 It's fascinating to me that stories have become the only useful part of Instagram but the feed, which is at least for me mostly ads, still takes up 95% of home screen real estate. It is at this point the inversion of the banner ad: the content area of the app shows you ads, and there is a little banner at the top you can scroll horizontally to find the information you want 14 comments
[DATA EXPUNGED]
  @darius huh, i never look at stories and still enjoy the regular feed for seeing the neat things my friends are making. I think i've learned to scroll past ads without noticing them; i checked just now and my feed (mobile app) is about 25% ads, nothing like 70%! when i look at the feed on a desktop browser, the adblock plugin seems to be able to catch them all and i see 0 ads. @ranjit it definitely matters whether you have "caught up" on your feed, it shows you random "recommended" content at greater rates as you approach full catch up  @darius Same thing just happened to the Apple TV app on Apple TV: the whole thing is ads for shit you're not watching and one small horizontally scrolling line of the stuff you actually want. Horrible. Related, @pluralistic on "enshittification" of platforms, which just crossed my desk https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/  @darius i don't use instagram a lot and am probably far from the average user, but for me the normal feed is more useful, but i find it actually unusable because of the sheer amount of ads and reels shown on the feed; so basically i think it's a self reinforcing effect; by making the feed unusable, anyone who would prefer it is driven away from the platform. |
Gregory's Server
@darius investors call this "optimal"