why? Because they are evil? No, mostly because they don't understand them. Employees live in a different world, demographically, socially, economically, everything. They've also never had a strong culture of truly understanding and embracing their user base. So they decide everything upfront without validating it externally first, and are genuinely surprised when they miss the mark. "That's so weird, all the execs & directors thought this was a good idea. Well anyway, I got my promo, better move on to the next team."
> Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate:
> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms.
These are mature Big Tech companies. While they do empower engineers to innovate, they still task Product Managers with managing product, just like every other big company.
The product direction isn’t very related to the LeetCode interviews given to dev candidates. I think you might be missing the context for the entire product side of a company and their interview processes and incentives.
I have commonly seen Senior engineers drive completely new product innovations at big tech. This hard split between product and engineering is commonly not real. Especially when the innovation requires understanding large scale systems deeply.
Same with Google, where Marissa Mayer would allegedly run A/B tests to find the best shade of blue
Pro-tip: that's not how you build a system. The best shade of blue is the least of your concerns
"Oh but Google/FB have actual designers, product people etc", yes but don't underestimate management's (those who got promoted, usually from the engineering ranks) ability to mismanage it
I saw an ad on LinkedIn a few months ago for Coinbase and applied out of curiosity. Was very intimidating as a British 'commoner' who went to a very average university to be being grilled on Leetcode/Hackerrank questions by fresh male-Asian Stanford/MIT/top-US-university graduates (not being stereotypical - this was true!). Didn't stand a chance really as I don't do well with algorithmic questions although the interviewers were friendly enough and I did somehow manage to stumble to the last stage of 1 recruiter interview and 3 coding interviews. One answer I was expected to answer the complexity of my code to which the answer was something involving logarithms which I genuinely don't have a clue. I consider myself to be a pretty good developer and constantly get praise/compliments from my colleagues.
Dodged a bullet really after all the news I've seen recently about staff having their applications revoked due to hiring stoppages.
> One answer I was expected to answer the complexity of my code to which the answer was something involving logarithms which I genuinely don't have a clue.
Being asked the logarithmic time complexity of some code you just wrote is literally one of the most common interview questions in Software Engineering, no? I'm assuming at least this is what you are referring to. All the well known interview help books in the industry ("Cracking the Coding Interview" etc etc) and websites like Leetcode spend a lot of time teaching it for a reason!
I've never had a software engineering interview where I wasn't asked to discuss something related to time complexity of a given bit of code, and given the regularity in which it will crop up its worth just spending the time to learn.
Yes, it was about the time complexity. I have a very primitive understanding of big-O notation from back in sixth form but I never did logarithms in maths (never did maths to a high enough level really).
My fault for not dedicating a bunch of time to read loads of books to pass an interview and instead spending my time making a living at a full time software engineering job.
The heuristic for this, FWIW, is to think about reducing the number of things you're messing with (such as a search set) by a factor (usually 2, not always) on every iteration. A binary search is a logarithmic algorithm because you chop off half of the (sorted) search set on every pass. That's all you really need to know about it to identify one (and thus realize you have a sublinear-time algorithm).
You don't need to read a ton of books or know any math at all really - the basic answers they are typically looking for are patterns you can spot with no knowledge of logarithms what so ever.
Spend a few days and you will just recognise, "oh hey I've a nested loop here, it's likely O(n2)!" That's really all it takes, and there are only 4-5 main classifications most interview code falls into, all of which can be spotted without knowing what a logarithm is. If I had interviewed you, I would not be impressed you hadn't understood this at such a basic level either, personally. The rest of us making a full time living at software engineering have to learn it to pass interviews at top companies too!
I'm comfortable enough with time complexity, and I like to think I'll sniff out a logarithmic-class solution when I've written one, but I don't think I've ever had a problem with a candidate bucketing a problem into sublinear/linear/superlinear.
I don't know if that is helpful but logarithms are quite an easy concept that helps with thinking about code complexity.
It's an inverse of exponent which translates to " grows very slowly with input size. 10 for a thousand, 20 for a million etc.". It helps to quickly ballpark feasability the same way exponential complexity usually means "doesn't scale above 30"
Log(n) is a
- number of digits required to write a number
- depth of a balanced tree of size n
- running time of any algorithm working on input of size n which does fixed cost operation to cut input in half (e.g binary search). If your code has cost function f(n) = 1 + f(n/2) then it has logarithmic performance.
I wonder how many of the people echoing this sentiment have tried and failed to clear the Leetcode bar at these top companies. It's hard to explain this level of consensus as anything other than motivated reasoning. As an earlier commenter stated, "I can believe that Leetcode is uncorrelated with creativity, but I have a hard time believing it's inversely correlated."
