Top influencers make a lot of money based on those metrics, Instagram doesn't see a cent of that yet they support these "businesses". Does anyone consider what it costs to distribute a post to 10s of millions of people? As an analogy, consider a system where advertisers paid the actor and the film crew to produce an ad, which was then distributed for free by the television studio. Not going to happen as it's completely unsustainable. Instagram is increasing the monetisation of the platform, and allowing advertisers free direct access to the metrics means you can't sell it.
Once it's gone, expect Instagram to roll out a new system where influencers will need to pay for potential reach and Instagram will start making a lot of money.
Advertisers encroach on every platform and it really sucks. Youtube for example didn't really develop anything worthwhile for users. 5 years ago the platform was so much more interesting. It still is, but navigating content was made really difficult with "adjusted" search results.
Sites that constantly evolve and try to reinvent themselves annoy me way more.
This makes sense from the perspective of the relationship between, say, Kim Kardashian and Instagram. More reach is directly valuable to some people.
But it kind of falls down when you think about the ordinary customer base. A lot of people will want to follow Kim Kardashian. They may not have any other reason to use Instagram at all. But when they try to follow her account, it doesn't look good to show the message "you can't see Kim Kardashian's pictures, because 200,000 other people have already signed up to look at them. Try asking Kim to upgrade her account! (But no, you can't message her here.)"
Summary -- charging popular accounts for potential reach, as opposed to charging advertisers for pushed advertisements, can have strong negative effects on your user base, despite the fact that those users never wanted the reach. They did want their favorite popular accounts to be able to reach them.
That is now how it works. People subscribe to more than one content producer which allows the aggregator the power to merge and reorder the individual streams. You do not pay for being displayed, you pay for being prioritized in the stream.
Crackpot theories aside, likes are just a stupid way to look at the world, the bigger scandal is how long it took all these supposedly smart people to figure that out.
I still miss it, because quickly scanning a very thick amount of content, I'd like to know where I should spend time. I do it with posts (and the list /best is great if you're short on time).
The ordering still supposedly shows us the very recent followed by the 'solid comments', but there is 0 information about how 'solid' that comment is by consensus.
That being said, my favourite part of HN is the [-], so when I'm done with someone's opinion and their 300 responses, I can just skip it.
That's really interesting.
It's good to keep experimenting with the development of better UIs though - seems to be plenty of demand for that on Twitter today as people react coolly to their new UI.
I don't think the user's experience as a 'nobody' is quite comparable to as a celebrity. I'd waste much more of my time worrying about social media metrics if I got more attention.
Though I also hope it doesn't exasperate competition anxiety, if people just presume those they're competing with are more popular than they are. (My understanding is Instagram tends to be very unhealthy for adolescents).
IMHO HN comments or some subreddits are good examples following this principle (not exactly the same environment though) while maintaining some sort of ranking.
"For social media titans, full demetrication would require a more radical abandonment of faith in data, and a disavowal of the numbers-driven “growth mindset” that has powered Silicon Valley for so long."
I'm conflicted on this change. On the one hand, we can see how visible like and follower counts incentivises wrong behaviour on the user side (let's leave aside ethical concerns about "nudging" users to the "correct" usage).
But on the other, these data points are still there for the company. They still know how many likes, and followers you have. They randomize your timeline to increase engagement. So this is not a radical change for them, they are still going to use all the data points they can to push you in the direction they want. The main thing this changes is how transparent they are about this. For Instagram, this means pushing you to use stories more, because it's what's driving engagement now.
Also, it's worth noting that for these companies, metrics were a vital part to convince investors to buy into the companies: they could point to them and say: "see? we're growing, people are engaging!". Now that they've made it, they can afford to tune it down.
The New York Times ran an article about this back in May[0]:
"[T]oday, what you see on Twitter and Instagram already depends on a mixture of signals — things you’ve liked in the past, how much time you’ve spent looking at a particular user’s content, whether you communicate privately with a given user and whether you have an affinity for some topic or another — not just chronology, likes or retweets. Those signals are all metrics too, of a sort, invisible to us but very much legible to the platforms themselves. Imagine a ticker in your Instagram app counting up the number of times you’ve scrolled, or tallying the number of times you’ve tapped, or counting up the seconds you’ve spent looking at an image. These already exist, somewhere, and may inform what you see every day. They’re just not for you to know.
Understood this way, the idea that metrics are the problem sounds an awful lot like these companies saying their users can no longer be trusted, not even with the scraps of actionable data they’ve been allowed to see for years."
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/style/are-likes-and-follo...
I find the key is metric obfuscation. Instead of "1023 likes", color code the post. A deep crimson for the most downvoted and a sky blue for the most upvoted on a site. The specific value is so useless anyway.
If it involves people other than you, your metrics likely don't mean what you think they mean.
So’s the non-engagement-optimized chronological timeline, of course.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have shadowy businesses to buy likes, followers and whatnot. Now just imagine how that would turn out in a decentralized setting where any script can create many accounts on several different servers of the fediverse.
Big corps have to show the metrics because their "engagement" model relies on those number to keep people addicted. On the fediverse, there is no incentive to make people addicts to your service, and showing the numbers would just encourage the same kind of fake-fame industry as on those big networks.
