One more thing to add on your list: spamming is ruining the entire experience. For a company that sells AI as the next big thing, not being able to detect accounts following 5000 people, having 8 followers and posting thousands of comments "GET 1000 FOLLOWERS ON [URL]" every day is kind of a joke.
As someone with a small-medium sized account (~2k followers), I currently get ~10–20 spam followers per week. I aggressively report as spam + block, but it's a nuisance.
Their reporting flow has so many taps and steps that it feels like it's designed to be inefficient to give them less requests.
I want to upvote this twice. This is the single biggest dissatisfier I have with Instagram. I've given up on blocking and reporting fake or spammy users.
Can you elaborate a bit on your developer experience?
I've started building an app for Instagram and would like to know. Apart from the newly introduced sandbox and app approval requirements I haven't noticed any major pain points yet.
It's true that most libraries are only seldom updated, but on the other hand the API doesn't change much and it's REST with OAuth after all.
We went through the Instagram approval process about a week ago, and it was fine. The API itself is pretty good I think, and has a pretty good coverage of their platform functionality. New sandbox and approvals are bit more limiting than the previous version, but it was ok in general. Our application was approved for all requested permissions in less than two days.
In addition to other major legal restrictions, the latest API update crossed a line for accessing your own posts; now you can only retrieve 20 of the most recent entries and pagination has been disabled.
Yes, Instagram legally owns your data, but now they are actively preventing you from accessing it as well.
Damn. I have several personal scripts related to aggregate and backing up my Instagram account that will break from this. It sucks that accessing your own data is blocked by their approval process [which does not approve everything].
Have you gone through the approval process? The accepted use cases are very restrictive, and specifically do not support allowing you to access more than 20 of your own posts.
"I want to display hashtag content and public content on my website."
"This use case is not supported. We do not approve the public_content
permission for one-off projects such as displaying hashtag based
content on your website. As alternative solution, you can show your own
Instagram content, or find a company that offers this type of service
(content discover, moderation, and display)."
Add to this list this awful new trend (twitter does that too) that every time I open instagram they "suggest" someone to follow. I think I follow like 40 ppl. More than enough for me. Not for them.
That's very nearly the opposite of why Instagram was founded: good mobile photography was hard.
From transcript:
> How many people have heard of Burbn/use it? .... Long story short, we worked on that for a little while and then realized it wasn't really going anywhere. But the thing people loved the most about it was actually sharing images of what they were doing.
> So what we did was we listed out these five problems. And I remember the top three that we circled. Number 1 was that mobile photos don't look so great. We've all had that experience... you're seeing the sunset, you take a snapshot, and it looks washed out, you can barely see the sun, etcetera. And we were like, 'That's the major problem we want to solve.' Number 2 was that uploads on mobile phones take a really long time. So we were like, 'What could we do around that?' Well, maybe if we started the upload way before you're done even editing the photo's caption, and what if we sized down the photo just to fit perfectly on the screen but nothing else? And that's the small little problem and solution that it turns out really delights people because they press 'done' entering their caption, it's already been uploaded.
For marketing, which has been positive for a lot of artists. It's definitely allowed people to get their works out there, but let's not act like it's for serious photography.
> but let's not act like it's for serious photography.
I (strongly) disagree. There is some incredible work on Instagram from (many) thousands of 'amateur' and professional photographers alike. "Serious photography" isn't just restricted to DSLRs/MF/etc.
In many ways, the constraints of mobile photography (lower res, fixed focal length, small viewport when consuming) has benefits, just like constraints elsewhere in photography.
(I follow many photographers who primarily or solely publish to Instagram; many who aren't marketing their paid services.)
They are using Instagram as an easy publishing platform. It's assured the big ones find it very lucrative. The biggest issue with Instagram is all of the bullshit accounts with millions of users, that are just posting the work of other artists with a "credit" if they are lucky.
I would even argue that Instagram has in some ways redefined professional photography (by enforcing different constraints than a professional photographer is used to).
Aggregator accounts are one of the best ways to discover high quality users.
This is Facebook's third attempt at trying to compete against Snapchat, this time with the exact same name as their product. I guess third time's a charm.
Interesting though that they're only implementing the most basic features (drawing over a video?), and not the more interesting and fun face tracking stuff that Snapchat does now.
Personally, I can't see this being successful. Snapchat will remain to be a quick and dirty way to get 'moments' to my friends (like twitter, but with video), whereas Instagram will be for more more 'serious', 'arty' photos.