The anti-Leetcode leaning on this site has the same flavor to me as the anti-crypto leaning. If you missed out on the easiest money in history (as I did), you're going to have a strong psychological block on accepting that crypto can be interesting or positive, and you're going to be drawn to arguments saying it's doomed to disappear. I have to explicitly set aside my emotions about that topic in order to see it for what it is.
This may be true about what Google employees have become ...
But the changes at Facebook and Google have a clear cost-benefit equation. When a company is in an expanding market, improving it's offering to capture more of the market is very worthwhile. When a company is in a static market where they aren't likely to lose too much market share, the company has incentive to squeeze as much profits out of their market share. Usually that's by raising prices but in this instance it's by stuffing in as much ads and behavior-control shenanigans as possible.
You can say this is because of monopoly but similar dynamics happen with "oligopolies" - cellphone providers or pre-foreign competition US automakers.
I don’t think the two are connected. It’s more likely that it’s because feature decisions at these companies are made by thousands of product people who have their own performance objectives, most of which are misaligned with the wishes of users.
I think this is an underrated comment. It's hard to innovate/apply divergent thinking if you're so far from the user.
Adtech as an industry would also be a factor, since it's not only not aligned with value/user goals, but working actively against them. I'm saying that as someone who worked in the domain.
I interviewed at Amazon in 2008ish and it was very leetcode-ish in its interview process. I remember whiteboarding a garbage collector.
In any event, few companies have product direction set by engineering. There might be influence, but product tends to be a different set of employees than engineering.
Every company I've worked for has had some form of annual or bi-annual "hack week," where employees can form ad-hoc teams and work on something they think would be cool to exist. Sometimes it's a feature, sometimes it's a new product line, sometimes it's just something ridiculous (e.g. an eight foot wide NES controller).
Some of these projects did turn into shipped features, though I'm not sure I ever saw a new product line come out of it.
One of the places I worked had an internal incubator. An engineer or PM could pitch an idea, and get paid their salary to go work on it if accepted. That was still early stage when I left, so unclear if anything came of it.
The point though is that many companies do open avenues for engineers to innovate directly.
I don't think you're necessarily disagreeing with the poster you're replying to.
I've interviewed at some of the FAANGs and like you said, I didn't find the Amazon interview format any less leetcode-ish than Google or Facebook. However I found that the level of rigor and was noticeably less than what Google or Facebook seemed to expect. Maybe this has changed recently, since the last time I interviewed at these companies was in 2019.
Come on. A decent engineer can pass the programming portion of FAANG interviews in 30-40 hours of study and they take at most 40% of the interview time.
How much leetcoding do their PMs do? I understand your overall point, but I don't think having a high algorithmic/data structures whiteboarding bar for their engineers correlates to Facebook's weakening product abilities. Ditto for Google.
I think it does. As much as companies want to believe that product runs the product, an engineer that can create new things that influences the product is massively more valuable. Amazon commonly has engineers drive new innovations, product people nowhere to be seen
There are without a doubt a sea of creative people at Meta, the question is whether the organizational structure disincentivizes creative collaboration with engineering.
I've worked for Apple and Product Management absolutely runs the product.
Engineers of course have entry points into this process but ultimately they aren't responsible for the overall process of what, how and when things get build.
You act like you know better than all of these companies so maybe you can try building a multi-billion business with just engineers. Good luck with that.
TBH this not scientific at all but judging from my linkedin feed the worst 'product people' I've worked with have ended up at facebook/meta, amazon and google -- apple and a bunch of smaller companies ended up with the best
it's a mixed bag when it comes to engineers though, most of my highest performing coworkers are pretty evenly distributed between the batch with the exception of amazon which seems like a catch-all
Unlikely: developers do not decide what features to implement, at least in companies of that size, so whether they interviewed with leetcode or not shouldn't matter
Isn't snap known as being one of the most innovative social media platforms? e.g. creating stories before anyone else, bitmojis being popular, innovative filters, etc. I don't buy this tenuous connection between leetcode and innovation lol
> Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products.
Microsoft? Really? Is Azure more innovative than Cloud? Where is MSFT innovating? Acquiring Xbox and Minecraft?
And for that matter, where is Amazon innovating outside of AWS (their primary profit engine)?
FB & Google innovate in Ad Tech - that's their core business.
Apple is just more in your face about innovation because their core business is convincing people they need to endlessly spend $2000 every year to get the latest and greatest gadgets.
Even Exxon is innovative in gas exploration... All decent companies are innovative in their core business. Some core businesses aren't as sexy as AirPods.
