Instagram doesn’t have an algorithmic feed that introduce you to content - not that I know of.

You pretty much only see instagram content when you visit a specific person’s page and that’s all you will ever see.

Insta reels and YouTube shorts are clone of Tiktok with similar feed/algo and content.

[delayed]

Facebook and Instagram "short video shit" is at least partially overlapping. This incidentally creates a quite grating user experience.

Instagram does for reels and you occasionally get related pages popping up in your feed.

I occasionally see a post from someone I follow. 90% of what’s in my feed is either and ad or “suggested for you”.

When was the last time you used Instagram? Or Youtube? They're almost Tiktok clones at this point.

I only visit on mobile. I thought the middle film thing icon was to take your own photos/videos - because that’s what the center icon did on the YouTube app; the last time I had the app installed. Never occurred to me it’s a feed. O_o

Instagram as it exists today is a streamlined dopamine injection engine.

Variable rewards, instantaneous short-form tailored content, fear of missing out. It's carefully built for continuous user engagement.

They're bad Tiktok clones. Which in this case is a good thing - their inferior algorithms make the result less addicting.

I often get “For you” on the front app page instead of the accounts I’m following. This sometimes shows suggested pages.

You can switch to "Following" on front page and not get any algo recs but I don't think selection sticks.

Algo recs and reels nearly killed IG for me. It desperately tries to become TikTok but that's not why I signed up for IG (which was photos). Photos still exist, but even if you like every photo and "dislike" every reel for months it will still push 99% reel content in your feed--whatever ML they use has been near totally useless.

They introduced this recently. They do it just like TikTok.

I don't know if it was that recent? I abandoned the app two years ago because of the introduction of the algorithmic feed ( and the explore page, but at least you had to click on that )

> Instagram doesn’t have an algorithmic feed that introduce you to content - not that I know of.

That is literally their default mode. They had to introduce a "For You" feed (hidden behind a tap on Instagram logo) to go around EU regulations.

I must have missed it because I don’t follow anyone and just go directly to their pages manually.

Then you're in luck :)

Instagram's default feed is an abomination. For me it shows two posts from people I follow, and then an endless stream of ads and "suggested" content.

Thankfully I don't engage with Instagram much, and a few years back I muted/unfollowed a bunch of people, so the algorithmic feed is mostly okay: dogs, cats, climbing. But most of it is recycled regurgitated aggregator accounts

I basically stopped using Instagram because it only shows you algorithm feed, I see so little content from the people I follow

You can just switch to “following” mode, but it is an annoying extra step.

There is no way to set it as default. You have to do it everytime which is extremely annoying. Instagram clearly does not want you to only see posts from the people you follow.

> I have a feeling tiktok is probably more moderated and enforces stricter content rules than instagram

Respectfully, did you read the article? They had more real problems with TikTok's moderation.

> The Nepali government said that they had reached out to TikTok multiple times but the company declined to address their concerns about the content; Narayan Kaji Shrestha, the home minister, suggested a ban on the entire app since scrubbing offending videos individually would be too tricky, the New York Times reported.

And youtube. YT shorts is essentially turning into TikTok.

Short of whitelisting and pre-approving content I don't see how we can allow this to go on. This is quite frankly destroying peoples brains.

I was telling my SO today that I think social media should be regulated like cigarettes and booze.

None of those things should be regulated by the government. Families/communities should be capable of that.

Any ideas how I can turn off this cancer yt shorts? I'm not using it and yt keeps shoving it up my ass in every update..

Do not use their app, then set ad block rules to block whatever you want.

Use alternative YT front-end like Piped, Newpipe etc.

I could be wrong, but i thought i saw shorts on newpipe the other day.

I guess you are talking about mobile. There a several ytshorts blocker extensions for desktop browsers.