I've stopped using Insta for the most part. I'm an old and I feel like Snaps are just more fun for me. The major issue with that is a lot of my friends haven't caught on yet.
Insta just feels like it has too many buttons and notifications from spammers flying at me. They lost the plot from the simple app they used to be a long time ago. Plus the new algorithm change is terrible for me. Every time I open the app I see the same pictures over and over again and lots of advertisements in there now.
Yeah anecdotally, my in app time for Snapchat vs Instagram flipped once they changed the feed. Twitter was even worse, I don't use it anymore. How insane would it be if your email inbox didn't sort chronologically?
I don't know what cohorts Facebook is looking at. Are they seeing a drop in engagement but balance it doesn't matter because of the revenue stream from advertisers? Or may be the bulk of users have increased engagement with a non-chronological feed? Perhaps more users than I realized follow over 1,000 users and the chronology value was lost a very long time ago.
Oddly enough I'm finding myself returning back to RSS feeds. Lots of excellent independent bloggers still out there who actually write useful things. edit: and photographers.
I never understood why they couldn't just give people the option to retain the chronological sorting.. It can't possibly be that difficult to give users the choice.
Moving the feed from 'chronological' to 'algorithmic' obfuscates the true quantity of actual content on the your timeline, thereby allowing a higher density of ads and other sponsored content without you necessarily being able to tell or prove.
I hypothesized about other benefits and drawbacks here [1]
Snapchats are surprisingly better than alternatives nowadays.
I personally really dislike the new feeds by popularity route that services are adopting, and Snapchat's Stories are great because I can find a friend's feed for the day and just catch up immediately, rather than having to either dig and dig until a feed thinks a particular post is important, etc.
Yeah. Just because a plethora of people like someone's post doesn't mean that I will, but with many new feeds that kind of post would be prioritized over something with fewer likes/comments that I would actually want to see.
Sometimes older posts are more important though. What if your friend got married yesterday and posted a toilet paper joke today? I've honestly never understood the anti algorithmic feed position.
I may not care enough about a neighbor/classmate/coworker getting married yesterday, whereas I may care about them posting about something about street cleaning / the exam today / debugging fixing the tough problem they ran into today.
I don't know that a third-party can assign a value of importance when it can be so arbitrary.
When services switch to algorithmic timelines, engagement incresses massively. If this result isn't an indication that "a third party can assign a value of importance", I don't know what is.
What people say they want and what their behavior shows that they want aren't necessarily the same thing. Watch what users do, not what they say.
It's funny you mention that, because I know more people who use Instagram than Snapchat. Could be an age demographic? What I do know is my friends who use Snapchat don't use the stories mode, relying on sending direct snaps to the people they want to send it to. Not the case with Instagram.
- they already launched it, not taking weeks like some other industry bozos where they announce something then ship it when no one cares anymore (Google how's that Allo doing)
- Snapchat client sucks balls on Android, it drains battery, horrible performance
I don't think there is much overlap between Snapchat and IG user bases, so I think this is more about adding well-received features as opposed to directly competing. In other words, they are leveraging all the time and effort that Snapchat put into developing a mature feature.
> I don't think there is much overlap between Snapchat and IG user bases
Huh? The overlap is probably one of the largest of any social networks. Simply take a look at the sheer volume of Instagram's that are obviously touched up Snaps.
"It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other (...) Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable."
And [2]:
"I can't help but feel that value is paradoxically lost (for the user) once everyone iterates themselves into equivalence. Network effect advantages become almost irrelevant when everyone maintains an equally split presence. And if value is lost for the user, their platform loyalty will plummet.
Facebook and Snapchat will begin to be perceived as a 'utility' (something that has already happened to Twitter), meaning, we as a society all expect these functions of social networking and messaging to be fulfilled by a provider, but the exact provider is no longer relevant. Pressures to maintain a positive balance sheet will lead to a proliferation of ads."
I would really like to know why Facebook thought that this would be a better feature for Instagram than for Messenger or WhatsApp. That's how I use my social media apps:
- WhatsApp: Messaging with most of my friends (I'm from Germany and here everyone I know uses WhatsApp)
- Messenger: Messaging with people that don't have WhatsApp
- Snapchat: Letting my friends now what I'm up to right now. I don't put much thought into what I post there. I mostly follow close friends because I honestly don't really care about the stories of people I don't know.
- Instagram: Posting pictures that I think look nice. Often that are pictures that I took with my DSLR and edited on my laptop. I also follow a lot of people I don't know but who I think take nice pictures.
