That app is super addicting and totally toxic. The shit it puts in my feed is crazy. It's like 100s "normal" posts and then all of sudden it's like here some whacky shit what do you think about this eh?
The default feed I get is at most two posts from people I follow, and then only ads and weird shit.
There's a minor mitigating factor: if you tap on Instagram logo, it will show a drop down letting you switch to a chronological timeline from accounts you follow. You have to force-refresh it though because by default it refreshes perhaps once an hour.
Instagram has added a word list feature that allows you to hide posts by keyword. This has been very useful to hide politics and topics I find negative. It's also much better without following influencers.
I dunno. I only follow tattoo artists on ig now and log on once a month or so to think about my next tattoo and also to laugh at the DMs my partner sent me from weeks earlier. I’m quiet quitting ig I guess?
I don't have much in the way of social, but I've kept Instagram mostly to look at locations when I travel.
Instagram seems to have leveled off, but I personally don't find the Instagram annoyances nearly as dire as the TikToks posted to Youtube Stories.
Those seem the most annoying, and especially fake.. with all the amateur comedians, clickbait-y vid behaviors and voiceover triggers, and fake couple dynamics.
I think it's highly dependent on the user. A technically inclined HN user probably knows people who shifted to a tech Mastodon instance (like infosec.exchange).
As a personal anecdote, the people I know who cut back on Twitter did so long before Musk due to general social media burnout.
Quite a lot of my feed was Popehat, Tqbf, and Mjg59, who have all left the platform (more or less). Also a handful of low volume, personal friends went to Mastodon or retired from the platform.
I don't have an active twitter account, so one of the things I like from post-Musk Twitter is that it no longer requires me to login for reading tweets or for searching.
Same, site's actually way, way better now for us non-account-havers.
And the dumb shit Elon posts and all the times he kicks himself in the balls are way funnier than before he acquired 'em.
Overall, I'm happier with the site since he took over, personally. But then I'm rooting for its demise, preferably with as much drama and humor along the way as possible, so of course I like it.
It can be useful for job seeking and maintaining contact with professional connections, but reading the feed full of self congratulatory and/or virtue signaling posts is a complete waste of time.
LinkedIn is a paradox. It's basically a free online resume to most people. A small subset actually post on it trying to build their brand. And then an even smaller subset don't understand that it's basically social media at work and spend their time posting political opinions and conspiracy theories that make them look bad.
I've never used LinkedIn for anything other than to respond to recruiters and look up people's backgrounds.
I've been having a great time using LinkedIn. I only like and follow data people. My feed is only data and there are a lot of high-quality creators. I unfollow anyone that posts personal content or low-quality data "self-help"/motivational stuff. Just checked my feed and the top 10 posts were all good.
The Canva infographics set destroyed IG. It became hyper topic after 2016 and never recovered. Good example of how not to run a platform.
Now it’s all ads and nonorganic posts. People only really use stories anymore. A few of
My friends are influencers and they’ve all given up on IG and moved to TikTok.
I was similarly confused and looked it up. I believe it’s just a set of templates for making infographics. Hard to draw the dots between “free templates” and “toxic social media app”
Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.
Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality (similar to colors not existing in reality).
Having access to a extra mirrors at first creates a sense of control. You know your mom and dad won't give you a "non-distorted" reflection so the reflection from strangers is worth more. Colleagues or friends saying "you're smart!" means a lot more from them.
When each mirror is carefully placed, the "whole" of we we are and would like to be can be understood more deeply just like 7 blind men working together understand the elephant more deeply.
However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life, then the identity becomes overwhelmed by expectation. Just like super high resolution makes your pores look larger, the mirror array makes every aspect of your life feel like shit even if from a rational analysis "extra information should never be a danger"
"Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous."
Wow. I have problems with Instragram, but I've never tried to sum it up into a single statement and while this is rather specific and may not include all the problems I _feel_ are there, it really does bring home the main issue, for me. A little snark in there about democratizing, as some people will always put a positive spin on such things, which I feel is totally appropriate here.
Just... The comment could have stopped right there and been as or more impactful (for me). Thanks. :)
I remember that for a few months before my partner broke up with me, their IG feed was full of reels, posts, 'comedy', 'psychology tips', about people complaining about their partners. And also lots of Insta influencers posts giving relationship tips or encouraging people to break up for diverse reasons.
While I'm aware my relationship wasn't perfect, the standards promoted by those aesthetic Insta influencers were really impossible to obtain in real life. Unless of course your life consisted only of perfectly curated Insta moments.
>It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan's dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, the googol game, and the best choice problem.
The internet and the options it gives, I believes leads people to think they have far more relationship options then they actually have, and the options they think they have are not as good as they believe. A lot of people put a lot of work in selling a perfect image online, but those rarely hold up in reality for any amount of time.
Of course this doesn't mean we should stay in bad relationships either. Our society doesn't really teach us how to have good relationships, especially in a capitalistic fashion (hey, just spend more money and everything will be ok), and quite a lot of us had really poor examples from our parents generation on how to treat other people.
If someone is constantly projecting relationship advice social media topics on you'd I'd venture to say you're in an abusive/manipulative relationship as opposed to a healthy one. Glad you got out.
I've learned more recently that healthy relationships aren't empirically so. Instead, there's "signs" of a healthy relationship; determining the health of your relationship must be a two way conversation. It requires assessment, honesty, and participation by both parties as a qualifier as well as the ability to listen without your ego involved. That's not to say all of those aren't challenging things to do in their own right just to say that the health of a relationship will be explored differently by different sets of people.
All the ideas that the world will be perfect if you would just think thoughts like these...
"manifest what you want from the world" and "think positive thoughts and everything will be ok"
Is actually kind of true when you think about all the algorithms that run social media. If you only ever search for cats and scroll past anything political, the algorithms will learn what you like and feed you more cats.
So, if you're searching up relationship advice, and spending time on those things, that's what you get back from 'the borg'.
You do have control over what social media shows you, it's just that you need to work against your basest desires in order to get there.
From the algorithmic feed PoV it's a very high value cluster (average watchtime has to be very high, audience retention is probably quite excellent) so it's unsurprising that it'll try to get you hooked from time to time.
It's like those "drug pushers" we were told about in school but don't seem to actually exist who use weed to constantly try to get you onto more lucrative for them heroin no matter how many times you say "no thanks." Heard that so many times at school, never heard anyone encountering anything like it in the real world.
But here we are with google, facebrick et al saying "come on, just try a little culture war" because its lucrative for them, no matter how many times you say no thank you.
It's really sick but yeah, obviously lucrative and Larry, Seregey & Mark clearly need the money.
The gaps of "what do we show now" are filled with popular content, so culture war content is what you notice but there's probably other tamer things that only the algorithms know is popular.
I watched a funny video of the President of my country mis-pronouncing a word in English. The recommended videos afterward were comprised ENTIRELY of the local far-right party's propaganda.
> While I'm aware my relationship wasn't perfect, the standards promoted by those aesthetic Insta influencers were really impossible to obtain in real life.