I used a Firefox add-on called "Stylus" and wrote a custom css rule to hide the relevant divs/elements. It's not perfect, but it's okay. https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

However, after the recent ad-blocker targeting by Youtube I pretty much just stopped watching Youtube entirely. I added my regular subscriptions to the NewPipe app on my phone and just watch what they put out.

The add-on I mentioned above is super useful to personalize my experience with other websites. Particularly online-shopping and other marketplaces that have huge amounts of whitespace for no reason. You'd be surprised how much nicer the web experience is after you add a few "margin: 0px;" css styles to strategic areas.

If you change /shorts/ in the URL to /watch/, it'll load the same video in the normal YouTube UI. I like that better because it allows for such advanced features as... changing the fucking volume.

(Shorts will keep the volume set as whatever you last changed it to in the normal UI, with no way to change it without going to a different ("normal") video.)

On Android you could patch using Revanced, there's a checkbox for shorts in the feed.

https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager

I'm pretty libertarian, but I agree something needs to change. I don't know what sane regulation would look like, but I suspect the politician's answer would be regulatory capture of some kind. I personally don't want some kind of government censor managing my internet connection, but at the same time I think this shit is detrimental to society. I think it's a conversation we should be having.

Maybe some way of making addiction-inducing products less profitable instead of censorship? Or going further, lessening the role of profit in how society is organized?

I'm also heavily leaning towards Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist. My thought on the matter is that whatever solution we come up with to resolve this particular issue is the same one we need to do to resolve the greater societal issues we are seeing, because I think the root cause is the same.

Beyond that, part of the Libertarian line of thought is that we have to "let go" and let things fall where they may because we have no moral claim over it. The area of effect we have as individuals is quite small so it makes sense to focus in that direction rather. So that would mean things like family, neighborhood, community, shared culture/religion, and the institutions that build on those.

I myself try to be involved with and sit on the boards of HoAs, to add some sanity and fairness to it. I've also been helping pay for close family friends to go through college. I'm also planning on doing charity work for the groups I feel closest to in my local context (South Africa).

The root cause is a desire for unconsciousness. The solution is a higher level of consciousness. Take a small dose of LSD (not endorsing this, just making a point) and the entire modern internet becomes unbearable. It becomes physically painful to procrastinate because you are just painfully aware that you are trying to distract yourself, defeating the purpose.

It's like when you reset your tastebuds and the level of sugar and salt in everything becomes physically revolting.

I don't expect a mass enlightenment any time soon though (regardless of legalization/normalization of psychedelics), so we'll need one or two (or three...) "stopgap" solutions before that point. (Just for the next thousand years or so ;)

A somewhat related phenomenon is the desire for someone else to take care of everything. It simplifies the infinite chaos and complexity of life. To some degree this is necessary to maintain sanity, but if this is the "default" approach, except for a small percentage of people who seek power due to genetic hardwiring... well then you end up with what we have now. In this case, the solution is also maturation (though in this case, emotional rather than... whatever you want to call consciousness being aware of itself), and also not expected to "arrive" within the next few centuries.

I wish I had some more practical suggestions, but I at least hope that pointing out the root causes (as I see them) may lead someone else to helpful ideas.

Interesting to watch people confront themselves like this. Everyone's libertarian until they see a real harm that actually upsets them and they can't victim-blame.

Misinformation on social media? We can't ban that, it would be a slippery slope to fascism. What even is "misinformation" anyway?

Hate speech on social media? We can't ban that, it would be a slippery slope to fascism. What even is "hate" anyway?

Algorithmic feeds? Fascist mind control. We must only allow strictly chronological feeds or it's the reeducation camps for us all.

The kids these days and their memes? WHAT DOES RIZZ EVEN MEAN? BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND AND SALT THE ASHES.

Nah man there are a lot of harms that upset me where I still think regulation would cause more harm. Anything related to the latest craze over CSAM and encryption is a good example.

On the other hand, if anyone wants to try making advertisement contracts unenforceable (illegal, essentially), I'll be the first in line.

