Instagram is also becoming a monotonous and boring platform to use. The more ads and other junk features they cram into it, the less people will want to use it.

Instagram used to be my go-to social media, and the millions of images of peoples dinners didn't annoy me, but I find myself using it less and less because of the non-chronological feed. I still don't understand how it can possibly be better than a chronological one.

If anything I wish they would give an option in the settings to make it chronological

Generally if they keep a feature it means that the majority of people were more engaged by it, so the algo feed is probably increasing engagement across the board but alienating a few users.

This. When companies start looking at features and changes through the lenses of a metric, everything follows that metric. I'm sure that drives more engagement, therefore it's enforced on everybody.

Unfortunately they're not measuring abandonment or annoyance. Metrics like these are the short-term gain investors of today tech, always looking into the today and ruining the tomorrow.

It's not so specific as alienating a few users, it's removing an intuitive UX feature in exchange for the ability to control the order of the content you see, which can increase engagement.

The same things happened with Twitter and FB. There are some tweets I've seen dozens of time because the algorithm think it is relevant, but I just want the latest thank you.

Instagram continually shows me photos from 2-3 days prior. I get shitty ads on a regular basis. The quality of the platform is definitely degrading quickly.

Pinterest for the long game!

I've never understood the pseudo-ephemerality of instagram. Even if you save stuff, or like it, the interface makes it very difficult to recall stuff from more than a few days ago.

Oh god no. I hide their results from google searches, that horrible wall they put up to make you sign up to read something or look at an image.

How do you do that? I couldn't find a good way when I looked. It is incomprehensible to me why Google supports the incredibly annoying bait (high res image for Googlebot) and switch (sign up to see high res in browsers) tactic of Pinterest. That shit certainly doesn't make me sign up, it makes me hate Pinterest.

Chrome extension called Personal Blocklist (by Google) There's a Firefox port, I'm not sure where the data goes.

> I've never understood the pseudo-ephemerality of instagram. Even if you save stuff, or like it, the interface makes it very difficult to recall stuff from more than a few days ago.

Hypothesis: these businesses all monetize # of interactions (even if CPI is low), which they want to maximize by structuring interactions such that there is constantly new content that encourages obsessive checking. A sense of ephemerality of content reinforces that behavior ("I have to check because there is new content and it may be gone if I wait to check").

Well, yeah, because they're talking about FB the product, not FB the company. From that point of view, "FB sucks and I'm using Instagram now" is a very valid statement.

That was me for a while before the cognitive dissonance caught up :)

Well yeah, FB owns IG now, but it wasn't always that way.