> product prioritizes sharing a human experience rather than a political article or an opinion

"In the real world, people slow down and look at car crashes. On the internet, they do the same - but it's interpreted by the system as a demand for more car crashes, which the system will then attempt to supply"

- paraphrase of a comment seen on Twitter

I had to look up paraphrase again because I had only ever seen it in the context of taking a larger work and making it smaller whereas your very clear example is larger than the original work. Thanks

Rather superficial attempt at wit. Anywhere "in the real world" that operates on feedback - which in a corporatized world is many things - also has that "interpretation by the system" - see the MSM as the most obvious example.

Sure, it's a common problem of metric-driven and target-driven systems, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. If we've built systems that reward outcomes that we find bad .. maybe we should do something about it? Or at least encourage people to be aware of when they're participating in the car crash production system.

Currently going around on my twitter is a reminder not to retweet screenshots of professional troll / Mail "journalist" Katie Hopkins calling for a "final solution" to Islam (in the context of the Manchester bombing). That's the kind of thing I mean: engaging with it at all is just feeding the outrage machine. Report and block instead.

I consider political thoughts and communicating them very much my more human experiences. Though FB etc. seems to be more used for people to agree with each other, not really discuss.

However, I remember the wild west days of forums made by people for people, with child and sibling forums and all sorts of stuff, and politics was always important, as was art, both to just enjoy and to criticize. Even arguing to show off who knew more or could save face better was great. Maybe that's nostalgia speaking, but we did learn from each other, we did change our opinions sometimes. Maybe it was because it was like 100-300 people, over years, more a village dynamic than a mall or festival. You couldn't just steal or destroy and be never seen again, what we did was and immune and not interesting to those types. We also shared photos and videos like crazy, we wrote poems or whatever, but I also wouldn't have missed the bits where we took ourselves too seriously and had drawn out discussions, those sometimes were the best bit. We weren't so uptight, didn't have such thin skins, as is the norm today, that I'll claim. We spawned from something that spawned from something that spawned from stileproject, after all.

I remember this guy being kind of a racist, and we sometimes called him out for it, but otherwise he was still a member, and after a while he wasn't so racist anymore. I still think fondly of that, having shown him the door for "being in the wrong place" because of his initial remarks would have been a huge waste. He became a photo journalist and showed us many great things, too. Sorry for rambling, I don't think I have a point other than fond memories of political debates, and I bet you every one of the inner core will remember that forum for as long as they live, and we didn't even do anything that special.. it's like back then there was grass, and now there's concrete, and that makes the grass seem like a jungle.

Something about the forum communities is that you couldn't isolate yourself from people that disagreed with you. On facebook you can limit who you interact with, so if your ego or your beliefs are challenged you can remove that person from any future discussions. In the forum communities this was impossible unless you were an administrator. Once you became an admin you were then under the microscope from the rest of the community to operate in a fair way, though this didn't stop some admin's from completely destroying their communities or turning the community into an echo chamber.

My friends started out on Instagram posting simple things about their lives, like a local pond with ducks, or a meal they made at home. Now it's like they only post the really outstanding stuff, adventure/travel or extravagant meals at high end restaurants. And they go crazy with tags, doing the dot dot dot thing followed by a tag block. While the new stuff is cool, I felt they were more relatable and more like friends when they just posted the mundane stuff which honestly makes up 90% of our lives.

This becomes a compulsion where the act of going out becomes motivated by the amount of high-value social media shareable posts.

Such a soul sucking compulsion, truly a product of modern times.

There is plenty of vanity and marketing on instagram though.

I personally have a preference of opinions over pure vanity.

Two points:

- Vain opinions and opinions based on good marketing that appear on Facebook are still vanity and marketing.

- Curating your feed on any service is paramount, and maybe my anecdotal experience is based on having curated Instagram well, whereas Facebook was a sprawl of vain or disingenuous political theater.

I think the big distinction is in feed curation, and to that end, I believe that Instagram promotes direct follow of highly popular accounts that can reinforce negative self-perception. I just don't really follow any big accounts, just friends whose hijinks I appreciate.

Curation does seem to be the key.

Yes, and I'm willing to bet it's not a linear function. I'd bet 10 bucks that there's a phase change at some point along the x-axis (hours used).

Browsing Facebook 5 hours / week is not the same as browsing Facebook 5 hours a day. So phrased, this seems to be nothing intrinsically new -- television and video games have these kinds of effects as well.

I'd like to see some of these studies that correlate for nature-of-following. It seems like the people who are put off be Instagram follow a lot of celebrities and lifestyle porn. I follow my friends and it's always nice to see what they're up to.

I don't recall ever seeing an ad on Instagram. Must have something to do with the sort of accounts one follows.

Have you ever seen anyone holding a suspiciously prominently placed product? I guess if you really only follow people you know personally this entire problem goes away.

Very true! I'm still on FB, but I do like how Instagram doesn't force you to show your current online status, or how it doesn't rat out your likes or comments...

Instagram does rat out your likes, comments and follows. Check the "Following" tab on the notifications view to see them for those you're following.

It's just down to chance whether the people following you see it, based on how many they're following and how much recent activity there has been with their followings.

Oh, bah. Can't believe I never came across that.

Guess I'm a very basic user...

Thanks.

I am in a similar age range (as yours) and I agree