📽️ The Vergecast: Searching for the first great AI app (link to timestamp)
Gemini, ChatGPT, and the race for AI’s killer app - The Verge
Instagram will let creators test experimental reels on random people - The Verge
Nilay Patel: [Your post] might permanently downrank you in the algorithm…When I say watch this video from the perspective of: how does Adam [Mosseri] think about [how] creators think about Instagram…it’s just purely commercial. It’s like, “What you want as a creator is to do great in our algorithm, so here’s some tools that will help you do great in the algorithm,” and it’s like, actually what I want as a creator is to make art–those are different things, like wildly different things.
David Pierce: This is going to sound more cynical than I mean it but I would I would take pretty strong bets that more people are interested in making money than making art.
Nilay: I think creator platforms are commercialized in that specific way, and people want is to win them and here’s a feature—and you know he says in that video, “We made this with creators,” like, “We’ve gotten a lot of feedback,” that “We’ve been working with creators”—but there’s just something very commercial about everything that’s happening there that is very far away from, “This was a photo sharing website for me to talk to my friends.”
David: There’s something really specifically instagramy about this that I find really fascinating…what this says to me is that you are always on a knife’s edge of losing everything on Instagram in the way that like on TikTok everything you make is like a new pull of the slot machine, right? Like Instagram cares so much more about who follows you and who you follow than TikTok does. TikTok is just happy to shove stuff into the algorithm and see what works and you’ll randomly go viral and sometimes you won’t. Instagram lets you build something that is much more understandable by you as the creator, but also if you make two videos in a row that your audience doesn’t like and doesn’t respond to you’re toast, and this is every creator’s desperate fear: if you miss once it can kill the whole thing for you and what this is, is Adam Mosseri basically saying, “Yeah that’s true, so we’re going to give you more tools to make sure you never do that.”
Nilay: It’s weird, it’s weird.