In the 4 months I dabbled with Instagram, I was shocked by how toxic and outright false the pop psychology memes were. They were stereotypical, frequently backwards, and deliberately misapplied. And all of that is before the cluster-B LARPing.
"Your partner won't give you access to their financial accounts? That's domestic violence, and he probably has Narcissistic Personality Disorder too! What's his is yours, so just use his credit card to book plane tickets without asking and remember that him yelling at you about it is verbal abuse, so get out while you still can before he starts beating you! And remember abuse thrives in secrecy-- so make sure you tell everybody how he was so aggressive that you were in constant fear for your life!"
Sorry you were on the receiving end of [whatever your case is]. Not even the strongest of relationships can withstand reinforcement of sentiments as corrosive as Instagram, where you're a useless piece of shit if you can't/won't support your partner's ambitions of joining the jet set.
You lost your partner to a cult. They're called "followers" for a reason. It starts with separating victims from their loved ones...
I saw a youtube short like this. It was a video demonstrating the "perfect" guy. It started reasonable, with him saying "oh can you check this on my phone? the passcode is XYZ"
Yeah, I would have trusted my current-wife then-girlfriend with my phone passcode pretty early on, no big deal. She didn't feel the need to know it, but casually telling it to her so she could do something with it is probably a thing that happened.
But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.
> But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.
Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's long-game triangulation, which is little more than domestic violence perpetrated by the other partner. But men are supposed to feel ashamed of themselves if they're not willing to just blindly go along with it.
The irony is, they call this sort of victim the "ideal" guy, while simultaneously deriding him as a "simp" to the rest of their cliques. It's loathesome. I pity anybody involved in the dating game these days.
No, domestic violence is only one thing, that thing is domestic violence. All violence is physical. Other forms of abuse that are not physical are not violence.
If we have a verbal confrontation one of us has hurt feelings. If it turns violent, there is actual violence. Words have meanings.
You can care about other types of abuse. You should care about other types of abuse.
But claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.
This is massively wrong at best and evil at worst.
> Domestic abuse, also called "domestic violence" [...]. Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person.
> Intimate partner violence refers to behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours
> Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship
Yes. The misuse of terms you've shown is exactly the concern I and other victims of domestic violence have.
Meanwhile, here the Oxford English Dictionary:
violence, n.
1. a. The exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.
You are indirectly supporting domestic violence by manipulating the definition of violence to include non-violent offences.
(separately: Wikipedia is not a source at all, let alone an authoritative one)
Again, since you didn't address this: claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.
> Forcibly. If there's no force there's no violence.
I get where you're coming from but enough men figured out that when wife-beating became illegal, they could continue to torment their wives and exes through passive-aggressive, explicitly nonviolent acts enough that the laws were expanded and the definition changed.
The redefinition happened at least 20 years ago and has since propagated across multiple disciplines (law enforcement and psychology inclusive). Even publishing revenge porn falls under domestic violence statutes now.
Yes, it no longer meets the strictly-literal definition of violence. It is what it is. Rather than arguing it here, consider adapting to the times or taking your grievance to the Department of Justice (https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence):
> Domestic violence is a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner. Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.
Repeating for a third time so you can hopefully read it and actually respond when you hit ‘reply’:
Claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence
I’m not responsible for all of humanity: you should want a clear definition and separation of violent and non violent abuse so why don’t you handle this yourself rather than asking me?
“get with the times” is ridiculous. vague legislation is bad whether it’s new or old. Likewise a lot of progress has obviously been bad much like other progress has been good.
I’m actually not really interested in your replies any more, since you’re not actually responding.
Victims of non physical domestic violence also need money, police time, and medical attention (yes, they do!). So I'd argue that widening the definition of domestic violence actually increases the visibility of the cause. More people are concerned, directly or indirectly.
> “get with the times” is ridiculous
It's not. Language changes all the time for better or worse, and trying to change it back is just not possible. You're wasting your time if you're trying to make your definition the correct one instead of the one that's widely accepted, even if your definition made more sense (I don't have an opinion on that).
Language is a reflection of society, and whether you want it or not, society has decided that physical domestic violence and non-physical domestic violence are the same thing, which we call domestic violence. You can fight words or fight for a cause, your choice.
I have no clue. I mostly get warhammer, video game, and programming videos. It showed up in my shorts one day so I took a look. I have long since purged it from my history because I want to minimize the chances of getting something like that again.
It's funny, I am married with a child, do my best and my wife too, but sometimes she gets dragged into meme-expectation that take her a long time to recover from. I cant see nor understand much of the source of these: Im an immigrant and I cant read her native language, and I dont know if it s a girl thing or if it's actually me not fitting reasonable expectations, but damn I wished everyone could look at their own relationship without trying to copy the appearance of others.
What seems to help is when an idolized version of relationship is suddenly broken into pieces and you discover your model was actually completely miserable and whatever you expected became trivial relative to that.
The joy of exploitative recommendation algorithms. I had a discussion with my daughter about TikTok's Glamour Filter the other day and now my whole feed is full of glamour filter posts. This is so unhealthy (mentally).
Observe how this amounts to crime. The platform has motive:
-newly single users attract more views
-newly single users are worth more to advertisers because they’re likely to spend on appearance, travel, new hobbies, and big ticket items formerly shared with a partner.
The platform also has opportunity because it has data on exactly what content has highest probability of nudging a particular user to break up. (Perhaps the “you are being abused by a narcissist” stuff others have mentioned works nicely.)
(See also Shoshanna Zuboff)
May be true for extroverts, but as an introvert I don't give a cent about what random people think about me (which also explains why I do not use Instagram in the first place).
However there is a certain kind of dissonance between deciding to publicly state "I don't care what you think" that sort of implies that they do care actually.
It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the first place?
>It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the first place?
That seems rather reductive given the topic here.
I don't own an EV auto, or any auto for that matter. By your logic, I shouldn't engage in discussions about EV vs. ICE or anything to do with transportation. Is that correct?
>If you said that you have no interest whatsoever in cars or electric cars, or no care for things tangentially related (impact on climate or similar).
A fair point. However, that's not what GGP[1] said. They said:
> Who people think we are is who we are
May be true for extroverts, but as an introvert I don't give a cent about
what random people think about me (which also explains why I do not use
Instagram in the first place).
I was responding to a reply[0] to that comment which asserted that:
However there is a certain kind of dissonance between deciding to publicly
state "I don't care what you think" that sort of implies that they do care
actually.
It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the
first place?
As I said, I think that's pretty reductive. If you don't care what people on Instagram (or other social media) think, then not using such platforms makes perfect sense. Which is what GGP said.
It seems reasonable to comment on the perceived "quest for likes" in a discussion about such things, even if you don't use those platforms and/or don't care what others think.
I don't agree with GGP's point about being an introvert, as I'm an extrovert and I don't give a rat's ass about such things either. Nor do I use Instagram or other (mainstream) social media.
Despite my (potentially) poor analogy, GP seems to be implying that if you state that you don't care about something, then you actually do care. Which, as I said, seems pretty reductive. And is also a poor use of logic.
