Going back even further, one of the initial draws of Instagram pre-acquisition was that you could escape the toxicity of trolls and other socially unproductive behavior on Facebook.
Meta has a big problem coming up. They'll get to the point where they won't be able to hide Facebook and Instagram's lackluster appeal. I suspect we'll start seeing advertisers peel away, followed by a few savvy investors first. Let's just hope this doesn't trigger a market-wide correction.
>Let's just hope this doesn't trigger a market-wide correction.
My flippant, "I hate social media and think it was largely a mistake and needs to go away," view is to cheer for that correction. That said, I understand that I'm very biased here and might be ignorant.
Is there a reason I shouldn't cheer for such a correction?
I'd cheer for a correction if it were limited to social media valuations. My fear is that social media tanks followed by people broadly pulling money out of the market.
To me facebook seems a lot quieter but instagram is as busy with stuff as ever. We definitely have differences of opinion on that. Especially if TikTok is shut down (fingers crossed) most people will fall back on Instagram Reels.
Facebook and Instagram's (pre-Reels) strength was that it was easy to have accounts of all sizes engage and be engaged with. Whether you have 10 or 100000 friends/followers/etc, the barrier of entry to have some engagement wasn't high and it encouraged people with all sizes of accounts to post, comment, and "like". Social networking felt much more intentional with these platforms.
Instagram Reels certainly has a lot of activity, but it's activity is driven by users passively consuming popular and trending media. This isn't a bad model, but it's a shift away from intentional social networking.
Ultimately, I think Reels is more evidence that Meta has had a user engagement problem for a while. Their current strategy for Instagram seens to be to hope passive consumption keeps everyone in the app and fall back on the "town square" model for comments as a means of engagement.
They A/B test reels in facebook. My mother's facebook has reels in it. Not mine. Soon, the apps themselves will lose any sense of history and they will morph into whatever new content format is favourite. All you need is account with Meta. The content will find you. Zuck has that covered for you.
Meta has a big problem coming up. They'll get to the point where they won't be able to hide Facebook and Instagram's lackluster appeal. I suspect we'll start seeing advertisers peel away, followed by a few savvy investors first. Let's just hope this doesn't trigger a market-wide correction.