I was wondering the other day what the alternative world would be like where every publicly posted video had to be reviewed by the BBFC censor board and assigned a rating. Like if you want to post your kid's first steps on Facebook, that would be a U rating, while car park fights would be R15.

(and of course how unworkable it would be to have the censor board be several percent of the population so they could keep up with the posting rate)

Maybe that's a good thing, and would cause the balance / dynamic to be different and thus requiring a rework in some form

Perhaps it costs real money to submit each video to these platforms as a means to offset the moderation and rating efforts. Similar to what others have suggested to reduce spam emails.

Off the top of my head, requiring money to post videos to these platforms would immediately reduce the sheer huge volume of spam and automated/auto-generated videos. It would also reduce spam from LCOL regions that weaponize their low-value of time in order to game the system.

Not only that, but it would solve identity and age verification (as it'd require a credit card).

>have the censor board be several percent of the population

Easy to scale up nannying to infinite proportions with AGI. (We don't have that yet, but it may arrive very soon. Well, we have a shitty approximation right now, but AI != AGI.)

On the other hand, that (coupled with the NSA thing) also makes the "my FBI agent" meme come true. One Federal Agent Per Child.

It probably isn't about grand principles, and comes down to wether they have someone to talk to and accommodate their grievances.

If Meta happened to be more reactive and cooperating than ByteDance, they won't be bothered.

Instagram presumably isn't controlled by an expansionist imperial power in Nepal's backyard.

it's not?

Not the expansionist imperial power in their backyard.

Why do you have that feeling? I volunteer helping to report and disrupt networks of sexual assault and hatred against women on social media. Tik Tok is like the wild west in terms of the availability of CSAM for example, and in how tolerant it is of hate speech. Instagram actually takes reports seriously and doesn't tolerate threats of violence etc.

My observation has been that the comments on high engagement TikTok posts are generally quite pleasant, whereas the comments on high engagement Instagram posts feel like a KKK meeting.

This is my experience as well (though it is uninstalled as of ~1 year ago).

You get what you look for on Tiktok.

Haha now do YouTube.

Youtube comments used to be known as a cesspool, but lately I'm mostly avoiding them for their unbearable positivity and uncritical praise of the video. I can see how that's bad on conspiracy or racist videos though.

Fascinating, I'd guess this to be the result of a filter bubble? i.e. it would only show you things you agree with. That might not be optimal though (at least in terms of harvesting human attention at all costs), I always heard that outrage drives engagement better?

I wonder if this is because the creators routinely prune negative comments of them. Or perhaps it is because Youtube severely down ranks comments with dislikes.

Because YouTube promotes positive comments and every comment section is set to "best comments" now by default (instead of most recent comments)

Toxic positivity is what the cool kids call it. Overtly positive, happy and encouraging comments that feel so manufactured and fake.

I'm familiar with the misogyny problem (Andrew Tate etc), but I thought that CSAM was the one thing that got an immediate effective banhammer everywhere on the Internet. If you've got a real CSAM problem with TikTok it might be addressed by taking it to their CDN?

(even on HN, it's hard to get people to focus on the "is it harmful" question for social media rather than the "run by foreigners vs Americans" aspect)

Maybe CSAM = 12 year olds posting videos of themselves dancing?

The 'abuse' in that scenario being the fact that the parents are ignorant or uninvolved enough to let it happen.

If you're posting it publicly then yes it's very likely that it's being redistributed in a pornographic context.

What's next? We should ban all photos of winter forests because arbophiles might get off on them?

Yes, TikTok is very very popular for this. The network of these accounts is then leveraged by "fan accounts" who form hubs for abusers to connect with one another and share links to other platforms, particularly Telegram and Mega.

Reddit is also extremely bad for it. They have a system now where a new subreddit is created every day, discoverable via known keywords, and then used as a directory for links to telegram.

The other thing you'll commonly see on both of these platforms is material being stolen from other social media platforms and then re-hosted to reddit or TikTok with sexualised descriptions. Reddit for example will often say it's fine as long they don't explicitly mention that the images are not of the poster.