Please feel free to disagree and/or down-vote me, as I (at least as far as this, and most topics goes) don't really care what others think.
Rather, I'm interested in discussion that sparks interesting exchanges. GP's shallow dismissal of GGP doesn't do that. In fact, it may well stifle discussion. And more's the pity.
Is there not a middle ground here? I don't think this is a binary situation where a person has to have no care at all, or it is their full obsession with life.
Like, I don't care if you think my clothes are shit, and I don't keep up with the latest javascript flavor of the day. At the same time I don't want, at least the general public around me, thinking I'm some creepy hermit murderer so they don't rise up with torches and pitchforks either.
That’s what the comment you’re replying to is saying, you just used more words. You’re downstream from someone who asserted they are a hard 0 on the caring, which it sounds like you agree is… unlikely.
If you actually don’t care you wouldn’t post because it wouldn’t occur to you to.
Edit: I find that most people who scream “I don’t care what you think” generally mean “I’m not influenced by what you think”. Which is an important difference, and helps explain getting red in the face about someone else’s opinion about which one don’t care.
That's because delusion is ugly and thus invokes complaint, so yes sufficient ugliness has influence, but the influence of ugliness is invocation of complaint about ugliness, it doesn't define who you are.
Whatever personality trait you’re talking about is orthogonal to introversion/extroversion.
There are many introverts who manage their social time specifically because they care about the impressions they make on others and find it effortful to manage them; and many extroverts who do the opposite specifically because they don’t think at all about such impressions.
Impression shaping doesn't define who you are, it's a completely artificial front, and it takes an effort exactly because impression has nothing in common with person's essence.
>Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection (similar to colors not existing in reality).
I strongly disagree, and don't think your example supports your conclusions.
Colors are arbitrary and subjective constructs and dont exist in reality. Following your example, identity does not exist. It is not in the reflection either.
The "problem" is that people place more importance on the subjective identity seen by the observer, and less on the equally subjective identity they see them selves.
Just because each are subjective does not mean that they are equally fulfilling, productive, or healthy.
Living a life you find beautiful has objective advantages over living a life someone else thinks is beautiful. Satisfying your arbitrary needs is ultimately more fulfilling than satisfying someone else's arbitrary needs.
It should be no surprise that people who don't live a life they like end up dissatisfied with their life...
I think that is an insanely insightful comment. It is very scary having an 11 year old and wondering when that day comes when his friends are on social media and he wants to participate. I am skeptical of a lot so don’t fall for get rich scams or ads on these platforms but do enjoy perusing for sometimes too long
My oldest got instagram and such at 16. She became depressed, moody, rude, and isolated. We would take the social media away, she became happy engaged, involved with friends and family.
Go right back to being depressed again as soon as she got access to Instagram.
Repeat every three or so months until she moved out. After wasting a couple years of her life she finally got off social media all together and is doing much better.
Her much younger sister is 13 wants social media. It’s a hard no. She complained to her older sister. Older sister was extremely firm on saying to stay off it.
There's hope: My 12 year old son recently got his first phone. After seeing what's happened with his older sister (very bad), he steadfastly refuses to install any games or social media on it.
We'll see if he holds out...
It's extremely hard as a parent.
Younger adolescent girls are extremely vulnerable. But this stuff is very hard to lock down and manage. There are no good tools for managing it. The parental controls apps are leaky and crappy. Schools issue (and require!) devices, so even if you can lock your kids device, there's always alternate paths. And as a parent you are easily sidelined and ignored when you try to talk about it and bring up concerns.
Worst problems have been Tumblr and Pinterest, BTW, not Instagram. Both are full of eating disorder and self-harm content. Instagram is at least somewhat moderated. (Reddit and Twitter are also really bad, though less used by teens that I have seen.)
> However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life,
you have control to not use this application. It's not like you're forced to use it. You can also go there casually to see your friends pictures without thinking too much about it.
You also have control to not be a celebrity and avoid the paparazzi. This is the parent's point. While you may have free will, it's hard to argue that having cheap access to fame is not appealing to everyone.
A lot of things can be bad if abused. Alcohol, eating, watching TV, video games even healthy activities like sport can be addictive or have risk of injuries. Social medias aren't different. They are entirely harmless for most people. Not that a big of a deal.
> A lot of things can be bad if abused. Alcohol, eating, watching TV, video games even healthy activities like sport can be addictive or have risk of injuries.
Scissors can be bad if abused too. Not sure why we're playing this game...
I think this is a great analysis, though I think in reality it's not limited at all to Instagram specifically but more broadly to the self-promotional and self-marketing aspect of our culture in general at this point. Social media throws kerosene on it, certainly, but it's a much broader phenomenon of which this experience of Instagram is only one symptom.
Capitalism turns everything into a commodity. Including ourselves. From a very early age we are taught that it's important to sell ourselves; to survive and thrive. For most people this is just a background nag, mostly ignored, or poorly executed. For some it becomes a primary drive. The internet only accelerates it.
Mediums like Twitter are just as involved; showcasing one's quips for the world. It doesn't have to be a photo or video like Instagram or TikTok.
And as others may be pointing out, Instagram isn't even the worst of it.
Anyways as a parent of teens, it's very distressing.
It isn't Instagram, it is like counts. But the like counts are what drives the addictive behavior and makes the product "free" to use.
This is just Goodhart's Law at a personal level. We stop being authentic to chase likes. We inherently turn the measure into a target. We have hundreds of "friends" of FB and we interact with a dozen or less regularly.
It's not just like counts. That's just a metric/formalism for the narcissistic self-marketing thing that these platforms are really about. You could remove them or obscure them but some other form of observing engagement would take the same place.
It's about being seen and popular. The same crap adolescents have dealt with for decades, but now... automated.
I don't think likes are currently their major issue. Instagram at least created its own problem:
1. start with regular people posting regular stuff - it was great fun
2. the professional users are the most active and polished
3. regular people stop posting because their content isn't polished enough and they resent comparisons of their life to others'
4. regulars follow less (to preserve their sanity) and post less
5. to maintain growth, the platform pushes more and more suggestions (people you don't want to follow, ads you don't want to see, reel encouragement you don't want to do)
Final stage is a platform that has deterred you from participating and constantly assaults you with things that you don't want to see. I used to really enjoy using Twitter and Instagram. I haven't touched Twitter in a couple of months and I usually resent using Instagram (but it's key in my industry).
Silly thing is, I think Instagram would be just fine if they didn't suggest things constantly. Every time, I select to see it less often, but it's inevitably back the following day. Let each person choose what they want their Instagram to be, whether it's following friends or being a creator or treating it like a magazine and looking at reels.
>Let each person choose what they want their Instagram to be
That's not as valuable to advertisers though. With recommendations and algorithmic sorting, the platform gets to mold what's important, and that influence makes it easy to sell off to the highest bidder.
I find a lot of value in following my friends---and my friends only. It's why we've all generally migrated off traditional social media and into private group chats. There's no algorithm mediating our interactions, and no one is going to try to sell our attention to outside parties.
