Instagram? It's too popular, nobody goes there any more
Plus, the AI content tsunami really is getting big, isn't it?
The other day I was talking to my daughter about which social networks she uses. As she’s in her mid-20s, I figure that she has a better handle on how it feels to use them at that age than me. In summary, she feels that TikTok is dangerously addictive (she forces herself not to use it for too long because it can eat up a morning or afternoon or evening), that Twitter is a Bit Strange (I’m paraphrasing; she runs an account on it for work, and she observes some of the fights that wash across the network), and that Instagram is Just Too Annoying Now.
The latter intrigued me, because it’s the same feeling I’ve been getting from it too. I only really use one account on it, onto which I put pictures of my dog, and follow various people and accounts that I enjoy. I like their pictures and the occasional story.
However, Instagram doesn’t think I should use it that way. Instagram’s algorithm—from which there is no escape—insists on thrusting lots of adverts and lots of “Because You Liked a Post by X” photos and Reels into my feed, displacing the things I actually want to see. The “Explore” tab, which shows you what’s happening across the Instagram network, is almost redundant because the timeline that confronts you when you open up the app is stuffed full of things that the algorithm insists you want to look at. Including lots of adverts.
Adverts, adverts, adverts. Those adverts really seem to work: best estimates are that Instagram’s revenues in 2021 were $26.4bn, with 1.1 billion monthly users. Meta, Instagram’s parent, doesn’t break out revenues or monthly users for Instagram. A little maths: those figures implies $2.2bn revenue per month, or $2 of revenue per monthly user (which I suspect is the approximation that was used to calculate the bigger figure), or just under 7 cents per day. So perhaps half a cent or less per advert that you see. Web advertising is like all software: only worthwhile at scale.
But what if you don’t want to be bombarded by adverts, don’t want to see photos and Reels of people you don’t follow, but would like to just see pictures your friends and so on have taken? Tough luck, buddy. Modern Instagram isn’t for you.
Oddly, there was a brief period when Instagram was just like me (and my daughter) wanted it to be. After the shocking suicide in 2017 of Molly Russell, who was discovered to have been shown disturbing content encouraging self-harm on the app, there really was a period of reflection.
One of the most notable changes was the end of the infinite scroll. In July 2018, a brief blogpost announced:
Today, you’ll start noticing a “You’re All Caught Up” message when you’ve seen every post from the last two days. We’ve heard that it can be difficult to keep track of your seen posts. With this message, you’ll have a better understanding of your Feed and know you haven’t missed recent photos or videos.
You’ll find posts that you’ve already viewed as well as posts that are older than two days below the “You’re All Caught Up” message.
Not everyone was a fan, such as Josh Duboff at Vanity Fair:
A week or so [after this was introduced], it's starting to feel less like a sweet smile and more like an admonishment. It’s as if I was trying to quit sugar and, every time I reached for a cookie at 3:36 P.M. in my office, a hologram of my elementary-school gym teacher’s face appeared, shaking its head and signaling that the jar is empty. I’ve realized I mindlessly check Instagram so frequently that . . . often I’m only scrolling past three or four new posts before I reach the “You’re All Caught Up.” Had I always been checking Instagram this frequently and just not realized it? (Definitely yes.) Had my complaints about the disorder of the feed not actually affected how often I was opening it? (Seemingly yes.) Did I now feel (even more) ashamed about how often I was checking it? (Also yes.)
But to a lot of other people, this looked like a very positive step. Telling people to stop using your app was a radical idea in 2018, apparently pushed by Kevin Systrom, the co-founder and then still CEO of the company.
“Caught up” Instagram was really quite a pleasant place. It didn’t overburden you with adverts (it couldn’t, really, because once you’d caught up, why would you keep scrolling?). You would be hard pressed to doomscroll.
But then Systrom left in September 2018, and things began to change under Adam Mosseri, the new boss who had in May 2018 had been moved over from Facebook and installed alongside Systrom (as VP of Product). You could read Mosseri’s move and Systrom’s departure in multiple ways: the cuckoo pushing out the founder, or the elegant replacement of the soon-to-depart CEO with someone ready for the job.
Whatever: under Mosseri, things changed. Having defended Facebook after the US 2016 election over charges of fake news, now he found himself defending decisions to leave deepfakes on the platform. But, equally, public Like counts, which had always been a source of anxiety for some people, were hidden.
Then in August 2020, the anxiety about TikTok became obvious. “Reels” are short videos, intended to mimic and fight off TikTok just as Stories successfully fought off the challenge of Snapchat. At the same time it began stuffing the timeline with “Suggested Posts” once you’d scrolled far enough. The idea of “Caught up” was binned. You can never catch up with suggestions. The network’s too big. There’s a billion people on there!
Except Reels is really not popular with the core demographic such as, well, my daughter. It annoys them because they’re already on TikTok, and Reels is not going to pull them away from it: TikTok does it better, and operates on a scale just as large.
The adverts too: no matter how skilful, they’re adverts. Sure, Instagram needs to make up for Facebook’s failing revenues, and the money pit that is the Reality Labs division, but annoying the users has the opposite effect.
There’s an article in The Atlantic that expresses the same views: “The app’s original purpose has been lost in the era of “performance” media,” Kate Lindsay writes:
Internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journalshow that Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, Instagram’s TikTok knockoff, compared with the 197.8 million hours people spend watching TikTok every day. The documents also revealed that Reels engagement has declined by 13.6% in recent months, with most users generating “no engagement whatsoever.”
You might be wondering which app all the kids are using? Well, apart from TikTok, it’s BeReal—the app which demands that at a particular time of day you take a photo showing yourself (in the front camera) and your surroundings (in the back camera). What’s really attractive about BeReal is that if you do a retake, that shows up in the photo that’s put on the network. No more performative Instagram multiple takes where everyone knows, quietly, that you’ve been editing your life to show only the very best bits (a fact which, along with the publicly visible number of Likes, was a constant niggle of anxiety and annoyance to enough users).
Facebook’s in a bit of trouble as younger users drift away. Instagram might have grown in popularity with them in the past seven years, but the changes it’s making aren’t working. Obviously, social warming is something that happens when a network is growing. What we haven’t seen for a while is what happens when the air goes out of a network, and people leave, and the flywheel of anger isn’t running. Maybe this is one of those times.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• Riffusion: using Stable Diffusion to generate spectograms, which are a visual representation of music, and then tweaking those to turn them into new music. The stuff with transitions (from church bells to electronic beats) is really remarkable.
• OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, reckons it can generate revenue of $200m in 2023, and $1bn by 2024. Impressive! Not sure about the profit.
• HUMAN_FALLBACK: Laura Preston worked as the human backstop for an AI system in the US, called “Brenda”, which directs people who want to rent rooms or apartments or houses to places they might want to rent. Brenda, however, gets very puzzled by some of the humans’ responses, and so has to call on human fallback. It’s a treat of a feature, in which Preston wonders if she’s making Brenda more human, or Brenda is making her into a chatbot. If you only read one thing this weekend, make it this.
• A guy faked his whole (publicly social network visible) life for a month using AI image generators. He chose to be “not quite Ryan Gosling” for a prompt. Modest.
• ChatGPT is coming for your job, you lousy lawyers, professors and journalists. Though I think (based on the Reuters story above about OpenAI revenue) it’s more coming for junior copywriters in marketing and advertising.
• Or maybe for the coders, as DeepMind’s AlphaCode “can keep up with the average human coder in standardized programming contests.” What happens when it can keep up with the average DeepMind coder? Actually don’t ask.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.