The other day, I got a new user interface in the photo sharing app. Although the company has not rolled it out to all users yet, the changes seem in line with its intention to move away from its original model of photo sharing among friends, to the one pioneered by TikTok
The new interface is clearly inspired by TikTok, like when they cloned Stories out ofSnapchat. They brought in a few bad habits and troubling choices in order to juice their metrics and force users to interact with the app's terms. I asked if the newUI would come to everyone and haven't heard back, but will update if I do.
The first thing I noticed was that I couldn't tap on the videos to un-mute them. Millions of people check their feeds in public places where the loud cheers and music of a random sponsored video would be an unpleasant surprise for everyone within 20 feet. It was assumed that the sound was off until you tapped it.
If you tap something, it will stop or pause. Why is it that it makes it noise? They have made it more difficult to consume the content in the way you want. If you want your phone to be silent, you need to set it that way.
Imagine it makes noise. I have trained my search page to work well. The image is from techcrunch.
My phone vibrates all the time, but that is not silent. I don't know what volume my phone is set to at any given time, because some apps have their own volume levels, others take over and so on. Sometimes my music doesn't come on at all because I turn it down for a game. How many clicks of the volume down button will it take for me to make a TikTok screen cap? It's hard to say. I appreciated the fact that a single tap would quiet the app and not affect the rest of the phone.
Dark patterns aren't always about deception. If you tap the little round soundtrack button on the video, it will be silenced so that you can engage more with it. Instead of leaving the decision to you, they put a lot of weight on the side they want to see more of. It is not part of the standard Meta playbook.
A switch from the classic infinite scroll to an item-by-item flipping style is similar to TikTok. It makes sense that you want to show the whole frame so you don't miss the beginning of a video if you're focused on video content. It doesn't matter as much with images because you can scroll by.
This is a dark pattern. It's about controlling how you view the content. An infinite scroll feed feels like a long stream that you are going back through. When you see something interesting or a post by a friend, you can stop it with your finger.
If only for a fraction of a second, you are forced to engage with each image or video in order to move on. It isn't that you can't move on quickly, but that every piece of content gets a new minimum quantum of engagement now, a level they chose instead of the user. It is just a choice to stop at every item.
There are pictures of the app'sUI changing. I like the look of Magnus but I don't follow any of these accounts. The image is from techcrunch.
The significance of this is that it reliably appears as every fourth item starting with the second in my newUI. Posts 2, 6, 10, 14, 18 are all ads for me. It is not possible in the app to simply zoom past an ad. Before you scrolled by in a hurry, the ad would take up your full display until you touched the screen to dismiss it, now it will take up your entire display until you touch the screen to dismiss it.
Do you think about that? Changing from a banner to a popup requires you to do something to get past it. You can get through your feed again, but what used to take a single flick of the finger now takes five or six. At least you were just tapping.
By the time you apply some attention to figuring out what the post is, ad or not, the hook is already set. It is doubly true for suggested posts, which have no indicator except for a follow button.
It used to say "suggest for you" or something at the top so you knew it wasn't your friend's dog. The little indicator that you have never met this account is the first thing you see. You can still use the dot menu toooze suggested posts for 30 days at a time, but I want them to nerf that as well.
When you reach the end of your organic posts, the bottom half of the screen is the top half. It kind of gives the lie to the idea that they want you to take a break when you're all caught up. They want you to continue, which is why the tiny action of "view older posts" is so important. The choice to watch some recommended videos is important.
On one hand, this makes it much closer to TikTok, and on the other, it makes it harder to control the user experience. The patterns the team has adopted are detrimental to the experience that users know and enjoy, even though they think mimicking something is the way to survive. Maybe don't change in such an obviously shitty way, you know?
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