Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the same. It doesn’t even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved. It may very well be the most toxic property out there. It’s hard to imagine something more phony, optimized soley as a way to waste your time tapping away giving “likes”. Watching somone use Instagram is one of the most depressing things I can imagine in terms of human social interaction.
IG was an app designed to share photos in the moment. It was a digital Polaroid. That was a pretty cool idea. That core feature is essentially gone and so is the community around it.
IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image macro hybrid abominations designed to get likes. I don’t even really know what you call them. They aren’t videos, or flops or even memes. The best phrase I can think of is digital media noise. IG is like some kind of weird digital static. If you wanted to broadcast incompressible nonsense into outspace the best way to do it would be broadcast the explore tab on IG.
>IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace hybrid abominations designed to get likes.
I guess you aren't following the right people or accounts, then.
I've seen plenty of engaging and cool content. I've even become friends with people from the opposite side of the world. Basically a modern kind of pen pal.
And this all happens while I'm still able to share photos in the moment.
The only thing about IG I absolutely hate is the non-chronological feed. It's ridiculously terrible, even reloading before I've seen the most recent posts.
I did that before with Facebook, and Twitter, and forums, and WoW, and MSN, and ICQ and IRC and MUDs...literally any form of online interaction. This doesn't set Instagram apart; it happens despite the fact it's a hyper-optimized advertising app.
But you know what? People I've met on IG aren't the types I would've found elsewhere on those other networks. And why does "setting it apart from the others", to paraphrase, have to be an issue? In that sense IRC and forums are exactly the same.
And no, hyper-optimized advertising app would mean I'm constantly seeing ads for products that fit what I like, which is further from the truth than any of this. I rarely, if ever, follow brand accounts, so I rarely, if ever, am subject to "hyper-optimized" advertising.
IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.
The thing that Twitter most needs is some way to find and sort by topic or category. And I haven't been able to find any resource to help me find accounts like the ones I most enjoy. You'd think, with all this machine learning that's supposedly going on, someone would find a way to lead me to the people I would enjoy reading, based on some "seed" accounts.
I'm on about my 12th account, and I barely pay any attention to it, because it's just too much work to put what I'm reading into context, and then switch it 72 times to catch up my feed. And I follow less than 200 accounts! God help the poor souls who have thousands of follows.
I say all that to ask: Do you know any way to find accounts with high signal-to-noise ratios that might align with other, known accounts? If Twitter wants more "engagement," THEY ought to be the ones offering tools like this.
Just follow a small set of people. When those people retweet interesting stuff from other people, follow them too.
I don’t use Instagram that often. Sometimes I pop on to see pictures of friends’ kids, holidays, parties, or events. That’s basically 90% of what I see. I post holiday pictures and interesting things I cook, because some other people like to see them. Sometimes there are ads in my feed, and for the most part they’re inoffensive products that I even sometimes look at!
It’s just kind of the least offensive form of social media I can think of. I’m surprised to hear that so many people hate it.
No one is sharing content from BlatantlyBiasedNews.sketchydomain all day, memes, or other crap. Its the stuff I see less and less of on FB, and why while I still check FB at least daily, its starting to feel more like going through the motions than something I enjoy doing.
If you find IG wholesome you’ve been living under a rock. I find almost everything about IG offensive these days and it’s only going to get worse.
When I've scrolled through all the new posts there's a nice big green checkmark and it says "You're all caught up."
If something isn't what I want it to show me, I don't follow that. Works great, no weird view optimization algorithm as far as I can tell.
I'm very active on Instagram and 90% of my feed is various electronics, art, and software projects, and family and friends' travel photos and photos of interesting stuff they come across in their day-to-day lives. If you don't like the idiotic meme accounts don't follow them!
What's missing vs. the Facebook experience is the politics, the rants from elderly relatives, the absolutely excessive poorly-targeted advertising (even in Messenger now!), and completely irrelevant posts that I'm only seeing because someone I know has liked or commented on it.
I expect all of this to change and for IG to be brought more in line with Facebook now there's nobody left to defend it from Zuckerberg. A sad day indeed.
Personally, I actually even find some of Snapchat's "For You" section useful as well — I usually only see stories from NYT, WaPo, or other news/informative content providers. The ads are surprisingly avoidable, and much less prevalent than Instagram.
Instagram has been susceptible to the same effects, but as others have mentioned, with a small and curated list of people to follow, it's probably a nicer place to be (compared to other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) when it comes to online social interactions.
But you have to give credit to how the company started and how it's been running all these years. Instagram is still flourishing (and grew in the face of competition from Snapchat, even by copying its features and making it better) and seems like a nicer group of communities with a lot less of the nastiness that's seen on Facebook (I don't have much first hand experience, but do see some feeds on the web). That's not easy to cultivate, and for reasons I haven't read about or examined, the Instagram users have self-selected such a group to be in.*
Here's hoping the founders start something new and fresh, far from privacy invasive platforms.
*: I'd be interested in any writings about how these communities developed to be what they are.