Maybe the problem is that these companies just need to stop trying to innovate? All successful social media platforms start out as fun places to be. Then they become feature complete, but the laws of SV say they have to continue to grow for eternity, so what do they do? They mess up the timeline, throw increasingly irrelevant content at everyone, add and sunset new features every month, try to copy other platforms, screw around with people brains (oh, I mean increase engagement). Couldn't they just try for profitability instead of infinite growth?
They keep the talent from doing their own thing, basically innovate. That's how you choke innovators. Give a fat paycheck, a sense of accomplishment, while bleeding them out. That's all.
I see where you're coming from but I disagree. your posts assumes that people who are good at leetcode (or more accurately, get good at leetcode by spending time on it) are not creative. but I'd like to point out that creativity isn't an intrinsic ability, but largely a skill. you get more creative the more you practice. innovation is not just about thinking differently for the sake of it, but more about the cross-pollination of ideas from different domains. that's what mathematicians do a lot of the time- see what unsolved puzzle can be re-shaped to be like a solved puzzle, and that's what a good computer scientist should be able to do with tech. i belive, at the same time, that leetcode is pretty fucking useless as a measure of ability and a way of learning new algos because. my opinion on the matter is that big tech like Google and fb suck because each manager has to justify their bullshit job by doing some bullshit change. there's no coherent vision anymore and the company has fragmented into a thousand teams, each run like a bad startup with infinite funding just until the boss gets a promotion or smth. and then the team does some other bullshit changes. apple has always had a very coherent product vision, and so this doesn't happen. i belive my conjecture is simpler and more plausible than saying that people who work hard aren't creative.
You can also take the life out of any willingness to innovate with enough compliance policies, controls, code standards, and bureaucracy. That's why large companies fossilize.
It sounds like you have an irrational grudge against Leetcode-style interviews.
> Theory on facebook failure/Google failure to innovate: They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap.
As does Tik Tok, perhaps even more so.
> lower level engineers hired ten years ago do rise to the top and run whole divisions
Engineers have little say into product decisions, even if they run whole divisions. Nobody is criticizing the engineering decisions Facebook and Google are making. Just their products.
> Current valley hiring practices filter out the mischiefs needed to take things from sustaining to innovative. It's why tech is coasting and deteriorating.
> Passionate weirdos like JWZ, Stallman, TBL, Carmack, Cutler, Torvalds, Woz, Pike, Wall, Jobs and Bellard are required
> "The quality of a commercial software product is inversely proportional to the difficulty of the problem it solves, how long it's been around for and how successful it's been"
Essentially as a solution reaches stability and success, there's margins of profit that keep a staff of engineers and managers employed to work on the system. As a result they mutate the system - drifting it away from being a good solution to real problems to an unfocused solution to theoretical problems. It's a core organizational feature how we don't treat software as infrastructure where putting something in maintenance mode is the majority of the lifecycle of a successful product (for instance, whatever building you're in right now).
So as the generations of engineers cycle in and out you get this discordance between the two: earnest new people getting paid very well to change a product that usually has no pressing need for change. They do it anyway and thus successful simple commercial software products decline in relevance and quality over time as an inadvertent result of mismanaged good intentions. Furthermore when a change is warranted, nobody in this model has the agency, authority, political capital, or willpower to do the proper reframing (think Apple Newton -> iPod -> iPhone) without excessive compromises.
All of the people who you listed are unquestionably talented.
But they are unsuited to working in very large companies which requires collaboration, patience and tolerance of other views. And pretty sure they know it too.
You can make the tired hiring practices are the problem argument but actually it's the nature of large companies themselves that self-select for these types of people.
The passionate grumps don't lack collaboration, patience and tolerance. Instead they have more commitment to the product and company then to power relationships and hierarchies
They may also be impossible to work with but that's independent (alright, it's likely correlated).
Anyway, the hard-nosed ones are closer in spirit to scientists who get mischaracterized as uncooperative inflexible foot-draggers because their advocacies and endorsements aren't a functional of social relationships and ideally can't be changed by them.
I think following the long tail will lead you to what I witnessed with my kids in grade school; mischief is now akin to a disease - it's treated, counselled, made an example of, and sometimes medicated. I had to work hard with my kids to overcome this 'vilification' of anything against the norm.
> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products.
I call bs on this. All of these companies have pretty similar interview processes.
> They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people
That is as far from truth as it can get. The problem in companies that fail to innovate almost always has the same problem: management. How companies are run has a significant impact on how much they can innovate. Even if you are willing to take massive bets as the management team, if the bets aren’t good enough, it’s going to be hard to innovate.