There was a young woman highlighted by a popular youtuber for her odd behaviour in a gym recently. She was filming herself exercizing for views and dollars. The rough moment was when everyday gym guys walked past her. She felt pressured enough by their presence to accuse them of being creeps and mocked them on her video feed while complaining at the guys in person. The guys were doing normal gym chores ignoring her.
A young adult has gotten so far into the mental space of her social media job that she is hypersensitive to any attention, or the implication of attention, in real life.
Splitting a person's psyche into cyberspace and real life when your livelihood is on the line, is a real skill. Training healthy habits into full time workers could possibly help.
> Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.
It also democratizes the clout, power and protection that the hollywood famous have. Without social media harvey weinstein would not be in jail. A "relative nobody" wouldn't have been able to "out shout" and expose a media mogul like weinstein.
As with everything, there are positive and negative aspects.
> They say it's the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison - it's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.
Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection..
That assumes a level of honesty that is missing from social media. On Instagram people explicitly pretend to be someone they are not. The reflection they show is beauty and affluence but the reality is Photoshop and prestige car rental.
Insta is like a computer role playing game, where the player usually plays a character that closely resembles themselves, but often as a more idealized version.
When my daughter started playing Hogwarth's legacy, she instantly created a charcter that looked as much as possible like her. Instagram is not that different.
It would be fascinating to take a sample of people, compare their avatars to their real life appearance, and then have them spend an hour talking to a shrink about why they are so similar/different.
Anecdotally, I know many people in both the very similar and very different camps, and a few who are very similar except for some small thing.
> mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.
There is no such illness. Like, literally none of them. (And in child stars case, massive amount of their issues can be explained by pervasive abusive situations and exploitation they found themselves in. Which is something that happens to poor unknown kids too.)
The biggest problem with instagram (well and most other photo-based social network) is not the fame and glory of a few individuals, but a selective showing of the best highlights of other people.
Imagine sitting at a shitty job, going to the bathroom, and browsing instagram... hey look, here's Alice eating at a fancy restaurant.. here's Bob on a beach... here's Cecilia at a party... here's Doug moutain climbing... and you're stuck at a shitty job.
Instagram doesn't show eg. Bob working for months to save up for a trip to a shitty seaside location, hotel with bedbugs, overpriced cocktails and a sewage flowing into the sea just out of the visible part in the photo... but you don't see any of the bad stuff, just other people having fun, and you having to deal with all the bad stuff. Add all the filters, and all other people are pretty, have nice skin, look skinny.. and you look like shit after 7 hours on the job and one more to go.
I mean, a generation or two ago, it would be a literal vacation slide show you might be "treated to" when visiting a friend. Obviously they never showed slides of Bob at the GM assembly plant.
And in the days before budget airlines most people accepted it that an overseas vacation was a bit like that for national lampoon vacations: working stiffs working hard and after years at the job “earning” a vacation. Not jaunts you did while between dead end jobs.
You're right that there is difference in degree. But I don't think that changes the fact that we should already accept that what people post to Instagram are the highlights of their lives and not the drudgery.
It's not a question of acceptance, but rather on the effects it has on people psychologically, whether or not they accept it. Humans don't just operate as rational beings – our brains' perceptions of the world adapt and change based on the things we see and how often we see them. Being aware of this effect is not enough to overcome it, much like being aware of the effects of hard drugs does not prevent you from forming an addiction. It is simply how our minds work. It affects people to varying degrees, but the only way to guarantee avoiding the effect is to avoid such situations in general.
But a generation or two ago you had context. You knew Bob worked in an assembly plant 6 days a week with tons of overtime sacrificing family time or took that vacation after 3 years and stayed in a cheap hotel to enjoy an amazing beach.
With social media you do not have that context, you just see the perfect parts.
This kind of reminds me what I experienced during my first travel to south america. In short, most people I met with shitty jobs or no job wanted to go to either north america or europe. They kind of assumed everything would be fine if they just could go to one of these countries. What they totally forgot is that we had to work our asses of to actually pay for the flight and 2 months or backpacking. At home, we had 9to5 jobs, something the people we talked to would actually consider slavery...
This is what a lot of immigrants during the "refugee crisis" thought too... pay the smugglers a couple of grand, then they come to germany, get a free house, free money, buy a bmw.
> Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality
Identity is by definition what and who you _are_ and this is _prior_ to thought -- it is a matter of being, not thinking. It is to some extent determined in time; our character is determined by our choices, and choices actualize potentials, or thwart them. The very fact that someone can have a distorted view implies a distinction between the opinion and the real.
You seem to be getting at this in the paragraph that follows. That is, what people _observe_ and know about you is information that can help you learn about yourself. That information can be distorted (through incompetence or malice) and should be therefore be verified before it is accepted.
So your general point has merit. Instagram, for example, feeds approval and validation seeking behavior. What does Instagram reward? Appearance and instant gratification. There is no verification, no contextualization. People not only develop a strong need for approval, but fickle, superficial approval. It's like Goodhart's law. The shallow image of identity, not the real identity, becomes what matters and what people invest all their energy into, and through their investment, reduce themselves to that image and accept it as who they are. People have always done this. Keeping up with the Jones', saving face. We all know people who are slaves to their reputations, to what others think of them, anxiously guarding their appearance from the slightest perceived threat. Social anxiety is largely this. But social media exaggerates and magnifies this flaw, one that young people are more prone to.
A virtuous man is concerned about his character; how he appears is a consequence or the effect of his virtue and who he is, not a deceptive mask that requires maintenance to conceal the filth and vice lurking underneath. And by his virtue, he suffers little from slander and welcomes truthful criticism. The Image Man is destroyed by anything unflattering because, true or not, it involves a negation of the image which he identifies with his very being.
> (similar to colors not existing in reality).
A digression, but this claim bothers me. Colors do exist in reality. Your claim rests on an unjustified Cartesian metaphysics in which color as we mean it is redefined as a surface reflectance property and what we commonly call color is involved in scurried away into the mind or "consciousness". (Materialism can't even pull that trick as the Cartesian mind has been eliminated from the picture.)
From a pure physical point of view, light exist of an infinite number of wavelengths. A mix of light of different wavelengths thus form an infinite-dimensional color space.
Our eyes only has thress sensors to detect the difference, roughly corresponding to Red Green and Blue, so as the light hits our brain, we receive a 3-dimensional color space. The brain collapses this further into a single qualia, that is very remote in structure to the physical light.
By comparison, our ability to comprehend shapes of objects is much more closely related to the objects' acutal shape.
>> Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality
> Identity is by definition what and who you _are_ and this is _prior_ to thought -- it is a matter of being, not thinking.
This is not the definition most commonly used, at least not in the physical sense. What we _are_, all of us, is very complicated. Far too complicated for our brains to relate to. Instead we're telling ourselves highly simplified stories about ourselves, where we "identify with" or "identify as" one or more characters (or personas) in these stories. This is not unlike when we watch a movie or read a book, and start to feel that we are one of the lead characters there.
