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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

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nasser

@darius investors call this "optimal"

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2y
benbrown

@darius I wish they’d just show me the stories in the feed

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2y
Nelson Minar

@darius See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newshole

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2y
Emily

@darius and the spam comments are rampant, despite all of them following the same basic script (message me X text for money).

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2y
ranjit

@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.

1
2y
Derek Powazek

@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.

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2y
Darius Kazemi

Related, @pluralistic on "enshittification" of platforms, which just crossed my desk pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/pot

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2y
EyeInHand

@darius
Works as intended. Late stage value extraction.

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2y
tüneis

@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.

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2y
Lyre Calliope

@darius Agreeeeed.

I recall that @pixelfed added stories at some point. I wonder what the usage numbers are like as well as the UX choices. Gonna check it out.

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2y
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