Apple has a top down innovation chain where goals and direction are decided by higher ups, while Amazon has bottom up innovation where people are encouraged to build. But the common theme in both is the ability to identify and nurture big ideas by the management.
> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms.
I find this naive, as if coders have a say on the product. The jobs in big companies tend to be very boring and actually simple since their core product is already there and all these people simply maintain and steer it based on the data.
IMHO the difference is simply in their situation. Google&Meta are absolute monopolies, nothing new had to come out of them as they were making more and more money as they optimize the same old product. They suffered the Galapagos syndrome, similar tp the Japanese smartphone market.
Apple is not in that spot, they need to aggressively innovate as the competition is strong.
Regardless of the limited impact, its hard to argue that there isnt a distinct difference in innovation/releasing good products between Google/FB and Amazon/MSFT/Apple. The latter simply innovate more and create more things that people want. So the question is why
I tried to answer why :) Unlike FB/Google, AMZN/MSFT/AAPL does have strong competition, therefore they can't simply milk the current offerings. They have to innovate.
> their employees are bookish, not innovative people
This is false. However, there is probably a misalignment between what the employees want to innovate on, and what Instagram users want.
My guess is that deep down it’s hard for a talented adult to truly give a fuck about Instagram.
So they do what they have to to keep themselves feeling like their work is meaningful. And that diverges from what consumers of tween influencer / fake-moment-creators think they want.
Zuckerberg is not an innovator we all know where Facebook came from. He's a do-er and copier and he will lose the AR Glasses race as it requires someone innovative behind that ship.
He keeps throwing all this money at VR which has been around since the 90s. The general public doesnt want it.. want something strapped to their face/isolating themselves from real life... it is not the next iPhone!
Sort of. There is not a direct correlation between leetcode, engineering skill, and productivity.
I also know some boneheads who made it into google somehow. I think hiring is more of a crapshoot these days than it was in the early 2000s when the tech industry was not cool, was fairly homogenous and full of nerds.
I think you mention the real reason as a footnote. Ads are SO lucrative that it isn't worth it to be innovative or take huge risks. They do a little here and there but why invest $10B in an idea that is unlikely to have higher margins or larger volume.
Also it's generally hard to innovate in large teams because you need to convince every one. Personally I gave up innovation at work consciously because of this. Most innovation comes from creative people dictating.
High G factor correlates with high creativity. I see a direct correlation to coming up with creative solutions and being able to solve a battery of tests.
A lot of the leetcode hate mostly exists because it's hard. And a lot of coding interview problems actually require a lot of creativity to solve.
And imagine thinking that facebook isn't innovating. Facebook is leading the future of virtual reality, and leading AI breakthroughs. What do you think facebook marketplace usage is like? Just because you don't like getting tested doesn't mean people who test well can't innovate. No matter how much you trick yourself into thinking that Facebook/Meta won't stand the test of time, it has and it will.
Theres a difference between creating beautiful creative code and creating an innovative product that people want to use. Its a different type of intelligence, and why you dont see Math professors starting ecommerce/product businesses.
Apple was famous for taking forever to design “their copy” of popular thing.
Then Facebook and the rest became staples of iDevices, Apple focused on stupid slim design rather than pushing the product envelope, and risk their yearly mobile cash cow.
Their EarPods were not exactly the first BT earbuds, HomePod was well after Alexa. Subscription video and games?
For the most part they are doing the same with hardware; changing up housing but emphasizing their own chips.
MS aped Apple laptop quality with Surface, bombed mightily with Windows Phone, is doing fine with Azure; again all products that came as a response to others.
We’re beyond the bootstrap phase of technology. Something truly innovative to the user is still in some lab.
My money is on bio-tech mutant; custom drugs and high res simulation to embed an experience so real you think it happened. I dunno something that’s focused on more than b2b apps/ads deals and phone update cycles.
I mean there is no point to any of this. There’s no higher calling for people. One generation being addicted to computers as we know them is not necessarily a forever trend for the species. It’s just math. shrug
> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be,”
This is what I also think. People (or, the mass of the users) keep following users that posts a lot of videos, they watch a lot of reels and like those... So instagram is doing the correct thing (for their goals of keeping people using it) in focusing on reels.
I disagree. It's certainly not the case for me - Instagram has become an app I open out of habit or because I got a notification, remember that it sucks now, and close again. But more generally, this is two things: the tail wagging the dog, because Instagram pushes reels hard you get more engagement there as a creator which pushes people into them; and the fact that low quality engagement is a poor proxy for what people actually want. Instagram can show me videos of women in sheer tops all day, and if I am bored it is mindlessly engaging, but it is never what I want. What I want is to skim over 50 posts from people I care about, and maybe interact with one or two of them. I think am far from alone in what I want, but Instagram does not want what I want, because it is harder to keep me looking once I get to the end of my feed, and harder to put ads in front of me I don't scroll past almost immediately.
