Sometimes when I'm scrolling Instagram I'm reminded of the sad era of "channel flipping" where we would just watch "whatever's on" while endless ads were blasted at our faces.

At least now we have some control over our poison, though few seem to bother exercising that control.

Um... I installed Instagram recently for the first time. Every 5th post or so is an ad. That you have no choice over... And there are a lot of suggested content posts which you have no control over.

It's like the same as channel flipping and getting ads blasted at you but now the ads are smarter/more targeted.

Yeah, the ads are actually relevant sometimes and they don't demand 30 seconds of my life, so massive improvements all around. I don't see much suggested content unless I scroll too long, at which point I probably do need some more content.

Here's the thing about Instagram: aside from posts by your actual real-life friends, everything you see is an ad. It's either a literal ad, or it's a popular user trying to sell you their t-shirts/newsletter/onlyfans. My wife likes to look at Instagram videos of cute kids and dogs, and whenever she shows me one the text at the bottom says something like "Our merch shop is open again!!!"

I honestly don't see targeted ads as an improvement at all. I see them as the opposite.

Although TikTok is fairly addictive, I find it's far better at showing you content you actually like instead of outrage/emotional/clickbait content. It's very easy to get into niches you actually enjoy with actual decent content (woodworking, cleaning, plants, DIY, cats in my case, for example) and actual people as creators, instead of whatever reposted content factory managed to cheat FB/Instagram algorithm this time.

TikTok has great content and I am far more entertained and educated there than any other of the engagement-driven "social media" apps (i.e. Meta products).

The problem I find is that it is basically mindless engagement, everything is really too short to get into it, the comments are garbage, and it's extremely entertaining and therefore addictive and a waste of my free time.

Political content in particular seems to not rear its ugly head on my Tiktok except rarely. Not even political ads. This is something that didn't ever happen with Facebook even after unfollowing everyone.

I fear to imagine what the next iteration will be. Probably someone, somewhere is already working on it.

Maybe the AI will also generate personalized content instead of only recommending it?