TheAtlantic writer bemoaning Instagram changing from a place to share personal images with friends, to entertainment, ads, Reels short videos, algorithmically selected for bingeing.
Will more IG users move to Threads, when Threads adds DM-like functionality (linking Threads to Instagram inboxes), but without the algorithm-driven feed pushing short videos and ads?
I think it's clear that Threads will eventually go the way of IG in terms of user-hostile engagement-driven UX changes. It's decent now because it's new enough to be in the "gain users" phase, but eventually the enshittification shall begin (as it always does).
Perhaps, but no more so than the lifecycle/honeymoon period for anything, ultimately revenue pressure forces things like MySpace and Yahoo to monetize, get superseded by a competitor or die, or die due to monetizing themselves in ways that annoy their users, or allowing bot activity/ annoying ads/ content. Time will tell what Reddit allows itself to become, for example.
Threads was set up to be a less political, more personal, less negative alternative to Twitter/X, and to poach users from Twitter/X; it intentionally isn't aimed at short videos by influencers like TT. It's built on top of IG, so Meta doesn't have huge incentive to migrate the annoying bits of IG to Threads. Threads doesn't allow multiple or throwaway accounts without account deletion, which is on balance probably a Good Thing.
[0] reports that as of 2024-6-23, Threads now has 10.3m DAU users spending a mere average of 3 mins daily vs Twitter with 200 million DAU @ 31mins/day. The way I read that is that Threads is the (small) category of users who intentionally left Twitter due to negative and political content, and mainly want unincentivized, "organic" social-networking with their friend network, i.e. not IG, TT, Pinterest or Mastodon. (In lieu of Meta allowing IG users more fine-grained control to turn down the knob on algorithmic and ad content.) I think adding DM-like functionality will be a big boost to Threads, wonder when it happens.
TheAtlantic writer bemoaning Instagram changing from a place to share personal images with friends, to entertainment, ads, Reels short videos, algorithmically selected for bingeing.