Followups: Instagram and the interest graph
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The obligatory “Link in Bio” is a slow knife: Social media platforms increasingly close their walled gardens by creating artificial scarcity among URLs that link to the open web
by Anil Dash 2019.12.10
“Link in bio” [is] a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that we barely even noticed it was an attempt to kill the web…
For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram… control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems…
There are some legitimate reasons platforms limit links. Spammers abuse links… scammers make links that look real, but lead to sketchy sites. Building a system to monitor all the links being posted on a big platform does take some cost. Maybe you can have a link again, if you are already in the 1% most influential users on the platform and put it in a story — the part of Instagram’s experience that drives the engagement metrics they care about. Maybe you just give up, and pay for links, by buying advertising…
But killing off links is a strategy… designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do [and] restraining links through artificial scarcity is an absurdly coercive behavior.
Decomposing TikTok’s upstart strategy to enter the crowded social media market and outcompete Big Tech incumbents from the US and China
by Eugene Wei (Remains of the Day) 2020.08.04
Musical.ly ran into its invisible asymptote eventually. There are only so many teenage girls in the U.S. When they saturated that market, usage and growth flatlined… In a bit of dramatic irony, Bytedance had cloned Musical.ly in China with an app called Douyin, one that had taken off in China, and now Bytedance was buying the app that inspired it, Musical.ly, an app conceived and built in China but that had failed in China and instead gotten traction in the U.S…
Bytedance rebranded Musical.ly as TikTok [then] did two things in particular to jumpstart TikTok’s growth…
First, it opened up its wallet and started spending on user acquisition in the U.S… a staggering eight or nine figures a month on advertising. [T]he 30-day retention of all those new users poured into the top of its funnel was sub 10%. They seemed to be lighting ad dollars on fire.
Ultimately, the ROI on that spend would turn the corner, but only because of the second element of their assault on the US market, the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm [which] doubled the time spent in the app…
To help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app — that’s where the massive marketing spend helps — but also ways to help these disparate groups to 1) find each other quickly and 2) branch off into their own spaces…
The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph… Just as importantly, by personalizing everyone’s FYP feeds, TikTok helped to keep these distinct subcultures, with their different tastes, separated…
For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars… Consider Twitter’s content moderation problems. How much of that results from throwing liberals and conservatives together in a timeline together? […]
TikTok is less a pure social network, the type focused on social capital, than an entertainment network [and] another way to describe an entertainment network is as an interest network… The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation, a hack… The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that a social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale… you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow. [TikTok skipped] the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump[ed] directly to the interest graph…
Now imagine that level of hyper efficient interest matching applied to other opportunities and markets. Personalized TV of the future… Education… Shopping… Job marketplace… personalized reading, from books to newsletters to blogs? Music? Podcasts… Dating?
Instagram’s evolution
by Ben Thompson (Stratechery) 2021.07.07
[Instagram CEO Adam] Mosseri cited user research showing that Instagram users use the app for entertainment… perhaps the most momentous admission by Mosseri is that Instagram’s new mission is simply to be entertainment. In truth, though, this has always been social media’s most important job…
[Mosseri said:] “So what you’re going to see over the next couple of months really is us start to experiment more in the space of what we call recommendations, so showing you things in Feed that you may not be following yet. We just started testing an early version of this last week. This week is a new version that’s coming out with topics where you can say which topics you want to see more of or less of.”
Mark Zuckerberg announces Instagram now lets users add up to five URLs to their account bios, challenging Linktree, Beacons, and other “link in bio” services
by TechCrunch 2023.04.18
YouTube is deactivating links in Shorts videos to combat spam
by Engadget 2023.08.10
“Because abuse tactics evolve quickly, we have to take preventative measures to make it harder for scammers and spammers to mislead or scam users via links.”
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