And just like the color "brown" doesn't have a single essential identity (it corresponds to a relatively large are of the RGB space, and an even larger area of the full physical color space), our mental model of who we are, is extremely simplified compared to our physical selves.
Spot on except I don’t think identity can be boiled down to perception. It’s also not really necessary to make your point - some people simply care a lot (too much) about the perception of others. Others don’t precisely because their sense of self isn’t so dependent on others.
The question I have is, why do people behave like Narcissus, then?
Why do they need so much external affirmation?
Why have some people become so extremely insecure?
Question from a blind man. I know we are supposed to be so stupid that an elephant confuses us... So I have to ask simple questions, because otherwise I will likely not understand the answer, given how stupid we are.
Social media is getting closer to fast fashion. Every app is doomed on creation to live a short life. I'm happy with this, since in reality, its ultimately a tool for marketing and social media is just the side effect. Superficial way of connecting to the masses? use the latest Social media. The real way of staying in touch with people? giving them a call or an email if not meet in person. Nothing beats the personal touch. Super
This is all true, but the result of social media is that people feel like they’re getting social fulfillment despite, in most cases, getting anything of value. So people are irritable, exhausted, and feel no need for offline socialization.
We’ll eventually come up with ways to resist this, but it’ll be hard. We can’t, if we live in the expensive cities where the jobs are, return to the real physical world, because that place was bought by the rich when we weren’t looking and now they own it.
I set a 15 minute daily limit on Instagram. I also have my phone setup to block all non-essential apps between 7:00AM and 6:00PM on the weekdays, and I am not usually hitting my 15 Insta-minutes on those days.
I could probably reduce that to 10 and still catch up on anything from friends and family. But the extra 5 minutes is just enough time to enjoy some interesting content from the hobby-influencers I follow, yet not enough time to get sucked into the click-bait stuff.
Before setting limits I was probably at 30-60 Insta-minutes per day. Now I spend that extra time commenting on HN, which I would like to think is a more productive endeavor.
It’s not cheap (like $99 annually) but I’ve gained a ton of time back with Opal. I think this is a referral link, but I’ve already paid for it. Founders are young, out of Paris.
https://link.opal.so/D3ttGLGSF9xGFNVj7
my iPhone saves my login credentials when I delete/reinstall it, so I delete instagram every Sunday or Monday then reinstall on Friday/Saturday, because I don't have the self control to actually limit myself with the screentime functionality.
Somehow Instagram is the only social media I can tolerate. Doesn't seem to have the hate and anger that I encounter constantly on Twitter and Reddit. Perhaps text format is not for me. I'm sure there is ugly stuff on Instagram but when it comes to images and video clips I naturally follow artists, musicians, and foodies rather than political or other incendiary content.
I guess I am too slow in that I opened a Facebook account for the first time ever in may 2012 and it was where everybody seemed to be at, only for a couple years later everybody started to open a parallel Instagram account - I never could understand why people would want to use another thing additional to a thing that could do the same?
In those years you could notice Facebook became a wasteland, the Cambridge analytica scandal surfaced and got so stressed just by opening the app - I deleted my account in 2018. But for my surprise, people around here seems to be quite happy with Facebook (which here in Latin America seems to refuse to die!), Instagram, twitter, Snapchat and now tik tok accounts - how do they handle all of that?
The Facebook experience seems to depends a lot on the age group. For the older than 1970s age group, Facebook experience is very similar to what early Facebook was for high school and universities in the 2000s. With lots of photo updates from friends.
The same way people handle Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. They fulfill different functions to different people. I could do notes, make spreadsheets, or produce presentations in any one of those apps, but each task is more or less practical in each tool.
I haven't used social media in a while, but when I did they fulfilled these separate functions:
Facebook - Keeping up to data with family (or anyone over the age of 40). Communicating with Social groups/organizing events. Messaging friends and family with Messenger.
Instagram - Maintaining a photo diary of my life. Sharing what I'm doing currently with friends. Following celebrities. Messaging.
Twitter - Following celebrities, but textually rather than with video stories. Keeping up to date on current events and trends.
Snapchat - To be honest, Instagram stole SnapChats cake completely for me when they made Stories. Younger generations use it more from my experience. Used it largely for messaging without a paper trail.
TikTok - Entertainment and following social trends. It's like YouTube, but with a better recommendation algorithm and shorter form videos.
Facebook Marketplace and Groups have nearly killed off hobby forums and Craiglist. I have an account for that purpose specifically. I don't even have a single friend on FB and it seems to really bug them -- I get a prompt to befriend at least one person from a list when I log in.
Instagram was much simpler back then. It wasn't a general social media platform, it was just for posting square images with captions. No DMs, no videos, no stories (that wasn't even a thing back then really), no status updates, etc. And it was only accessible on smartphones.
And that was around the time Facebook's original audience had their parents joining Facebook, making it less of a safe/cool place to screw around with your friends. Instagram had less appeal to parents because of all those limitations, so young people migrated there. Eventually the parents got on Instagram too, and they moved to Snapchat, which has so far done a pretty good job at being indecipherable to older generations, and focuses on making everything private, only sending stuff to people directly or whitelisted groups of people who can see your stories. Not to mention, everything having an expiration date means people won't be able to scroll back and see cringey/embarrassing posts you made a few years ago.
I have posted photos to Instagram but I don’t understand the point. I rarely take picture of myself . Mostly I take photos using my macro camera , cool things I have seen like architecture or the local environment and graffiti and real life stickers. Is it mainly just to share photos of yourself?
I bookmarked the messages page in instagram in my web browser and deleted the app, that way I can stay in contact with friends and family without the distraction.
This interaction pattern isn't possible in the app, and users are forced to view the most captivating post in their feed upon opening.
I didn't want to delete my Instagram account but they went ahead and algo'd it into the trash can anyway, after first making me upload a selfie with a piece of paper with a random code written on it.
Truly a bizarre experience.
After I tweeted about it I discovered there's an underground economy of people claiming to be able to restore your account.
I use Instagram for my hobby/business (coin & paper money collecting & dealing). I have mercilessly curated my feed to be ONLY people who post content purely related to the numismatic world. No real-life friends, no travel posts from random semi-friends, no selfies, none of that garbage. If someone starts posting it, I unfollow them.
And for the ads -- I click on ads related to cat toys and pet food, just to let the algorithm know to feed me more of it.
SO: My instagram feed is 100% hobby-related posts & cats. I think I may be victorious (for the time being....).
PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.
> PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.
I have a 6 figure instagram id and have never opened the explore tab.
But I also stopped using instagram when I realized the ads are more interesting than the people in my feed. Maybe early instagram folk just aren’t the target market anymore.
Sometimes I miss my quirky candid real life photography app.
edit: to clarify for the downvoters — professionally interesting people (influencers) bore me and my friends highlight reels … are kinda boring too because they all end up looking the same since they’re all trying to promote an idealized version of their lives instead of just being themselves. The ads were great, but I don’t need an app for ads. So like the commenter above, I curated heavily – by never checking the app.
