I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app.
By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.
It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.
TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.
Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).
On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.
Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.
PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:
* Buy everything, or course.
* Pay for electric, gas, and water.
* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.
* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.
* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.
I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid.
I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.
They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.
You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.
As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat.
I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.
Rename it "Skype for Teens". Make no changes to the codebase.
Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.
And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.
At a certain scale, a person doesn't make this decision... their friends make it for them.
On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.
East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.
What is Reels immitating here?
TikTok or Doubin, just swipe up/down would be enough for 90% of your input
When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse.
tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.
Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.
Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then).
Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore.
I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.
This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)
UI wise, Snapchat is the worst.
What I would do to solve this problem if I were at Facebook is to start new features out on an established platform (like they already do) until they reach a critical mass. Then I would completely break the feature out into its own app with separate branding. Hopefully I could get 10-20% of the active users of that feature to move to the new app and then grow it from there.
It's a very delicate process each time you do it but I think in the long run it would diversify Facebook's revenue across many independent brands and solve the feature creep problem.
After the rise of Snapchat Facebook tacked on stories to FB, IG, and WA.
If that's the value prop, what were people willing to pay for that value?
I think, instead, getting sponsored stories in front of eyeballs is the service being provided to the paying customers.
Understanding these phenomena is easier when you think of it solely in terms of the bottom line.
It's an ugly, but effective strategy.
So in a way their arrogance may have hurt them in the long run.
As we all know this strategy worked great for Foursquare.
The biggest reason I left Facebook was because the platform became a jumbled mess instead of its original clean interface. It's the reason why Facebook originally won out against Myspace and why Instagram won out against Facebook.
Now they're Facebooking Instagram.
But I think Zuck knows this and buys up enough up and comers to probably stay ahead on enough things.
* MySpace, at its peak, had around 75 MM MAU.
* Facebook's core properties (Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger/Big Blue) have around 2.6 billion MAU.
Even if I just consider FB core + Messenger, Facebook is roughly 20x larger than MySpace. Facebook, as a core product, also is growing in non-US markets, even though it has saturated the US markets for years.
MySpace and Facebook just aren't comparable anymore.
75m MAU in 2008 is very different than 2.6b in 2020.
The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that:
1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social products increase it too. If my friends aren't using a social platform neither am I, usually.
2. Facebook has such a rich culture of A/B testing that they'll never release controversial changes without a deeper understanding of the impact of those changes on engagement. They won't shoot themselves in the foot like Digg did with current leadership.
3. Facebook has a really successful history of acquisitions and its leadership is very aware of social media trends. It catches those trends early.
As a consequence of (1), I'd argue that Facebook has a tremendous moat in comparison to its peers: it has a large amount of users who are more likely to stay put. While Facebook also moves slowly as a consequence of (2) often enough, it can move really quickly on producing novel products.
Facebook certainly will face challenges in the future, but they're likely to be a lot different at this stage.
The questions for continued relevance is if Facebook-the-company can continue to iterate Facebook-the-product, or if its codebase has grown too unwieldy, and the company's culture gone toxic, making it harder to add a feature to Facebook, compared to creating a new company, writing a bunch of code, buying content and acquiring users. Given the rise of Instagram(Acquired), Snapchat (IPOd), WhatsApp(Acquired), TikTok, it's not clear Facebook-the-company is able to innovate. It's not clear that they have to, either, given older Internet brands like Yahoo! are still around and making money.
The comparison I'd make is to email. There are reasons email will never die (along with reasons why email can't innovate), and I think some of those reasons also apply to Facebook by this point. There's just some percentage of people that won't ever move, so while, eg, IRC is no longer in its heyday, it's still alive and kicking.
A decade ago you could have everyone on it for their entire lunchbreaks, deep-stalking their mates. But nowadays people are not engaged with it compulsively.
Younger people don't use it because their parents are on it.
Content isn't made by people for Facebook because it won't show in their friends feeds.
Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
Before Facebook there was the printed telephone book and the Yellow Pages. People and businesses had to be in the phone books because someone might want to contact them that way. But the Internet and email came along. Facebook is a bit like that, people are there but no more engaged than they are with a printed telephone book.
Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to keep the same eyeballs. Because of that Facebook are successful.
But TikTok is the new, cool app in town. 80 million users in the US apparently, not all of them teenage girls.
The only thing I disagree with is that Facebook does make big profits from its ads, in fact it does a tough competition to google and amazon... the rest of your arguments seem correct to me... facebook doesn't feel like the home that it was before... it feels more like a newspaper, full of ads, debates, news and toxic people
> Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
No, this is not true. Not only has Facebook done well in Q2, performance was unaffected by the boycott of large advertisers because of revenue from small businesses.
True. But then they should speak with humility and uncertainty, not proclaim their wrong ideas with confidence.
> if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons
No, it's not our job to educate people. Least of all, people who are ignorant but purport to be knowledgeable. These are the most resistant to any kind of learning.
Kodak didn't die when invented digital cameras, but it was a downhill ride towards inevitable cliff.
Facebook is probably the the company most able to claim to have achieved this, with facebook.com and Instagram being two big hits, arguably Messenger and WhatsApp too. TikTok is probably the biggest sign that they have actually failed to hit a 3rd generation.
It might be a successful strategy to run a business when you are big enough to do it (as long as your buyouts are correct).
I heard about facebook from a friend when it was still exclusive and I joined when it was opened up. Now I open it up at what seems exponential intervals, and each time it seems my disappointment with the platform is also exponential.
Its a mess filled with garbage mixed with adds that pretend to be content.
Facebook has been declared dead without actually dying for so long now that it might still be alive when the retro mechanisms start kicking in.
Absolutely. They just reported their Q2 earnings, and Facebook has 2.7B monthly active users. When you exclude China (where they aren't allowed), people without internet or too old/young, then yes - is growth is limited, largely by size of the human population.
Even if young generations decide not to join, this will be likely most powerful network for decades.
But they sure love Instagram and WhatsApp.
I wouldn’t say Instagram is fading. Just that Tiktok is keeping the younger generation away from it. Snap is losing on both sides because of them.
Facebook (the company) will probably settle into a stable pattern like the BBC's radio lineup, where listeners roll from Radio 1, to Radio 2, to Radio 4 as they age.
Btw UI and UX need to evolve but to the point where they don't become bloated.
It already is... About a week or two ago Instagram decided to put the "Shop" or "Marketplace" button where the "Likes" tab button was... And now to get to your likes/follows/etc. you need to go to your profile tab, and find the "heart" button in the top right.
But because the "like" button has been in the same place for the past several years, it's still ingrained in my habits to press where the "Marketplace" button is, so I keep opening the store page...
I can't believe this wasn't on purpose...
The "Likes" button on the tab bar wasn't to like a post. It was to basically see the list of all interactions on your posts or new followers/requests.
It's terrifically awful. If you do get a notification, then pressing the "Profile" tab button now brings you to the notifications list view.
But if you have "read" the new ones and want to go back to it you need to dig through for it like I mentioned in the OP.
It's ridiculous.
There is an ever growing demand for new features, not necessarily from users, to fend off rivals and to stay relevant and exciting. As with a lot of popular apps and services, it ends up bloated, trying to offer everything to everyone and satisfying no one.
Except it didn't, the photo quality on Instagram is really bad because of compression and it is not possible to share actual good pictures because of that.
User experience doesn't seem to be a priority for Instagram.
Back in 2013-2014 it was a quite simple to use and elegant app. Then Facebook happened.
Really feels like it belongs more in the feed part than the stories part but I guess no one would watch it then.
Only watched one once and feel like that’s where I did.
Commerce is already integrated into the stories feed, not only with advertisements as you scroll through stories, but with "swipe-ups" that users can use to sell or advertise products with.
As much as this article paints a messy picture of Instagram as an app, it's still wildly popular and these issues don't seem to be hurting its popularity.
Wait, there's a separate app for IG messages? For iOS? Link? I can't find _any_ references to it.
You can add anyone to your close friends list. So add anyone you like to chat to. If you want a group to appear in Threads, add all the people in the group to threads.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/threads-from-instagram/id14738...
" Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps. "
Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676
[1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...