I mean that makes sense. People entered the new hot thing on the market but it’s still very half-baked. No hashtags, no following only tab, no likes tab. If it wasn’t for the sign up via IG, this would’ve been DOA.
Imagine if they just had feature parity with Mastodon. It would’ve probably replaced Twitter by now.
Instagram I don’t believe has it either, and was a major breaking point for me years ago when someone coaxed me into trying it. Their “algorithm” has no place in a followers-only tab, so they will likely never add it.
I really hated when they switched from chronological order to the algorithm, now the app is useless except for my gf sending me her daily memes, the feed is just a bunch of nonsense from people I don’t know or content from days ago from people I do
IG does have Following (posts from everyone you follow) and Favorites (the ones you give that designation to). When you open up the app they give you everything (accounts you follow and those they suggest.for you). The drop down to pick Following or Favorites is hidden in the IG logo.
Instagram has a following tab, you have to tap the logo at the top and switch it. It also reverts back to the algorithm frequently so have to constantly switch it around.
Yeah, amidst all the posts about Threads, the most insightful articles I saw were the ones stating just how dogshit the actual user experience was. And that experience is just "get users to see more ads among the regular content.
It’s like, people don’t even care what they join. They just care that it has the POTENTIAL to be the NEXT BIG THING, so they need to be on ground zero. All for the show off, zero to do with the specifics of the platform.
Insightful in the sense that it adequately matched the reception shit like NFT powered user spaces got, with investors thinking Blockchain wass the Next Big Thing. It’s all theatrics.
“Social media” is just bad on another level these days. It’s no longer about keeping up with family and friends and 100% about cramming the algorithm down your throat and “helping” you to discover new entertainment from people you’ve never heard of. I’m done.
Honestly, most dev effort at big companies goes into ensuring nothing breaks or slows performance. When news articles are written about your mistakes, most developers and managers try not to break things.
Making new stuff happens, but it just can’t happen as fast as at small companies where 90% uptime is good enough.
That said, it doesn’t excuse launching products half baked. No reason an unlaunched product can’t be iterated on quickly during dev.
No reason? It’s probably meetings, then more meetings, add some meetings, and you guessed it, meetings.
Like the follow tab mentioned it’s probably first product owners meetings to agree on what a user would expect… and there’s always someone having a wild opinion or two that needs to be “hashed out”. Then when that’s done it’s meetings with the UX team, then they have a meeting on their own, then a new meeting with product owner, UX and designers, then after that frontend team is in the loop, then back to UX and prod owner, then a new round, then it’s time for backend to come in, first one with PO and frontend, then a technical one to agree on how to do it, then database team is involved, they refuse to change a small thing and expected functionality needs to be changed, back to PO, UX, frontend, backend, and then finally maybe a dev or two can sit down and add it. Which takes 2 hours. After six weeks of meetings.
And then comes testing of course, and signoff on the functionality.
Totally agree about the amount of coordination overhead. That is a huge amount of time to do anything.
But even so, it’s even slower, by a lot, once you pull the ripcord and need to keep the site working while you update it.
Prior to release you don’t need to have branch and release then QA then deploy. You can just modify schemas and drop existing user data without needing to migrate anything. You can change the look of the interface without angering users who generally hate change.
Just the cycle of releasing new features carefully is a ton of overhead.
I’ve spent entire days just rolling out code to change which domain name is used to refer to some images because doing it quickly would overwhelm the image servers due to the caches being unpopulated. 100% of that would be unnecessary prior to going live.
The follower-only limitation is likely by design. They don’t want you to see only those you’re interested in because it limits advertising power. This platform is almost entirely geared for selling things to its users.
I mean that makes sense. People entered the new hot thing on the market but it’s still very half-baked. No hashtags, no following only tab, no likes tab. If it wasn’t for the sign up via IG, this would’ve been DOA.
Imagine if they just had feature parity with Mastodon. It would’ve probably replaced Twitter by now.