What I hate is that even if you curate it that meticulously (gid forbid you click on the wrong thing and mess it all up), you still get fed so many random ads and "people you could follow". Just a completely whack user unfriendly platform in my experience.
And the worst part is that if your curated feed isn't overly active (because Instagram is degrading their experience too), you get yet more suggestions and ads to fill the gaps. Plus the badgering to make reels, no matter how many times you ask it to stop suggesting that.
It's way too big of a task for any one person to do individually (like trying to block ads online), and then you have the problem that people collaboratively moderating a stream together wouldn't have the same opinions on what content they actually want to see.
The Algorithm owes no loyalty to your efforts. I think many of us have watched well-curated social feeds revert to noise when an algorithm got tweaked or irrecoverably fixated on some irrelevant interaction we once made. These things are not built to let you have the control you’ve found. It’s an happy accident when that happens.
At some point, wouldn't it be better to build your own RSS bridge for posts from Instagram accounts you want to follow? At least you'd get to exercise some programming skills that way, instead of running around in Meta's dark pattern labyrinths.
They already have on Facebook. I can keep my Insta stream within certain bounds but Facebook always serves me fresh nonsense no matter how tightly I try to control it.
Well for billions of users, it's very hard for them to quit a digital drug like Instagram when the feverish notifications, updates and posts are tempting cold turkeys everywhere resisting the urge to log in to the app.
There is a reason why Meta has spent millions on psychologists studying on ways to hook in users and increase screen time, scrolling and getting more people addicted to Instagram; hence the billions of users having difficulty deleting the app.
Even if they do, they end up re-installing it and logging back in again to scroll up for the entire day about what they missed, then the addiction cycle continues.
My wife convinced me to install Instagram so she could send me videos of stuff. My experience was that at first it was annoying, then I found out I could follow some cool hobbyist folks working on cars, old computer systems, electronics, and of course all the mechanical keyboard content, as well as travel (I'm an extensive world traveler and used to post travel content on Instagram over 5 years ago) and I got sucked in. I started getting recommendations for comedy shorts and cat/dog videos which I enjoyed, and pretty soon I had a list of subscriptions which made it possible to scroll for hours watching videos which interest me without repeats.
The problem became:
1. Ads, the ads are bad because they're well targeted and mostly for things which are unnecessary or scams/knockoffs. I found myself buying things I didn't need from dubious brands.
2. Thots. Maybe because I'm a male between 25-50 or something, but even though I subscribe to 0 people on Instagram that qualify as thots, my feed started getting filled with women using Instagram to advertise their OF/services. Usually these seem cross-recommended as related to comedy shorts, cosplay/gaming, or cars, but aren't really any of those things.
3. Notifications. Instagram generates unnecessary notifications which ends up driving you back into the app, especially if you are like me and require there to be no number badges on any apps on your phone to eliminate FOMO anxiety.
The net effect was that I talked with my wife and deleted the app. It was the only social media app I've attempted to use in the last 3 years, and it lasted about 30 days before I felt it was necessary to delete it once again. I had used Instagram from 2015-2017, but had deleted it in 2017 previously. It's gotten much worse, and even in 2017 I felt it was unhealthy.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure Instagram is "better" (in the sense of less bad) than TikTok and many other apps that are more popular.
Ooc why didn't you disable notifications? I have them disabled and with a nicely curated feed (like yours) it's pleasant. The hard part is limiting your usage. I trick myself by putting the app many screens deep and in a folder so it's not one tap away.
The thing I dislike the most about Instagram is it seems like at some point it will be like "I'm done showing you content from your feed, here is generically popular stuff". There's a divider and a little message, but if I'm casually scrolling I might miss it and I'm on my timeline, if I wanted to be on Discover I'd be on Discover.
When TikTok runs out of relevant content and starts showing me generic/popular stuff; I say aloud "Ope, I'm out of tiktoks".
These days I don't check TikTok every day or I hit the normie soft cap after 5 minutes. My friends rely on me to be the "TikTok" guy since none of them have it installed for various reasons, so I "save them up" by waiting to view my fyp for longer periods of time.
>The thing is, I'm pretty sure Instagram is "better" (in the sense of less bad) than TikTok and many other apps that are more popular.
Users judge these apps based on different criteria and at different stages of use. On Instagram I found someone I wanted to follow but had to be approved to follow their content, I immediately uninstalled the app.
I get tons of excellent content on TikTok about tech, science, programming because I've "shaped" my algorithm well. I find people judge these platforms, as I have with instagram, before they have cultivated their best possible platform experience.
TikTok skews younger on average; Instagram skews more egocentric. You can mostly avoid both negatives but it won't be your first experience on these platforms.
The enshittafication of TikTok is just starting. Right now they are still doing their best to provide a quality service rather than extract value. Instagram is about a decade into getting steadily worse, more addicting, and more unhealthy.
So IMHO no not yet, but it will get there eventually.
> 2. Thots. Maybe because I'm a male between 25-50 or something, but even though I subscribe to 0 people on Instagram that qualify as thots, my feed started getting filled with women using Instagram to advertise their OF/services. Usually these seem cross-recommended as related to comedy shorts, cosplay/gaming, or cars, but aren't really any of those things.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS. I have consistently resisted ever following, or even looking at the profiles of obvious IG thots and yet recently, because my IG account only follows a handful of others and runs out of content quickly, IG has been FILLING my feed with IG models. Not just one, not just a few, like a healthy amount of scrolling is required to get beyond them to other types of sponsored content.
I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I'm sure something I did or revealed has tagged me as "likely to find this content captivating" but I don't and I wish I could flag it as such. My best guess is that because I follow some "BRO" accounts (qualified captain, i70 things, etc) and happen to fall in gender/age pairing where that kind of content is a reliable draw, they'll keep trying.
I mostly maintain my account to follow hobbies and local businesses, but I'm about to shitcan it for the second or third time.
I don't use a whole lot of social media with targeting as part of the core feature set (just Instagram and Snapchat.) Instagram has their algo honed into exactly the type of people I like to see, and my search page is filled with basically nothing except that. This is despite the fact that I don't engage (comment or like) with any posts. They must have some intense screen lingering analytics to figure out what people like. I find it very annoying and wish I could see what data they're basing recommendations on. It's a large impetus for me to get rid of my Instagram account entirely.
I had the same problem and hated it. What fixed it was clicking "Not Interested" on enough of the posts to where it eventually gave up trying to show stuff like that. I think you're correct about the fact that it figures out you're an adult male and assumes you want that content, since a common theme with adult males is, well, an interest in attractive women.
The algorithm has now decided to just show me cute animal stuff for several months, which is fine by me. It's all low-effort and mostly dumb, but it's better than unsolicited butts popping up everywhere when I just want to see what my friends are up to.
Now if I could just fix the scenario where somehow it decides I really like garbage pay-to-play mobile games and shows me _nothing_ but ads for them for days on end.
>Now if I could just fix the scenario where somehow it decides I really like garbage pay-to-play mobile games and shows me _nothing_ but ads for them for days on end.