Steve Jobs famously said that he saw the computer as a "bicycle of the mind." He saw technology as a tool to amplify humanity's abilities.
Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to build a "casino of the mind." Facebook and Instagram have been purpose-built to amplify and prey on humanity's weaknesses.
The fact that "Meta" is now trying to make their casino _even more_ addictive to compete with TikTok does not bode well for the world.
While casino is probably the best comparison, I've always thought of social media as kind of the high fructose corn syrup for this generation. We took something that in small doses isn't really an issue and over optimized without thinking of the human cost. We've figured out the most addictive part and have turned that up to 11 and are now realizing, "oh shit, maybe that was too much".
This is the problem with most "free" digital services now: games, social nets, news sites, etc. They are optimizing user behaviour to cater their customers (advertisers), so they estimulate addictive behaviour.
I blame advertising based internet. It pushes the wrong incentives for service providers.
I've never had an Instagram account but I stopped lurking when they forced me to make an account. I guess I'll look at butts somewhere else.
Tangentially- what is the deal with social media sites forcing you to login to lurk? I understand they want more data but lurkers are still forced to view ads.
They make gobs and gobs of money, that's the signal, and they're optimizing for it. I tend to think that social media is harmful, for everyone. Send pictures of your kids to your grandmother directly.
Big difference is that porn is incognito so probably a little more difficult to try matching preferences with your peers for good reasons lol
I don't find myself using TikTok much, but when I do it's easy for me to slip into a black void for an hour watching videos. I found the app was able to determine a pretty reasonable algorithm for me waaaay to quickly
> Big difference is that porn is incognito so probably a little more difficult to try matching preferences with your peers for good reasons lol
Maybe something like the reddit model where it's pseudonymous based on username. People who like this subreddit might also like that subreddit. People who like these porn videos might also like those videos, etc.
IIUC incognito's not effective at evading fingerprinting. It's really only good for preventing auto-complete accidents when e.g. you're giving a group presentation.
What annoys me about the update is obviously the layout and UI. You can’t scroll freely and you don’t know how many flips it takes to move to the next item.
But worse is the content selection.
A really nice feature of instagram used to be that the feed had an end. “You are now done watching who you follow. If you wanna keep hanging around here’s some random stuff”
That was really nice and quite the refresh compared to other doom scrollers.
Then they slowly started adding non-subscribed content into your main feed and I’m sure the metrics were great. I at least ended up looking at them longer than average cause I couldn’t figure out who the hell I knew that was posting _that_. Then realized it wasn’t anyone I followed and got annoyed.
But the metric don’t capture that.
With the redesign you might as well not follow anyone. Its like 75% of your feed is ads and randos.
IG kept requesting to add my birthday, going fullscreen notification like even if I forced quit earlier/rebooted my cellphone, didn't use cause birthday thing.
I uninstalled it, didn't kill my account as there are some stuff I appreciate but the dark patterns won't fly.
One thing I hate was the change from "disable/never see again" to "see less often" that surrounds almost every app now, be twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.
> But users are notoriously fickle, and complaints often don’t align with their behavior. While some Instagram users claim that they want to see more photo-based posts in their feed, Mosseri said users are posting less of this content, _choosing instead to share pictures to their Stories or through direct messages_
Maybe they use DMs because they hate your ad delivery. Maybe they use stories because you make every effort to push users to it, so that's where the eyeballs are.
Pretty tiresome to position your company as a victim of its users when you have a shocking level of influence over their behavior.
Not to mention how credulous this passage is from a journalistic standpoint.
I was very happy to learn that I could "Snooze suggested posts" for 30 days. That we can't disable them is, well, perhaps predatory, but here's how to do it.
There's an X at the top-right of any suggested post. If you click it, an option appears to snooze those posts for 30d.
Mosseri is right to be concerned about supporting creator-discovery, which is a huge problem on the supply-side of IG's creator/consumer marketplace. If suggested posts were only a few percent of posts and didn't favor eye-catching Reels, but rather content in the same spirit as a user already follows, quality content could again rise to the top.
> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be”
I'm likely not in the majority here, but my average usage of Instagram these days is me scrolling through my feed for about 20 seconds before getting frustrated and closing the app. All the ads and things I never opted into seeing make it an unpleasant and uninteresting experience. I was far more engaged when it was just a reverse chronological timeline of images from people I follow.
Adam Mosseri has been in full damage-control mode for years.
