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Ask HN: Can someone explain why Meta makes such bad design decisions?
I logged into Instagram from a browser yesterday and for the first time they offered me a modal to 'Freshen up my feed' by following a bunch of suggested accounts. Fair enough, but the kicker was that this modal forced me to follow new accounts before it would let me see my feed again. Until I selected accounts and clicked submit, the only button I could click to clear the modal was greyed out.
This sounds like I'm throwing shade, but I genuinely don't understand what would cause the Instagram team to make a design decision like this. It is so obviously anti-human and annoying that I can't comprehend why they continue to do stuff like this.
I get that on some level forcing users to follow more accounts adds to engagement and growth, so on an economic level it makes sense. But in practice what they're actually doing is proving to their user base that they're a soulless company, over and over again.
Can someone explain to me why they keep doing stuff like this? Is it some kind of cultural dynamic where employees are unable to stand up for human decisions? Or are they really just this oblivious?
That's crazy. They just keep getting worse with each new "update".
It's for the money.
It's why I refuse to turn on my reshare or use the reshare option on WhatsApp.
I can't scream this loud enough. Leave my apps the way they were!!!
Their design decisions aren't as bad as you think. You just haven't come to terms with how the "free" internet works yet.
I think they are bad decisions despite the economics of it, though. Maybe they're good for Zuck and execs in that they're squeezing every ounce of remaining life from the company before it dies. But they don't seem to have much of a coherent plan in making their products actually enjoyable for real people. It's always the path of least resistance, automated crap, or safe but dumb decisions.
Google and Amazon strike me as companies who build good products. Meta does not, despite it being the 'free' internet.
I would genuinely like to know why I'm wrong and these decisions aren't as bad as they seem.
> I would genuinely like to know why I'm wrong and these decisions aren't as bad as they seem.
Because it's not a $1.6 trillion dollar hobby or charity. They need to make money, full stop. This can't be emphasized enough.
As such, they view users more as a hybrid of volunteers and products. Then they monetize generally by selling the engaged users to advertisers. At this point I'm pretty sure they have financial models customized to individuals and they probably determined you're not worth providing service to unless you view more adverts... thus forcing you to engage more with the feed system.
They did what they had to do and you went ahead and accepted it; that's a good design. If you stop using them or switch to another service; then it would be a bad design.
What's the alternative? Put together some aesthetically beautiful design that lets users walk all over them while Meta foots the bill? That won't work because they'd go out of business. It's a matter of give and take.
Right, I think everyone gets that, but clearly treating the actual users of their applications as products isn't working and hasn't worked, as evidenced by most people abandoning those applications
But maybe it's too late in the game for them anyway. Even if they tried to build a more engaging product the trust the public has in them has vanished, and few tech savvy users would care.
The alternative I'm suggesting though would be a design that attracts people to and sustains the product. But they likely needed to do this fifteen years ago while also avoiding all of their scandals.
Every minor dehumanizing decision they make chips away at their credibility among all but the dumbest people. Those people may stay because Meta has their contact list, but after a while absolutely nobody is going to be loyal to them. Being human sometimes goes a long way.
Forget the speculation and aesthetic/subjective judgments for a moment. My point is they have to do something with users who free ride on their system. They decided to give them an ultimatum. And, this sounds like a reasonable design decision to me.
What else do you do with those users... let them free ride ad infinitum? Do you have a better solution? After all, you can only woo those users for so long before it's a sunken cost.
I don't see how, in the scenario I mentioned, that just allowing a user to click away from a modal is a problem, though. Are they not losing value from alienating users who they do stuff like this to? Are they really gaining any value by forcing them to follow accounts they don't want to follow?
It just sounds like they have no better ideas to me. Why not just make the feature human and build a little bit of customer loyalty? That's kind of my point. After a while people get so tired of this crap this might be why these users provide Meta no value.
And I guess, if they're already making ridiculous profits, why not just accept that some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network at all.
> some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network
That's not how advertising works. If you're not looking at the advertising, you don't provide any value, nothing. In that case you're now a losing proposition and they don't want those users because they're lowering margins and ROE. It's about good decisions that make money... goodwill only goes so far on the balance sheet.
Now, you got my full explanation. If you still don't understand why it's not as bad a design as you first thought... we'll just have to disagree ;-)
software-by-committee: the bigger the committees in charge the worse the software they produce
Curious, do you know that this is the answer or is it a guess?