> Reddit is also extremely bad for it. They have a system now where a new subreddit is created every day, discoverable via known keywords, and then used as a directory for links to telegram.

Why is Reddit in the equation, because the Telegram channels also get banned ? Cause if not, why not just stick to Telegram

Reddit is used as a directory. It has the advantages in discoverability and being able to automate account creation without needing an email address or phone number.

Run by Americans or run by the intelligence and propaganda arm of a govt that is adversarial to America?

Sure, but .. are there no first Amendment implications at all? What's the minimum US involvement of staff TikTok would require in order to receive first amendment protection?

Why do I get a bad feeling about someone "volunteering" to police CSAM on the internet in the name of "disrupting networks of sexual assault"?

Vigilante CSAM Detective doesn't exactly sit well with me

> I volunteer helping to report and disrupt networks of sexual assault and hatred against women on social media.

Are you part of an organization?

But tiktok does have an "agenda" of sorts.

From what I've read, if you open tiktok app outside of China, most videos will be about ordinary folks celebrating a very liberal or open way of life, being an anarchist, anti-authoritarian or even a dissident is celebrated.

But if you open tiktok from within China, most videos will be about Chinese patriotism and how that way of life is the best. In this case, anarchism or anti-authoritarian videos are NOT celebrated, they will be likely removed or banned from there.

TikTok is not much different than Instagram and Youtube Shorts in the western world. That it is heavily moderated in China would not surprise me either. But i wouldn't call that an "agenda"

What else is it then? An instrument in the hands of a dictatorship.

Let's ban schools because they can be used by dictatorships to inoculate their propaganda?

Yea we should ban schools ran by foreign dictators on American soil. Any more obvious questions?

Are you saying TikTok is inoculating Chinese propaganda in Americans' minds? Are you really saying that?

I’ve seen it, there’s a ton of evidence of it

They are much much different.

TikTok is full of anti America propaganda. It rarely gets removed. Anything anti China doesn’t last long.

Instagram has hardly any anti China or anti America propaganda. And it’s certainly not recommended to you within minutes of using the app for the first time.

Opened TikTok in Taiwan and almost immediately got anti America propaganda. Blaming America for covid.

The opposite is absolutely true.

Try and question "America's greatest ally ever" and their policies and see how long you last on these platforms.

When critiquing china, remember that you're essentially looking in the mirror.

That’s funny because this argument has been exposed as complete bullshit in the last month. You should find a better example to try and be dishonest about nowadays. Social media is extremely anti-Israel and now everyone knows it

> Social media is extremely anti-Israel and now everyone knows it

People generally don't hold ethnic cleansing in high esteem.

There’s no ethic cleansing unless you follow the propaganda that Palestine has existed for 1000s of years and Israel stole all the land and has been attacking everyone around it.

First weeks I used TikTok, I got all kind of anti-anything, from the local right to local left, from global KKK to whatever global hippies are called today. Any propaganda to burn whichever evil empires in the creators corner of the world exist. Guess it had some hard time to find my political niche and started with too little information about me.

On Instagram on the other side, I've never seen any serious amount of political messages, but they all want to sell me merch, cat-toys and nerd-toys from any point of the spectrum. Likely be because they have more information about me. And these days, TikTok is pretty much like Instagram, all cats and nerds and the occasional call for blood from those plebs who break their spaghetti.

So I don't think it's that any platform is full of this or that, but it very much depends on what the platforms think what might be interesting for you, and the rest you just don't see until it really floods the platform hard.

Aren't those just moderation policies adapted to local markets?

If you go to Douyin's search page https://www.douyin.com/search/ and focus the search bar, it'll show two sets of recommendations. The first is "for you" and, if they don't have a profile on you, likely a reflection of the most popular content. The second is a ranking of "hot topics", where Xi Jinping gets a dedicated top spot above number 1. Obviously that's because he'd only rarely rank near the top organically. But even with that extra promotion, most people will simply ignore it, so it's more of a fig leaf to keep the government content while users keep watching basically the same stuff as anywhere else.