Simply put, Instagram knows you're addicted and will make as much possible product change to make them more money while you struggle to get it out of your life given how personalized and predatory the experiences are becoming.
There is a natural conclusion to "growth" of engagement though. Everyone is competing for our attention given we sit on devices longer each year. I think it's averaging about 3 hours today on a smartphone. That's crazy to think about.
It's IMPOSSIBLE to make an instagram account based solely off of images now.
You're content will NOT even be pushed on the Recent tab of the hashtags you choose. You are essentially not seen at all unless someone is following you.
The only way to be seen by the algorithm anymore to grow your account is to make videos.
This is what happens when a company loses it's vision. Just check out how the filters have changed over the years. It's just Instagram losing it's soul and what made it unique.
One reason I'm skeptical on the government bringing down the antitrust hammer on Big Tech is because of things like this. Antitrust is a slow process and a crude (but powerful) instrument.
Facebook originally bought Instagram because IG represented an existential threat to FB's business. Remember it was only a few years old and had 13 employees at the time of acquisition. How can you be a monopoly when 13 people can threaten your business?
So here we are some years later and Facebook is getting killed by Tiktok. IG, in particular, is no longer "sexy". it is not where influencers aspire to be anymore. Facebook proper has billions of DAU/MAU but many younger people don't even have acounts anymore. It's facing it's own myspace moment. FB (now Meta) is betting its future on something that (IMHO) will never happen: the Metaverse, much like how Uber (and even Tesla to a certain extent) were betting their futures on self-driving cars (both of which, much like AGI, are perennially 5-10 years away).
The market will sort out FAcebook one way or the other. It requires no heavyhanded intervention.
The MBA eventually turn every social media platform into an ecommerce platform because how else do you make money? When that happens that platform eventually dies.
If you've been following IG redesigns, it's been moving further and further away from being creator-focused (eg the "create" button moved from the bottom bar to the top). IG has been pushing shopping, IGTV and other efforts to monetize the platform and/or tie it to commerce.
Trying to clone Tiktok with Reels just isn't going to save it.
Say what you want about Twitter, but as someone who's been on it since 2011 and has made it my primary platform for social media since 2016, I'm grateful that fundamentally it's still the same old Twitter.
Yes, they've fallen into the copy-cat temptation machine in some regards – i.e. "fleets" (stories) – but unlike Instagram will at least admit when it's not working and revert (fleets are no longer a feature on the platform). Of course, their failure to innovate definitely cost them TikTok-level success with their mismanagement of both Vine and Periscope, but at least their stubbornness to change has kept the core experience intact.
Obviously there's some larger issues around Twitter's direction ("who is going to be in control of the company?") and the ever-present critiques of misinformation/harassment/"moderation versus censorship" that comes with the territory of being a public forum, but overall it's still the Twitter I know.
I wonder if instagram's downfall will be a boon for Twitter in this regard: at least I know what it is.
Seems obvious that showing people relevant, quality content drives engagement more than showing unrelatable, boring stuff from your long-lost friends and politically extreme uncle. Driving engagement is something FB and IG have always had as their North Star, just with the self-imposed limitation of using your friend network to do it. Now that they see what TikTok has done they want that juicier business instead.
It's a bummer that there doesn't seem to be a great place to grow or maintain old/distant friendships (like the early days of FB) but hopefully this will open space for smaller players to get involved in that, if anyone has any time left in their day for it...
An interesting next step would be to generate real-world friendships from TikTok's acutely tuned interest graph. Friendships are still mostly outcomes of a certain circumstance in the meatspace. You met at a party, or are the friend of a friend etc. It's a really weak algorithm for finding the right people to hang out with IRL.
"Engagement" is the metric and the incredibly obviously stupid problem with it as your optimisation goal that is apparently ungraspable by the leadership of every single social network.
It infects everything down even to Google search rankings.
If you can quickly and easily find the info you want then that reduces "engagement" and that is bad, apparently.
No, engagement is a (bad) proxy for clicking on Ads.
If you want to measure Ad revenue then measure Ad revenue/impressions.
However, Engagement is a great proxy for users listlessly clicking through the site desperately trying to find the content you care about that they know is on here somewhere yet the company has hidden it behind multiple click walls all of which rack up the Engagement score.
In my experience it's absolutely true. Maybe it's just early in Instagram's phase of their new feed and it's not optimized, but all I see are a bunch of seemingly random memes and videos that don't interest me at all, and they only appear targeted to me in the most superficial of ways. Essentially I skip past the videos looking for friend photos, and after about 30 seconds get bored and shut the app.
TikTok on the other hand seems to know me better than I do myself (or care to admit). I go out of my way to not open it because I know 30 minutes of my time will vanish in an instant.