My wife used to use instagram just to look at cat videos and wedding dresses. She wasnt into cars or gym workouts or whiskey or whatever. She's also surprisingly female. Her suggested posts and ads were always just girls with onlyfans accounts. I thinks it's just a matter of what most of the platform offers at this point.
>I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I'm sure something I did or revealed has tagged me as "likely to find this content captivating" but I don't and I wish I could flag it as such
A lot of engineers in SV (and in this forum) think they know better than the users. They think they are so much better than everyone else that they feel a allowing the user to tell them they don't like something is just extra noise that doesn't provide useful information.
What probably happened, is that you watched a video for 1 second too long, and the algorithm took that as a positive signal, and since the average amount of dudes probably spend longer than you, they assume they can increase your engagement through biology and your monkey brain alone.
I hate it too, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of a nice pair of Tatas, but I don’t need them in my face all day. You have to actively steer your feed away from it by gaming the algorithm harder. If a Thot shows up in your feed, swipe away instantly. Don’t even stop for a second. Then when something comes in that isn’t a thot but engages you, smash that like button so hard the algorithm thinks you’ve got the shakes.
> Ads, the ads are bad because they're well targeted and mostly for things which are unnecessary or scams/knockoffs. I found myself buying things I didn't need from dubious brands.
I make it a rule to never click on an ad no matter what. On the rare occasion I see any ad at all, if I do see something I think I want, I'll search for it later on my own. That let's me look at reviews, compare other similar items, and it means I'm buying from reputable sources only. Block every ad you can, never click or interact with any ad you can't block (or just haven't blocked yet).
You don't have to click on ads to be fed relevant ads. Your search history, app usage history, browsing history, credit card purchase history, location history, your social network (using any of those signals), can all be aggregated to profile you and your (potential) interests.
Searching and purchasing the item later can and (often but not always) is fed back to the system so it knows you purchased something you got an ad for.
All true! I block whatever ads I can to minimize the odds, and I take some comfort in the fact that when I see an ad for an item and end up buying later, what I pick up is not always the same product that was advertised or bought from the same place that paid for the ad.
We cannot avoid being influenced by advertising, and sometimes ads are even useful. It's just a shame that the ad industry has become so corrupt and obsessed with surveillance that the smartest thing is to avoid ads entirely whenever possible.
I made an Instagram account recently and within 10 minutes they banned my account for being suspicious, asking for a mobile number. I gave them my number and then the account got banned again for the same reason. I didn't post anything or do anything suspicious, is this common?
This has happened to me, except I was banned instantly upon creation and they wanted a mobile number AND a selfie. Which I refuse to give them and ended up deleting Instagram.
I suspect my IP address was suspicious to the algorithm, but it's a mobile app on a mobile network so I'm not sure why it's so strict.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadOr: Instagram is the most-used app.
If we all just kept these counter-explanations in mind we wouldn't have anywhere near as much pointless controversy in headlines.
The default feed I get is at most two posts from people I follow, and then only ads and weird shit.
There's a minor mitigating factor: if you tap on Instagram logo, it will show a drop down letting you switch to a chronological timeline from accounts you follow. You have to force-refresh it though because by default it refreshes perhaps once an hour.
I am not terribly active on it though.
But let me say that it's total horse shit that most of my notifications aren't related to my posts, or posts I've interacted with.
Instagram seems to have leveled off, but I personally don't find the Instagram annoyances nearly as dire as the TikToks posted to Youtube Stories.
Those seem the most annoying, and especially fake.. with all the amateur comedians, clickbait-y vid behaviors and voiceover triggers, and fake couple dynamics.
Instagram seems almost normal in comparison.
So far it's gone well! Occasionally I use the Facebook Container Firefox plugin to check the web app for messages from my mom.
As a personal anecdote, the people I know who cut back on Twitter did so long before Musk due to general social media burnout.
I don't have an active twitter account, so one of the things I like from post-Musk Twitter is that it no longer requires me to login for reading tweets or for searching.
And the dumb shit Elon posts and all the times he kicks himself in the balls are way funnier than before he acquired 'em.
Overall, I'm happier with the site since he took over, personally. But then I'm rooting for its demise, preferably with as much drama and humor along the way as possible, so of course I like it.
I've never used LinkedIn for anything other than to respond to recruiters and look up people's backgrounds.
Now it’s all ads and nonorganic posts. People only really use stories anymore. A few of My friends are influencers and they’ve all given up on IG and moved to TikTok.
What does this mean?
Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality (similar to colors not existing in reality).
Having access to a extra mirrors at first creates a sense of control. You know your mom and dad won't give you a "non-distorted" reflection so the reflection from strangers is worth more. Colleagues or friends saying "you're smart!" means a lot more from them.
When each mirror is carefully placed, the "whole" of we we are and would like to be can be understood more deeply just like 7 blind men working together understand the elephant more deeply.
However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life, then the identity becomes overwhelmed by expectation. Just like super high resolution makes your pores look larger, the mirror array makes every aspect of your life feel like shit even if from a rational analysis "extra information should never be a danger"
Wow. I have problems with Instragram, but I've never tried to sum it up into a single statement and while this is rather specific and may not include all the problems I _feel_ are there, it really does bring home the main issue, for me. A little snark in there about democratizing, as some people will always put a positive spin on such things, which I feel is totally appropriate here.
Just... The comment could have stopped right there and been as or more impactful (for me). Thanks. :)
Let's try this:
"Instagram makes pandemic the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous."
I remember that for a few months before my partner broke up with me, their IG feed was full of reels, posts, 'comedy', 'psychology tips', about people complaining about their partners. And also lots of Insta influencers posts giving relationship tips or encouraging people to break up for diverse reasons.
While I'm aware my relationship wasn't perfect, the standards promoted by those aesthetic Insta influencers were really impossible to obtain in real life. Unless of course your life consisted only of perfectly curated Insta moments.
My $0.02: We are taught not to aim for perfection at work[0], that should apply to relationships too.
[0] https://hbr.org/tip/2020/02/dont-let-perfect-be-the-enemy-of...
>It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan's dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, the googol game, and the best choice problem.
The internet and the options it gives, I believes leads people to think they have far more relationship options then they actually have, and the options they think they have are not as good as they believe. A lot of people put a lot of work in selling a perfect image online, but those rarely hold up in reality for any amount of time.
Of course this doesn't mean we should stay in bad relationships either. Our society doesn't really teach us how to have good relationships, especially in a capitalistic fashion (hey, just spend more money and everything will be ok), and quite a lot of us had really poor examples from our parents generation on how to treat other people.
I've learned more recently that healthy relationships aren't empirically so. Instead, there's "signs" of a healthy relationship; determining the health of your relationship must be a two way conversation. It requires assessment, honesty, and participation by both parties as a qualifier as well as the ability to listen without your ego involved. That's not to say all of those aren't challenging things to do in their own right just to say that the health of a relationship will be explored differently by different sets of people.