Holy crap, this is bad in another level
Instagram I don’t believe has it either, and was a major breaking point for me years ago when someone coaxed me into trying it. Their “algorithm” has no place in a followers-only tab, so they will likely never add it.
I really hated when they switched from chronological order to the algorithm, now the app is useless except for my gf sending me her daily memes, the feed is just a bunch of nonsense from people I don’t know or content from days ago from people I do
the feed is trying to get you to look at ads and buy shit. that’s what
You can turn off the algorithm stuff in the settings, but it resets monthly.
IG does have Following (posts from everyone you follow) and Favorites (the ones you give that designation to). When you open up the app they give you everything (accounts you follow and those they suggest.for you). The drop down to pick Following or Favorites is hidden in the IG logo.
Instagram has a following tab, you have to tap the logo at the top and switch it. It also reverts back to the algorithm frequently so have to constantly switch it around.
It does have a following tab actually, it’s an option at the top of the app, I forget exactly where
I think there was a following only tab at some point. Not sure if it exists now though.
Yeah, amidst all the posts about Threads, the most insightful articles I saw were the ones stating just how dogshit the actual user experience was. And that experience is just "get users to see more ads among the regular content.
It’s like, people don’t even care what they join. They just care that it has the POTENTIAL to be the NEXT BIG THING, so they need to be on ground zero. All for the show off, zero to do with the specifics of the platform.
Insightful in the sense that it adequately matched the reception shit like NFT powered user spaces got, with investors thinking Blockchain wass the Next Big Thing. It’s all theatrics.
Surfer Economics, the only thing you need to be successful is ahead of the wave.
“Social media” is just bad on another level these days. It’s no longer about keeping up with family and friends and 100% about cramming the algorithm down your throat and “helping” you to discover new entertainment from people you’ve never heard of. I’m done.
I’m actually working on building my own.
It never amazes me how little billion dollar companies actually do with their money.
Honestly, most dev effort at big companies goes into ensuring nothing breaks or slows performance. When news articles are written about your mistakes, most developers and managers try not to break things.
Making new stuff happens, but it just can’t happen as fast as at small companies where 90% uptime is good enough.
That said, it doesn’t excuse launching products half baked. No reason an unlaunched product can’t be iterated on quickly during dev.
No reason? It’s probably meetings, then more meetings, add some meetings, and you guessed it, meetings.
Like the follow tab mentioned it’s probably first product owners meetings to agree on what a user would expect… and there’s always someone having a wild opinion or two that needs to be “hashed out”. Then when that’s done it’s meetings with the UX team, then they have a meeting on their own, then a new meeting with product owner, UX and designers, then after that frontend team is in the loop, then back to UX and prod owner, then a new round, then it’s time for backend to come in, first one with PO and frontend, then a technical one to agree on how to do it, then database team is involved, they refuse to change a small thing and expected functionality needs to be changed, back to PO, UX, frontend, backend, and then finally maybe a dev or two can sit down and add it. Which takes 2 hours. After six weeks of meetings.
And then comes testing of course, and signoff on the functionality.
“Fast” is nowhere in enterprise development.
Totally agree about the amount of coordination overhead. That is a huge amount of time to do anything.
But even so, it’s even slower, by a lot, once you pull the ripcord and need to keep the site working while you update it.
Prior to release you don’t need to have branch and release then QA then deploy. You can just modify schemas and drop existing user data without needing to migrate anything. You can change the look of the interface without angering users who generally hate change.
Just the cycle of releasing new features carefully is a ton of overhead.
I’ve spent entire days just rolling out code to change which domain name is used to refer to some images because doing it quickly would overwhelm the image servers due to the caches being unpopulated. 100% of that would be unnecessary prior to going live.
Wait, you can’t see a timeline of people you follow?!? And no hashtags?
The follower-only limitation is likely by design. They don’t want you to see only those you’re interested in because it limits advertising power. This platform is almost entirely geared for selling things to its users.
OK OK guys hear me out, what we made twitter but with VR? We can rub our willies together
-Zuckerberg probably
How could you launch such an app.