I’m so unable to relate to perspectives like this on social media. I have Insta and my connections on there are almost entirely my real friends, we all post stuff we’re actually doing in our lives, and send messages to each other, etc… as in, we actually use it for socialising. I follow a small handful of celebrity accounts, and browse reels occasionally, but the main reason I like using it is to interact with my friends.

That isn't 'social media', that is a friend network utilizing a social media network already in place as a communications device.

This seems like a very peculiar attempt at gate keeping to me. It’s a social network application that we use to share the content that we’ve created with each other. That’s what social media is, and the use case I’m describing is basically what it was initially created for.

No they're right.

If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.

Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?

The key difference is that all those other services you list have UX that is mostly centred around active use ("Check this out: Your friend Joe is doing a thing right now!"), while Instagram's UX is mostly centred around passive use ("Now that you have some free time, let's catch up on what your friend Joe did last week").

Ultimately they can all be used for the same purpose, sure. At the end of the day you're pushing the same bits around. But UX can make all the difference.

The mechanics of something like Facebook are that you have your “friends” and people can engage as much or as little as they like or dip in and out. I find I’ll occasionally post something that relates to overlapping friends circles but people can easily ignore stuff that doesn’t really involve them. It’s a very different model from a much more deliberate mailing list or SMS chat.

I do have some group chats and email threads but there’s a broader that extends beyond that which social media apps can be useful for.

> Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?

It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node on your social graph. Even then the UX is designed around messaging, not as a content repository.

This has to be one of the most asinine takes I’ve ever seen.

I think it is a good question. You can share media like pictures and videos over email.

You offer a bit of insight about using something as a content repository. That's an interesting take.

I appreciate the question and the thought process it invites. I'm also glad you added your insight in response.

"It's the user experience" haha

Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services.

That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.

You couldn’t create anything resembling the Instagram experience on any of those services, let alone using some of your other suggestion like email. If the only thing you think a substitute service requires is a way to send images, then you could replace Instagram with the postal service by that standard.

The most absurd part of this argument is that discord, WhatsApp, messenger, etc… are all also social media platforms. This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.

Discord is a social media platform. And you absolutely could. I’ve been in quite a few servers where channels were used as a dumping ground for whatever people were doing at a time and felt like showing off. It’s an extreme example, but one that works because ultimately Instagram’s ability to display this information is no different than anything else’s. You simply believe Instagram is some perfect solution that cannot be replicated and refuse to understand the basic definition of a social network.

You _could_ use email as an Insta replacement as well. But the suggestion that they deliver the same service or experience is rather contrived.

But that’s really besides the point, because as you said, they’re all social media platforms, and it’s social media when somebody posts content on them to their large public audience, and it’s social media when I post to my small audience of friends. It’s the suggestion that one of those scenarios is social media and the other isn’t that’s completely illogical.

> You couldn’t create anything resembling the Instagram experience

I actually 100% agree with you here, but assuredly not in the way you meant it.

What it's NOT is that you couldn't replicate a simple media sharing experience between a tight nit group of friends. That's demonstrably false.

> This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.

No, it's... something else. Again, you're being extremely defensive when someone points out simple facts. Iykyk.

Their point is that social media is an abstract concept that correlates with it's use; not the platform it's used on. What Kim Kardashian (as an extreme example) posts on Instagram/Twitter/etc is social media, because it's media broadcast out to be shared and commented on.

Having an Instagram account and messaging your friends is not social media, it's a social network using the same aforementioned platform.

In other words, a public Telegram channel can be as much social media as Instagram can be, and Instagram can be as much a social network as Telegram is. And exclusively inverse, as well.

We all produce content that we publish on the social media site platform (posts, stories, reels. Text posts now too if you count Threads…). This is quintessential social media content, and was the primary way that social media platforms were used in their early years. My content with a couple dozen likes isn’t somehow not-social-media-content just because my audience is limited to my actual social circle.

The point they were trying to make isn’t difficult to understand. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Since you admittedly have no understanding of what people are talking about when they refer to social media being toxic then you must not be in sync with the definition of social media that others have. Regardless of whether it makes sense to you, it makes sense to a lot of other people. It would be nice if you weren't so incredibly defensive about your need to express your conception of an idea so that you could try and understand what other people think as well.

What you’re talking about appears to be some particular subset of the content appears on social media platforms, not the concept of social media itself.

Also before complaining about the toxicity of social media I’d suggest you take a look at the toxicity you’re choosing to contribute to this platform with how intentionally abrasive your comments appear to be.

Thanks for the personal attack but I haven't called anyone's perspective 'asinine' or treated people with outright disrespect on this thread, as you have.

Is there a reason you are so reactionary when people pose an alternative viewpoint to your own?

Why did you bother posting such a thing as "I don't understand why people think that social media is toxic" if you are just going to attack everyone who attempts to give a reason for it?

That’s how I used Instagram in the first half of the 2010s. It seemed like the app was designed for that use case back then. Now it seems like it’s designed primarily for watching ads, so I text my friends instead.