Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
I think unfortunately for IG in particular, it evolved for a segment of people into a status flexing game more than genuinely keeping in touch.
Every social media platform has a lot of different segments of people using it for different reasons.
If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.
I’m not a heavy Instagram user but I’ve found it trivially easy to tailor my feed to the content I want to see (friends and family). That’s why I don’t find much interest in the pearl clutching about how some people post on the platform. I’m not there to judge and moralize about others.
Let's ignore the things that upset us even more easily, while maintaining the required social appearances even harder!
Ah, such progress!
Speechless, except obscenely.
I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.
My friends gave up too.
I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.
The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"
It’s OK to believe both 1) social media can be a useful service for connecting with friends and interesting people, and 2) social media has feedback mechanisms that reward unpleasant and abusive behavior.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
I agree with this 100%, on top of what you said remember that Instagram launched in 2010 as an iOS exclusive during a time where Apple was not particularly focused on camera quality, ignoring Android where there were numerous devices with substantially better cameras. IIRC someone was even selling one with an optical system in the ballpark of a low-end mirrorless. They also limited image resolution to 640 pixels square until 2015.
The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
“I only use it in this limited circumstance”
You are on Facebook. That’s who. It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while. Sure you’re not an addict (probably) but you still drink.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20110...
> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that [they] had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
In any casual poll like this, every number has a large margin of error. When 6% of respondents select an answer, some of those were mis-clicks, people who misread the answers, or people who were just clicking through randomly. The latter happens a lot when bad UX means the only way to see the results is to take the poll.
So the more likely explanation is not that people were calling themselves vegetarian but also eating meat recently, it’s that around half of those reporting vegetarians were either mis-clicks or people blindly clicking things. It happens a lot in online polls.
No, you're just making things up. For one thing, these are telephone polls, not online polls.
If you have the actual study please share it. Right now, I doubt the veracity of psychology today's claims.
In fact I've done more digging since posting this and the only other people talking about this survey is citing psychology today as their source. I can find no primary sources.
You can find other Time articles that cover their methodology, which involves paying a polling (or consulting) firm to run the poll.
> It links to several studies but not the one they're writing about.
Which one do you think is "the one they're writing about"? The Psychology Today piece opens with a description of the current state of affairs.
You might or might not have noticed that immediately after the mention of the Time poll, Psychology Today links to a survey published by the USDA finding that, among self-described vegetarians, 64% reported eating meat within the last 24 hours. Why do you doubt the Time poll?
Vegetarian = no meat, no chicken, no fish, no crustaceans, no dead animals, no meat/fish broth, no lard. Nothing derived from a dead animal. Or as my little sister used to ask: “did this have a face?”
But that’s what “vegetarian” means to me. I guess that’s a “strict vegetarian”?
> You let me take my own damn car
> To Brooklyn, New York, USA
Political activists, like a former partner of mine.
… who I mute, because I am a British person living in Berlin, I don't need or want "Demexit Memes" and similar groups, which is 90% of what they post …
… which in turn means that sometimes when I visit Facebook, my feed is actually empty, because nobody else is posting anything …
… which is still an improvement on when the algorithm decides to fill it up with junk, as the algorithm shows me people I don't know doing things I don't care abut interspersed with adverts for stuff I can't use (for all they talk about the "value" of the ads, I get ads both for dick pills and boob surgery, and tax advisors for a country I don't live in who specialise in helping people renounce I nationality I never had in the first place, and sometimes ads I not only can't read but can't even pronounce because they're in cyrillic).
There is some percentage of the world-wide population that would find interest in both ads simultaneously.
For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?
Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.
> one have to ask a question, who is left on facebook aside from dopamine junkies and bots.
> The only reason why I didn’t delete facebook is messenger, where I chat with old folks.
How are you confused about who still uses Facebook in one sentence and then immediately in the next sentence you describe yourself as a user and explain why it’s useful to you and the people you know.
- Older folks.
- People using marketplace
- People exchanging inter-personal tips and info: best stroller, contractor, etc.
Not saying FB is best for those things but it doesn’t seem dead at all.
It’s crazy how bad it has become.
I don't wish to sound like I am shooting the messenger here, but Meta just has way, way too much baggage for me to ever consider returning.
https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chat...
Warning: truly disgusting
They clearly work for advertisers, and that's all that matters.