Like it or not, Instagram is the strongest platform for photo sharing at this point since 500px never really took off and Flickr is a raging dumpster fire that refuses to go out. I have 2 Instagram accounts that are basically the last vestiges of my social media presence: one for street photography which is a longstanding hobby of mine, and one for more social-media-y stuff and portraits of friends. Instagram, for better or worse (most definitely worse), is the best way to share these photos with a wider audience whether they're selfies or meticulously-edited photos which would otherwise just sit on a harddrive.

Casey Neistat's Beme app did this but for video. It wasn't a success.

It is intrinsic to who we are as humans to want others to see a version of ourselves that we want them to see. It is the reason that fashion and beauty are such large and enduring industries. And so trying to build an app that fights that is never going to work.

You're right that Beme had many similar elements, but IIRC it was focused outwards - you'd place the phone screen down on your chest triggering it to take a video (or the wall to take a selfie)

Demo video: https://youtu.be/mixsze6uJPg?t=101

What's interesting to me is that IG seems to emphasize a very specific form of "curated authenticity" that's distinct from Beme + taking raw video. Maybe IG's the "Based on a True Story" of social photo apps.

In the late 1990s I was part of a group that was thinking about how cameras might be able to sign images so that later editing could be detected. The motive then was connected to using images as evidence. But I guess you could also use it to mark edited images in some way.

Would apps like Instagram be "improved" if retouched images displayed a prominent "FAKE" icon of some sort?

What does "fake" mean? Even if you're taking as-camera images (which have already had de-Bayer and some level of dynamic range and denoise processing, which may be considerable and involve machine learning!), then you can't tell what manipulation has been applied to the scene. You can rent little "sets" for taking photography in. Props and clothes can be borrowed. And so on.

Authenticity is a product, just like any other. And it's increasingly hard to say what it even means in the 21st century.

I don't know the answer to this.

But I always use McDonald's (although any restaurant can be used here) as the core of the conundrum of fake vs. real. Look at a corporate shot of a cheeseburger and compare it to reality. The marketing cheeseburger is the platonic ideal of the product -- it's fresh, perfectly prepared with care with all of the ingredients visible. The cheeseburger on the ground looks like a crumpled napkin in comparison.

Is the marketing cheeseburger fake?

When I look at some of the more image-conscious Facebook/Instagram people, some of them are kinda insane with editing and retouching. My wife has an old acquaintance who produces a highly "optimized" picture at least twice a month. (With substantial retouch to her face and usually other body "enhancements". In the age of Instagram+Photoshop, when does someone cross the line from marketing cheeseburger to fraud?

Go further down the rabbit hole on that one; is makeup a form of fraud? Heels / lifts? Push up bras? Instagram has simply accelerated and magnified what already happens in good ol' regular life (and introduced mass distribution of it).

This reminds me of Magritte's The Treachery of Images [1] and Calvin and Hobbe's Photo Lies [2]. All images are inherently lies - colors aren't completely accurately reproduced, perspectives are changed - so what is the threshold for manipulating the subject until the photographed subject should be deemed "fake?"

I think that it lies on a spectrum, that a dolled up cheeseburger could be more fake in the sense that a telephoto black-and-white picture could be less authentic than a color photo taken at a focal length of ~40mm, but it depends on the viewer whether to accept or reject a photo as true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images [2] http://stevestenzel.blogspot.com/2013/12/photography-lies-fr...

“Is the marketing cheeseburger fake?”

I would say yes, it’s fake and probably fraud. You should have to show real products in advertising and not an idealized version.

So many late nights at that McDonalds, and in that area. (Dundas and Bathurst - Toronto). Even this video is an idealization. That corner gets grimy at night. At least it used to around that time. And that burger she bought was not what they look like coming out of there. I have to laugh a little...

At least they don't use waxes in the model burgers anymore. That's a step toward honesty, at least.

> What does "fake" mean?

When my kids asked me why we didn't have a real Christmas tree this year, I told them, "we do have a real Christmas tree. It's made of real plastic and wire."

To me this is like saying, "I'd like TV shows to all be shot live with no editing, and I'd like my books and news articles to be first drafts." I mean there's a place for those things (live theater or SNL, and poetry slams where stuff is improvised), but I certainly wouldn't want the majority of my media to be like that. Editing is more than just removing the ugly and emphasizing the beautiful. It's a way to clarify what point you're making.

No. Would restaurant food be improved if all meals came with "FAKE" sticker, because they do not match the raw ingredients? Even straight out of camera image has been processed _a lot_. I don't really care "how it looked in reality", because what is reality? All that matters is what the photographer wanted to show.

I used to no care as well.

But the world is heavily influenced by all those fake images. People may know something is fake, yet being exposed to it again and again do change their expectation and behaviour.

It's like ad. You think it doesn't work. That you are not that stupid. But eventually, the brute force wins.

It's always interesting when people try to Solve Art.

Art is inherently subjective, and you have to accept that a lot of it just _sucks_.

It's up to you to curate your own taste, and you do that by trawling through the terrible art until you find something that you like.

Both Canon and Nikon offered expensive cryptographic addons for their pro cameras that signed out-of-camera images. It never really caught on due to cost and, more significantly, the acceptance that some postprod as always required ( except for straight-to-press sports shots ).

for younger people, this is already solved by noticing each online system corruption of the image. e.g. some social networks add a greenish tint, other have a bug that adds an also greenish (but stronger) tiny to only the last column of pixels, etc. then by looking at those artifacts you can know not only if it's a repost but for how long it's been reposted.

it's a skill we, older, not so immersed, totally miss.

Maybe include a link from all retouched images to the original.... :-)

That wont work for long. Phone makers are already adding built in "beauty" filters that can't be turned off. [1]

[1] https://www.diyphotography.net/iphone-xs-camera-forces-beaut...

While I'm sure there are phone makers doing that, the one you're linking appears to have been debunked a while ago. [1]

[1] https://blog.halide.cam/iphone-xs-why-its-a-whole-new-camera...

Twitter is full of tales of people using the camera filters on their phone to change their appearance on Tinder, Match etc.

What do you call body dysmorphia when what you see in the mirror doesn't match what you see on your phone in every Instagram/Snap post of yours?

It might be called 'victim of a crime'.

> The term 'deep fake' means an audiovisual record created or altered in a manner that the record would falsely appear to a reasonable observer to be an authentic record of the actual speech or conduct of an individual.

from yesterday's discussion of Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act of 2018

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19076121

Hah, certainly an interesting interpretation of that law. But 'intent' matters as well, and tech corps can always point to A/B testing, usability testing etc to show what we already know: everyone wants to be healthier, handsomer and richer than they actually are. Social media enables this via a constant feedback loop of our human frailties.

yes there's somewhat of a push for hot girls to have vsco links in their bio but for the most part that trend has died