Therefore I don't see me using Instagram Stories anytime soon because
1. Snapchat already has that feature and they probably implemented it better,
2. the content on Instagram is simply different than the one on Snapchat (more high-quality instead of the quick and dirty Snaps).
If I wouldn't have Snapchat and they brought Stories to one of their Messaging apps I might have used it. But Instagram? No chance. It would be interesting to know how other people use these apps (if at all). I realise that I'm probably younger than most people here so my experience might differ quite bit.
Can't speak for everyone but my followers on Instagram are quite different from my Facebook friends. Over half of them I don't know personally. Besides the fact that my account is public, I think this impacts what I would post on there vs Snapchat significantly.
What's funny about this thread is it's almost all people complaining about dev experience, APIs, etc and saying IG is dead...
Meanwhile their customers are very happy and very active. Look at how many snaps you see on your snapchat right now and then go look at how many IG stories have already been posted in the first couple hours.
I'd say that was a successful launch.
Nit picking things, as a developer, i understand... but ultimately what matters is: are customers using it? Right now the answer is, without a doubt, yes.
Thousands (Millions?) are debating deleting their snapchats at this very moment. I know I am.
IG did a great job getting a whole lot of activity back on their app. Congrats to them.
By customer, i meant users. By users, I mean the people who spend time on the app and are the reason there are advertisers and/or a business in the first place.
Regardless of what the post says to you, people have it and are already posting a LOT. Vogue already has anna wintour in multiple posts on their IG story. Brands already are posting. A lot of the vine/snapchat "stars" are already 20-30+ posts deep. I see fashion bloggers, tech writers, etc. A lot of people are already using it.
I agree, seems to be a lot of anger/hate on the developer side of things, but it's a smart move on IG's side from a user and business strategy perspective.
I was having a similar discussion with someone else on a duplicate of this post, so thought I'd share some of my thoughts here as well since they're especially relevant to your comment. The general point of the prior discussion was that IG was simply cloning SC, and might do better by releasing it as a separate app vs inside their main app. But by releasing it within their main app will result in certain failure since SC's crowd of tweens/millennials wouldn't leave SC.
[my responses with minor edits]
I disagree, I think integrating it with their main product is the perfect way to release this. Just look at Periscope ( and Vine ) living as separate products from Twitter, vs FB releasing FB Live deeply embedded into their primary product. The likelihood of the mainstream user's willingness to try out and adopt the new product/feature is increased.
And in this case, I think all the additional features that comes with IG Stories is actually very cohesive with the rest of IG's core experience. All the new stickers, overlays, filters, and I'm sure they'll be adding the same animated video filters are all very natural extensions of the IG user experience.
So many people use Snapchat as a photo/filter editor to then share on IG/Twitter/FB, now they can do that very same experience directly in IG and share it with their existing fans.
And maybe an overlooked aspect is IG's better UX vs snapchat's bizarre stubbornness to maintain their user antagonistic UX.
But I think it's just as telling with SC's recent spate of features that are moving away from the ephemeral nature of the app ( ie Memories ). Where you can store or save Snaps or Stories.... oh you mean sort of like a personal gallery? And now you want to view a collection of the latest/most popular collected snaps from your friends? oh you mean like a newsfeed?
Bottom line is that the photo/messaging apps are converging. And I don't think there's necessarily any loyalty to a particular platform especially if they have very similar features. The crowd will move to the platform where their friends are, and where the celebs/bloggers/artists/influencers are. And IMO I think IG has a slight advantage with that group at this point because of the non-ephemeral nature of their app which led/leads more naturally to those types building their 'brand' and following. Nobody wants to spend hours and energy creating content that simply disappears. But these types have followed the crowd onto SC and lived by the SC rules, but I'd have to believe they would prefer the other model if they had a choice.
So I guess what I'm saying is that these 2 apps are converging to the same point, albeit from different ends of the spectrum with differing pressures. And once they reach a certain level of parity, loyalty to a platform goes out the window, and being able to capture the cool kids and influencers will be the key to where the rest of the crowd goes. So I don't think it's 'certain failure' from IG's point of view, and certainly still anyone's game.
Your comment deserve a longer response, but i have to leave the office shortly.
My short reply is... I agree that staying within the app is a win. The overall mood seems to be "yes, one less app i have to use now..."
I don't keep apps I dont need or use, and a lot of people feel the same way. I dont want YET ANOTHER social networking app. This app feels like snapchat and IG merged, except in reality, IG just stole a lot of Snapchats thunder/users.
