Social Media Platforms experience adverse network effects as they grow because they do not attempt to keep a running friends list that is representative of your friends
Evidence:
FB is going to increasingly add content to your Instagram feed, as it did with the newsfeed, reducing the % of the content in feed that comes from your friends.
Evidence:
In addition, because the people you’re friends with on IG become less representative of your friends, there is an accelerated decline in the quality of your newsfeed.
Evidence:
If previous results hold, consumers should be looking for a new outlet to express themselves more personally. They will continue to exist on IG (leaving FB) but the IG experience will begin to more closely resemble the Facebook product.
Evidence:
IG will become more of an advertising platform than a place to share my life with my friends through photos.
Evidence:
Eugene Wei wrote much about status as a service, one of his core principles is that humans are status seeking monkeys.
I agree with Wei, but I rather contend that humans are status seeking storytellers.
We all have this innate desire to be influential. IG really controls the public influence sphere. People realize that at this point they likely won't become Instagram influencers. But they want to become these “content-gods” amongst their close friends. A way to become known, in their circle, for the content they aggregate and distribute on the web.
Snap understood the importance of ephemeral communication far sooner than anyone else, but failed to optimize for non-user generated content. As a result, it's not particularly well suited for group chat. More optimized for 1x1.
Non-user generated content is about who finds it first – there is clout generated in being the first to share a link.
Messaging is the communication space of the future. But from a development perspective, it feels dated. Messengers are fractured and are optimized for sharing content from their service. Think of IG messages: our contact list exists here but we only utilize it for the distribution of content from IG, not other sources. For Apple users, iMessage is the de-facto aggregator – because it makes sharing content standard across mediums with the share drawer. In addition, Instagram is poorly built for group chatting in a way that Group me isn’t.