When TikTok was available here, I loved it largely because it had a lot of creators from poor and rural areas. The content was genuinely way more fun and authentic than any slickly edited video on Instagram
Very true, but partly due to the broad content variety TikTok has. Their tools to help creators are excellent and they do a lot to promote highly niche content.
Instagram is a clunky mishmash of features rolled out in desperation. TikTok may suffer the same fate eventually, but I think they are years away from that.
It's algorithm is way more aggressive than other social media. Sometimes it's almost creepy. I don't care about a lot of stuff on there but it's easy to find yourself in very niche communities on tiktok.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a good alternative for old-Instagram (e.g. just sharing photos)? I only joined originally because of their cool map view that had pins around the world showing where each of your shared photos were taken, and they removed that feature a few years ago; I haven't found any other app than Google Photos that does it well. However, Google Photos does it for all of my photos (there's a lot!) and I'd much prefer a separate app just so I can edit and curate a very small collection for the map instead (1-2 photos per place), and ideally be able to share that map with other people.
+1 on glass. It's so purist about not having algo or becoming destroyed by influencers it's actually hard to find other photographers currently. Paid by users and no ads. I hope they work on some human-curated suggestions in the future!
Creators aren’t happy either. I have 107K followers for dev and learn to code content and the last few months have been a roller coaster.
There’s about 50 to 100 of us devs with that size of following on IG and we all see the same thing time and time again which is that the algorithm moves and you have to change your content style to see what it wants. The messaging and content stays the same but it needs to be packaged in whatever way the IG algorithm wants to push at that moment.
IG is scared of TikTok but rather than accepting that platforms can be different and that’s ok they’ve decided to force a move to basically copy them but without a guiding strategy - it’s baffling.
While having to respond to TikTok is understandable, what's their point of differentiation? It's hard to tell the difference between the two now. Maybe that's a good thing for insta?
Am I the only one who is deeply unsettled by tiktok as a format in and of itself?
The weird unnatural voice and the fast pace and the shallowness of the content. Is this what people really want? I think the answer is yes. But the people who want this are broken people. There's no sugar coating it. This is like some weird drug for reverting people to their dumbest instincts. The fact that everyone immediately acknowledges that this is great and the future is terrifying.
Everytime I get on Facebook, the navbar seems to have a new combination.
Watch, Gaming (Streaming), Dating, Marketplace, "News" Feed, Shop, Groups, Home, etc... These could all be different applications under the same login.
Kylie Jenner is right (for once)... Nobody knows what Facebook or Instagram is for nowadays.
Reddit - Communities and memes
Snapchat - Sending snaps and watching stories of your actual friends
Tiktok - Fast paced entertainment (Short videos)
Twitter - What's happening right now?
Instagram and Facebook is trying to be all of those at the same time.
Snapchat knew the same thing. A Kardashian even told them. Not working out so well now.
Instagram is a slightly different story, because they've probably got official guarantees that government is going to finally ban TikTok in their endless campaign of aggression towards China. So Insta replaces their pissed-off old users with young TikTok users, and the government can tell angry TikTok that there's a red-blooded Jesus equivalent to the evil Chinese internet drug.
Personally I don't care they're just copying a rival. I do not have/use Tiktok and do easily spend a good chunk of time looking at the "reels" in IG. Even if most of these turn out to be direct lifts out of Tiktok, I'm not about to "switch" or even open an account over there, I already have the content over here. I assume that's part of the strategy to not hemorrhage users, in my case it works.
You know what? I love the new instagram changes. And everyone I know has been using it more and more over the years. Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it. Data doesn't lie.
TikTok copied short form videos from.. vine. I mean youtube YLYL videos. I mean... newgrounds.
Shit's been around, and both facebook and google are going to lap tik tok. Keep up :)
Data doesn't lie is, in itself, a lie. Data has to be collected, so it's biased by what you choose to measure. Data has to be interpreted, so it's biased by how you interpret it. Data is only a snapshot in time, so it doesn't predict the future. There are many, many ways to make engagement metrics look much better in the short term while absolutely destroying long term engagement. Whether that's what Instagram is doing is still up for debate, but I think there's a very real chance it is.
>Interesting that the people who hate it so much are the same ones that are using it.
You're jumping the gun there. The people who hate it and use it are the people who were using it before the change and want it to go back. They were strongarmed into it and they're not about to abandon their userbase/followers overnight - they'll try and advocate for change and then migrate elsewhere.
But these changes are so relatively new that there hasn't even been time for any of that to play out yet.
Long time Instagram user. Deleted my Facebook account years ago.
