The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem.
Feels there are rooms of people now just being paid to clone successful features from other apps and only after those apps have carved their place in the market, literally become followers rather than trailblazers.
In just a few years Instagram is going to seem completely old hat to anyone who didn't grow up with it, my 10 year old niece has a TikTok account where she makes weird minecraft and among us memes, she has over 2000 followers, I've never even heard her mention Instagram, not sure she even knows it exists.
Think Twitter will be relevant for longer just because there are less companies trying to compete but honestly the app that was mostly about reading short form text thinks the future of their platform is half being a voice chatroom? Why? Because Clubhouse the new hotness a few months ago? Again just panicking to clone other services as a feature within their app who cares if it makes sense or complements the platform, lets just pray our existing users opt for doing their voice chat in our app rather than going to that new app.
I'll admit IG managed to clone snapchat stories successfully and pretty much kill off Snapchat, but reels? IGTV? I no longer have any idea where I'm supposed to put my focus or post my content in that app.
I actually quite like the lack of innovation on Twitter. It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and stick to a small, simple vision.
I would hate a hypothetical Twitter that turns into another Facebook amalgamation of 75 products.
>It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and stick to a small, simple vision
They literally just cloned Clubhouse and are going to put it at the top of your feed because it was the cool new app for like 3 weeks last year..... How is that restraint?
Someone had a "history of MUD sites" in which they describe a two year lifecycle of popularity. I think the same applies to social media on about ten years; there's a cohort of people who join in the first few years, because the site creates a different community that isn't served elsewhere. Then it reaches saturation, slow decay, drama, and gradually exodus to the hotter new things.
Hence all the desperate cloning of new platform features.
> The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem.
Yes, and the befuddling long time it takes them to implement obvious features that smaller teams delivery within days, like support for dark mode, or an auto-repeat button on YouTube (seriously wtf is up with that, they have auto-play but not repeat? w. t. f. Google)
The “optimal” network was mix-and-matching different apps and services as you saw fit. Fool around on IRC/web forums → Invite people to MSN Messenger as you grow closer, trade email etc., increasing and cutting back on the access of information shared with each person as you saw fit.
Herding as many people as possible into one service and corralling them in there seems to benefit the megacorps more than the users.
Established social media companies innovating is how you get new reddit. I think the facebook strategy of not changing successful platforms and continually building/buying new ones makes the most sense.
>Established social media companies innovating is how you get new reddit
I'd argue new reddit isn't innovating, there is no vision or passion behind that product. The team is clearly being given metrics they need to move and all the work is focused around moving those metrics.
Feels there are rooms of people now just being paid to clone successful features from other apps and only after those apps have carved their place in the market, literally become followers rather than trailblazers.
In just a few years Instagram is going to seem completely old hat to anyone who didn't grow up with it, my 10 year old niece has a TikTok account where she makes weird minecraft and among us memes, she has over 2000 followers, I've never even heard her mention Instagram, not sure she even knows it exists.
Think Twitter will be relevant for longer just because there are less companies trying to compete but honestly the app that was mostly about reading short form text thinks the future of their platform is half being a voice chatroom? Why? Because Clubhouse the new hotness a few months ago? Again just panicking to clone other services as a feature within their app who cares if it makes sense or complements the platform, lets just pray our existing users opt for doing their voice chat in our app rather than going to that new app.
I'll admit IG managed to clone snapchat stories successfully and pretty much kill off Snapchat, but reels? IGTV? I no longer have any idea where I'm supposed to put my focus or post my content in that app.