Tik Tok is very good at targeting to the user. My Tik Tok doesn’t have any liberal stuff on it at all.

> probably more moderated

for now. Unpopular opinion, social network should be regulated like casinos.

I would say rather like cigarettes

Adults are not immune.

Cigarettes are heavily regulated for adults too.

I mean that we need something like a forced label on every social platform: a forced 5 second splash screen with a warning. “this app can cause depression, self-esteem issues and is detrimental to your mental health. Here are some resources to know more”

I wish the EU commission had the guts to push for something like this for all dopamine-kick and scroll-based apps

Social network apps with scrolling feeds are literally online slot machines. People get stuck in the machine zone. It's exactly the same thing, minus the explicit money transaction.

This design should be regulated the same way slot machines are.

Instagram has been around too long so gets largely ignored when people talk about bad influences from social media. Even though, realistically, any photo/video-based social media is awful for teenagers' self-esteem and mental health. [0]

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...

Instagram's influence on people is of a different kind (which doesn't mean it is not a concern...). TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ, especially amongst teenagers.

> TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ

That isn't a very High IQ statement. Facebook is believed to be responsible for violence in Myanmar and other countries.

Don't forget it was also the chosen Livestream platform for the CHCH shooter and was where the "J6 Insurrection" was planned (hence the frantic redirection and sacrifice of the scapegoat known as Parler)

The Indian ban on TikTok was very curiously timed as well - right after a major investment in Jio (Reliance) from Facebook.

No other apps were banned after that, nor was there any ban on Chinese smartphones. Trade with China has only increased rapidly since then.

Coincidentally, India is perhaps the only large market where Instagram still dominates

Not much to do with Facebook. The people and govt were struggling with Covid and govt. wanted to show some action. India also had some border skirmish with China just before that and also the govt wants to reduce dependency on China in general.

IIRC the TikTok (and others) ban had to do with some Chinese incursion inside Indian territory, and the government wanted to appear to be doing something.

That's a incorrect and biased piece of sentence. Over 60 apps were banned initially, some before the skirmishes and some after. Kindly do not spread biased political propaganda.

The direct trigger was a violent confrontation on the border that led to the loss of life of 20 Indian soldiers. The govt wanted to be seen as taking action, while dependence on Chinese supply chain meant any action on the trade front would hurt India's own economy. So popular Chinese apps were seen as a softer target and banned. Aliexpress was also targeted with shipped products being held up at customs indefinitely, leading to aliexpress ending shipping to India from China.

Yeah sure. Love how my pro-Israel comments get immediately deleted.

It's a Chinese propaganda platform.

Why are all the comments that point out who runs TikTok downvoted? I want to suggest the same people are active on this platform, which sounds absurd, of course, but also they wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't!

> Why are all the comments that point out who runs TikTok downvoted?

I downvote them for their potentially misinformative nature, which can lead to delusion and disharmony.

It seems to me that the world would be an objectively better place without any of the current generation of social media where you get force-fed content.

Anything with a “feed” of anything other than what you specifically seek out to follow should be constrained at least by persistent warnings like cigarette labels and prevented from being used for advertising (subscription or freemium model).

Advertising should be banned on media that is proven to promote social harm.

MySpace, blogs, newsgroups, IRC were the socially optimal form, even if not the commercially optimal implementation.

Everything else creates ragebait, doomscrolling, self reinforcing insecurity loops, rabbit holing, and other negative social consequences.

If anyone has a counterpoint, I’m actually really interested in other, more positive, models for online social interaction.

> Of course may be tiktok is just more popular

Instagram: 2.35B MAUs, tiktok: 1B MAUs (reported by a Chinese company so... probably like half that)

> So they should ban instagram too.

A great start!