The recent changes to Instagram totally suck. I hardly see any of my friends pictures anymore. Maybe one, or two, then a constant shit-stream of 'reels'.
I am done. No more Instagram for me. I am hoping someone will bootstrap a replacement that basically replicates Instagram from two years ago.
What I don't like about the TikTok-like experience is that I can tell the algorithm "works" on me. I'd just keep scrolling through pointless, entertaining crap.
I wouldn't mind trying to build the new IG or Facebook, but issue is how to fund it without angel investors or others who push towards eyeball/click/attention-frenzy we have today.
Instagram is phasing people like us out of its ideal customer profile, and optimizing the app for Generation Z. It has no choice but to adapt or become irrelevant in the current ecosystem.
I guess Meta must be knowing what they're doing? I'm sure they are basing their decisions entirely on actual analytics and A/B testing results. If the numbers say users are moving towards videos, away from photos, than that's what they will cater to. That's why public emotions won't sway them.
“I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be”
Sure, because they could get the information they want without having to wade through the mountains of crap you’re pumping out of the septic tank into your users faces. You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown.
Could you please follow the site guidelines when posting here? Note this one:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Similarly, 'You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown' can be shortened to 'You’re optimising the wrong metric'.
I have a feeling that from Meta's perspective, that is the right metric. It's probably also a decent metric for that guy, because his influencer business depends on people wading through his content.
Interestingly, I remember when Facebook made a similar change to their feed, it was about 12-15 years ago, where they essentially made it much more like Twitter. I absolutely despised it, I still despise it to this day, and I think it was the point where I realized how social networks are all actively out to basically destroy you (I'm being hyperbolic, but only slightly).
That is, if they really wanted to make it easy for you to connect and share with friends, or maybe meet some new ones (remember Facebook's "poke" feature?), they could easily do that. But they've found they are much better at the endless scroll of mindless WALL-E human crap, having optimized the right brain chemicals to make you feel like you can keep boredom at bay with one more upward swipe.
I want the social network equivalent of "slow food": All social networks try to optimise for very the wrong metrics for the users, but right metrics for their customers (advertisers).
I want a social network where it is OK for people to sporadically add vanal posts. A social network that does not prioritize outrage or contention. And a social network were my close circle is actually discoverable, with high SNR.
He has a say on what he says about metas feed optimization though, and he clearly supports where their headed now. That's fair to criticize, even if the insult is a little heated.
Tommy Marcus, the content creator from Brooklyn profits from his instagram fame. Of course he wants the company do to well even if it's at the cost of the users.
He does have a say in the way that facebook acts because he has leverage through his popularity. Not to mention that he is going on the news giving apologia to the corporation. And you're saying we should we should just twiddle our thumbs and not contest his ridiculous ideas because he's not a shareholder or something?
Sure, because they could get the information they want without having to wade through the mountains of crap you’re pumping out of the septic tank into your users faces. You’re optimising the wrong metric you fucking clown.
Tommy doesn't optimize Instagram metrics. Instagram does.
Tommy doesn't have users. Instagram does.
Tommy doesn't pump "mountains of crap out of the septic tank into" users faces. Instagram does. Tommy pumps out whatever content he wants to the people who follow him.
It's clear from the quote that OP thinks Tommy works at Instagram and is criticizing what he think is an Instagram employee.
It's not even apologia for Instagram, it's just Tommy's statement of belief that Instagram won't be negatively impacting users' time spent with these changes. There's no value statement at all from Tommy.
It's not even a "ridiculous idea". It's just that Tommy thinks these changes will increase users' time spent on Instagram. You're just imputing mountains of additional context into what he says.
They're optimizing for the metric that suits their interests.
It occurs to me that Facebook and related companies may well become the equivalent of ransomware companies - controlling more and more of the world's information and making more and more abusive demands for access to it.
only time will tell. Every gamer was upset about diablo immortal being a mobile pay to win game, but recent reports suggests diablo making boatloads of money. The shift could work out in the long run.
Equating "cares about something else more" with "doesn't care" is pretty toxic. Instagram is a big company that doesn't have feelings, so whatever, but this isn't a healthy discussion habit to reinforce.
They rolled out this update slowly and when it hit my account, it happened to be the day Biden posted about his Covid diagnosis and that was the post at the top of my feed.
I couldn't figure out why it was showing me this post with an all black border and not letting me scroll.
First, I thought it was a bug and then I thought they were forcing everyone (or some subset of American users) to watch Biden's instagram lol. Not a logical reaction but was my first interaction with the new UI and I was very confused.
My SO also thought it was a bug and we spent 5 minutes trying to fix the app before realizing it was just a clunky update.
