Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm

hsuduebc2

>Children will be smoking less if you don't offer them cigarettes

petterroea

For a lot of people that's a good thing

civvv

Same probably goes for slot machines if you strip them of all the bright, flashy colours and comforting sounds and make it a black metal box, with only a number display. Its almost like... it was inherently designed to be as addictive as possible?

dofm

Only half? That's sort of depressing.

sakisv

cue the smallest sad violin Snarky reaction aside, and actually reading the article, it says that the problem is something along the lines of "we incentivized and rewarded business accounts to post large volumes, so now if you switch to chronological order you will see more of these posts which reduces user satisfaction". Well, that just means that the company will have to adapt before their users start unfollowing spammy accounts and the whole "influencer" business takes a hit. Though tbh, not sure how much of a hit it could take but hey, when instagram says engagement falls, I allow myself to feel optimistic for a brief moment.

pluc

Monetization is down when content isn't force-fed to users. Give this guy a raise.

danw1979

Good stuff ! When’s it going to prod ?

embedding-shape

I think the single best change Instagram done in a decade is the "ad break" that happens once you've scrolled through enough posts, which stops you for N seconds to stare at some random ad. I think I can scroll through 2-3 posts before my scrolling gets locked, and I close the app, and now I barely scroll Instagram at all anymore. Thank you Instagram!

coatmatter

Bluesky likely knows this problem well. The pro is that I never find myself stuck there. The con is that I just end up somewhere else (including this orange website). Time to ctrl-w.

chinathrow

Cry me a river, seriously.

dumberquestions

I don't know what the right balance is, but there should be some sort of friction. Feeds shouldn't be infinitely scrollable, for instance, and users could be made explicitly aware of how much time they're spending. Some people think this should all fall back on personal responsibility, but the way I see it, introducing highly addictive algorithms should've been regulated the same way adding addictive chemicals to food is.

brookst

Tobacco exec says smoking falls by half with low-nicotine cigs.

mrkramer

Because people are lazy, they feed on feed.

hgoel

I don't get how instagram is as popular as it is. I made an account last week to try to look for pictures from an event I recently attended. First I was incredibly surprised and frustrated that their search functionality is effectively nonexistent, then, when I gave up and scrolled, if I tapped on a post to look closer, I had to deal with it interrupting whatever I was listening to. Then, cherry on top of the shit cake, they suspended my account unless I did some video ID process. Nope, not happening. Instagram felt like a more invasive and hostile user experience than any social media I've used before.

croes

> Users miss more content and spend less time on the platform. And what is the effect of this on the user? Oh right, you don't care. For me this guy is directly repsonsible of all the negative side effects of this attention grabbing engangement BS and he should go to jail for that.

esperent

That's great, does he have any other good news to share with us?

HNUsesLLMs

Same with HN and its LLM powered comments script they run internally

Aboutplants

Yeah, we know! That’s the problem!

vrganj

That's the point . Engagement ~= addiction. Just a more euphemistic framing.