The Takeout: ”Social media rumors don’t always prove to be true, but in the case of the Choco Taco, this one is sadly based in fact. RIP, Choco Taco, 1984-2022.”
This clearly the biggest, most important, news of the week. The Choco Taco wasn’t exactly a great treat but it wasn’t the worst.
I’m fine losing it as long at the It’s-it is never discontinued.
The Verge: ”Sounding like an exhausted parent, Mosseri agreed that Instagram’s new feed sucked and its recommendations might be bad and then told us it wasn’t going to get better. Instagram no longer cares about photos.”
I don’t have a lot of pity for Instagram. Unfortunately Facebook took a beloved application and platform and turned it into an ad platform. It’s not that businesses are bad for using it, why not use it? It’s bad because all I cared about was posting pictures and looking at my friends pictures.
There are much better alternatives today.
If you spent enough years using A/B tests to chase every little bump in engagement without any basis or logic behind what you’re changing or why, eventually people will find something else they like better for reasons you can’t understand.
— Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) July 26, 2022
That’s the lesson of Instagram.
Do you want a chronological feed?
— Glass (@tryglass) July 26, 2022
No ads?
No algorithms?
Never having anything in your feed you didn’t put there?
No celebrities selling you crypto nonsense?
High quality photos with P3 color support?
No public counts anywhere?
Just photos?
Only photos?
You’ll love Glass.
Glass is a wonderful alternative to Instagram and they don’t make you the product. The app just gets out of the way so you can see your feed of beautiful pictures. No ads, none of that Instagram garbage.
How do they manage to do it? By using an idea from long ago. They charge you $29.99US a year to use the platform and support running their business. Novel, right?
Oh, almost forgot, they have an iPad App and you can view pictures on the web without annoying prompts asking you to log in to view more photos. Imagine that, they embrace the open web.
Like most social networks I’m Fahrni on Glass.
Charles Chen: ”Whereas in the .NET ecosystem, Microsoft provides a rich set of professionally developed and curated first party libraries for many, many scenarios, JavaScript has no such governance.”
Look, I’m an old Microsoft Employee, via the Visio acquisition, and spent 20-years of my career building C++/Win32 applications. I still love using Windows and love Microsoft’s commitment to supporting old API’s, but .Net is amazing, especially when combined with C#.
I haven’t written any modern backend C# but I did enjoy the bit of time I spent developing backend code with it. It’s a really great platform if you’d like to be extremely productive.
I’d imagine that extends to the client side as well. My desire to write a cross platform Stream is dwindling. I believe I’ll do the Windows version in C#/.Net.
Robert Reich: ”Progressive states are becoming more progressive; regressive states, more regressive. As the states move to the left or right, state legislatures are becoming more active and important, while what happens in Washington is growing less so.”
This is a good read and worth a few minutes of your time.
The closing question is something I think about quite often.
The Verge: ”For Zuckerberg, the company he founded 18 years ago was facing existential threats on multiple fronts. Both Facebook and Instagram were being rearchitected to compete with TikTok. Apple’s iOS privacy settings had disrupted the company’s once-stable ad business, costing it billions in revenue. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s bet on the metaverse was a money pit that he didn’t see turning a profit until at least the end of the decade.”
I think we all knew Apple’s new privacy settings would put a dent in their earnings. Couple that with their constant morphing of their platforms; Facebook and Instagram, and their moonshot to be the leader in the Metaverse and it’s a perfect storm of misery. 🍿