I had turned auto-update off ahead of the new instagram UI update because I prefered the look of the old Instagram. I'm now glad that I did. I don't need stories slowing down the experience, taking up more real estate, or eating more bandwidth.
I don't mean to be cynical, but I think Instagram as a product has peaked. Their core functionality was perfect, and in many ways, the product only gotten worse as they've rolled out updates (prioritized feeds, sending DMs by default when you @ people, ...). Instagram hasn't rolled something out in a long time that's made me "wow," which is too bad, because it was my favourite social network not that long ago.
I'd be very annoyed if I had any personal stake in the company.
Also turned off auto-update but few weeks ago the app signed me out automatically and prevented me from logging in unless I update to the latest version.
Haven't used the app since then. Every social app is trying to do the same thing it's pretty pointless now imo
Looking past the obvious verbatim copy. Have we reached the point where everyone is completely sick of another way to "share", update, and post every moment of our lives. It's really exhausting. Is this a function of getting old?
What! Didnt that video of the cool kids having fun inspire you to share your awesome life stories?
I do get where you are coming from. I dislike snapchat because while it may be a way to share something silly its not a serious way to communicate.
I have a friend that tries to use it for this and drives me nuts.
Serious question: what is it like being on an engineering team like this? Where the explicit objective is to clone a competitor head-to-toe. Does it impact morale? Can you recruit great people to such teams?
(Note, I get that nothing is completely original out there, and that there are a few differences between this and Snapchat.)
I have met some members of Instagram's engineering team at Python conferences. They also run a dedicated engineering blog (https://engineering.instagram.com).
Despite the fact that they use an old version of Django, and the product has not exactly changed drastically since it became popular, they don't seem jaded.
Sometimes it's fun to build your own version of something regardless of what exists in the rest of the world. I'm sure nuances will become more prominent in time.
I've been to a couple of Instagram ML meetups. I am not surprised that this is what they came up with. There seemed to be a lot of technically gifted people there, but I always felt there was a lack of creativity and deep domain understanding. All the projects seemed to be in the line of: we added this feature, and we saw our user engagement increased by this percentage. Everyone seemed to be working on incremental improvements without a purposeful leadership and vision.
They do have the technical talents though. I think one of the word2vec authors was there, but he was giving a talk about using the same technique on emoji icons :-( I would think there are more interesting problems to tackle with the available resources at FB.
Meanwhile any time I look at Instagram now I'm hard-pressed to find any posts from the current day because they only show me the "important" highlights from more than a day ago.
I think that Facebook and other companies need to consider that it's better to change nothing than add the wrong feature. This blurs the lines too much with Snapchat. If I still used Instagram when they added this feature, I would stop using it in favour of Snapchat. (But I've already stopped using Snapchat since they feature-creeped all the way into photo backups.)
What I'm unclear about, as both an Instagram user and with an interest in product development (from a UI/UX perspective), is what question this answered.
I suppose it should not be entirely a surprise for a half billion user, Facebook-owned service to take the throw-feature-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks approach.
Regardless, it appears to be unobtrusive (though it seems odd to bury ephemeral content creation/consumption...)
As an educator, I can tell you that young teens still use both Snapchat and Instagram equally. I would say that younger kids are actually more drawn to Snapchat due to the face swap and goofiness functionalities.
I would call it the 3rd dotcom bubble, there was a pretty big one forming that popped during the 2008 financial crisis as well, at least in San Francisco.
That wasn't really a fall, just a dissapointment. They still made a pretty hefty return on their investment there which adds to the cash position of the company and I'm sure the investors are pleased with the attempt to crack China.
Is it April Fools' day already? They didn't even bother to change the name from the direct feature rip of Snapchat? haha All I can think of is this meme: http://bluetide.pro/1eJqM/4NFGBKsg
Things that are shit with IG and still require attention:
- there is no real onboarding experience [1]
- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a user [2]
- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a developer [2]
- developer libraries are abandoned [3]
- the API is a joke.
- There is still a lack of support for HD photography.
- The 3rd party developer experience is ... well ask some of your peers and you'll quickly find out.
[1] Someone at Instagram, for the love of the internet just do some reading up on this. Here's an article to get you started: https://medium.com/@scottbelsky/crafting-the-first-mile-of-p...
[2] unless you stalk them on Twitter. That's not creepy at all though, is it?
[3] https://github.com/facebookarchive/instagram-ruby-gem