"manifest what you want from the world" and "think positive thoughts and everything will be ok"
Is actually kind of true when you think about all the algorithms that run social media. If you only ever search for cats and scroll past anything political, the algorithms will learn what you like and feed you more cats.
So, if you're searching up relationship advice, and spending time on those things, that's what you get back from 'the borg'.
You do have control over what social media shows you, it's just that you need to work against your basest desires in order to get there.
But here we are with google, facebrick et al saying "come on, just try a little culture war" because its lucrative for them, no matter how many times you say no thank you.
It's really sick but yeah, obviously lucrative and Larry, Seregey & Mark clearly need the money.
In the 4 months I dabbled with Instagram, I was shocked by how toxic and outright false the pop psychology memes were. They were stereotypical, frequently backwards, and deliberately misapplied. And all of that is before the cluster-B LARPing.
"Your partner won't give you access to their financial accounts? That's domestic violence, and he probably has Narcissistic Personality Disorder too! What's his is yours, so just use his credit card to book plane tickets without asking and remember that him yelling at you about it is verbal abuse, so get out while you still can before he starts beating you! And remember abuse thrives in secrecy-- so make sure you tell everybody how he was so aggressive that you were in constant fear for your life!"
Sorry you were on the receiving end of [whatever your case is]. Not even the strongest of relationships can withstand reinforcement of sentiments as corrosive as Instagram, where you're a useless piece of shit if you can't/won't support your partner's ambitions of joining the jet set.
You lost your partner to a cult. They're called "followers" for a reason. It starts with separating victims from their loved ones...
Yeah, I would have trusted my current-wife then-girlfriend with my phone passcode pretty early on, no big deal. She didn't feel the need to know it, but casually telling it to her so she could do something with it is probably a thing that happened.
But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.
Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's long-game triangulation, which is little more than domestic violence perpetrated by the other partner. But men are supposed to feel ashamed of themselves if they're not willing to just blindly go along with it.
The irony is, they call this sort of victim the "ideal" guy, while simultaneously deriding him as a "simp" to the rest of their cliques. It's loathesome. I pity anybody involved in the dating game these days.
No.
Domestic violence is domestic violence.
“Long game triangulation” is manipulative behaviour. It is not domestic violence.
Domestic violence is having your mother beat your skull with one of those maglite baton torches the police use.
Saying things that aren’t violence are violence is exactly the kind of awful behaviour others in this thread are complaining about.
If we have a verbal confrontation one of us has hurt feelings. If it turns violent, there is actual violence. Words have meanings.
You can care about other types of abuse. You should care about other types of abuse.
But claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.
This is massively wrong at best and evil at worst.
Yes. Here's the meaning of "domestic violence" according to some authoritative sources:
- - -
https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/what-is-domestic-abuse
> Domestic abuse, also called "domestic violence" [...]. Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person.
- - -
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-ag...
> Intimate partner violence refers to behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours
- - -
https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence
> Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship
- - -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence
> It can assume multiple forms, including physical, verbal, emotional, economic, religious, reproductive, or sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, here the Oxford English Dictionary:
You are indirectly supporting domestic violence by manipulating the definition of violence to include non-violent offences.(separately: Wikipedia is not a source at all, let alone an authoritative one)
Again, since you didn't address this: claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.
> treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.
Domestic violence comprises more than just battery by someone who happens to be a family member.
Forcibly. If there's no force there's no violence.
Psychologically abusing someone does not involve the use of force.
> Domestic violence comprises more than just battery by someone who happens to be a family member.
Agreed, thankfully nobody defined in the conversation defined domestic violence this way.
Again: domestic violence most include violence, i.e. the use of force.
Why are people trying to hard to redefine words?
I get where you're coming from but enough men figured out that when wife-beating became illegal, they could continue to torment their wives and exes through passive-aggressive, explicitly nonviolent acts enough that the laws were expanded and the definition changed.
The redefinition happened at least 20 years ago and has since propagated across multiple disciplines (law enforcement and psychology inclusive). Even publishing revenge porn falls under domestic violence statutes now.
Yes, it no longer meets the strictly-literal definition of violence. It is what it is. Rather than arguing it here, consider adapting to the times or taking your grievance to the Department of Justice (https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence):
> Domestic violence is a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner. Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.
Claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence
I’m not responsible for all of humanity: you should want a clear definition and separation of violent and non violent abuse so why don’t you handle this yourself rather than asking me?
“get with the times” is ridiculous. vague legislation is bad whether it’s new or old. Likewise a lot of progress has obviously been bad much like other progress has been good.
I’m actually not really interested in your replies any more, since you’re not actually responding.
> “get with the times” is ridiculous
It's not. Language changes all the time for better or worse, and trying to change it back is just not possible. You're wasting your time if you're trying to make your definition the correct one instead of the one that's widely accepted, even if your definition made more sense (I don't have an opinion on that).
Language is a reflection of society, and whether you want it or not, society has decided that physical domestic violence and non-physical domestic violence are the same thing, which we call domestic violence. You can fight words or fight for a cause, your choice.
What is the point here?
What seems to help is when an idolized version of relationship is suddenly broken into pieces and you discover your model was actually completely miserable and whatever you expected became trivial relative to that.
May be true for extroverts, but as an introvert I don't give a cent about what random people think about me (which also explains why I do not use Instagram in the first place).
But you did post about it.
It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the first place?
That seems rather reductive given the topic here.
I don't own an EV auto, or any auto for that matter. By your logic, I shouldn't engage in discussions about EV vs. ICE or anything to do with transportation. Is that correct?
A fair point. However, that's not what GGP[1] said. They said:
I was responding to a reply[0] to that comment which asserted that: As I said, I think that's pretty reductive. If you don't care what people on Instagram (or other social media) think, then not using such platforms makes perfect sense. Which is what GGP said.It seems reasonable to comment on the perceived "quest for likes" in a discussion about such things, even if you don't use those platforms and/or don't care what others think.
I don't agree with GGP's point about being an introvert, as I'm an extrovert and I don't give a rat's ass about such things either. Nor do I use Instagram or other (mainstream) social media.
Despite my (potentially) poor analogy, GP seems to be implying that if you state that you don't care about something, then you actually do care. Which, as I said, seems pretty reductive. And is also a poor use of logic.
Please feel free to disagree and/or down-vote me, as I (at least as far as this, and most topics goes) don't really care what others think.
Rather, I'm interested in discussion that sparks interesting exchanges. GP's shallow dismissal of GGP doesn't do that. In fact, it may well stifle discussion. And more's the pity.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074290
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35072080
Edit: fixed formatting and prose. Clarified my response.
Like, I don't care if you think my clothes are shit, and I don't keep up with the latest javascript flavor of the day. At the same time I don't want, at least the general public around me, thinking I'm some creepy hermit murderer so they don't rise up with torches and pitchforks either.
Edit: I find that most people who scream “I don’t care what you think” generally mean “I’m not influenced by what you think”. Which is an important difference, and helps explain getting red in the face about someone else’s opinion about which one don’t care.
Notice how the top level example didn't start with randos, but family members and close associates.
There are many introverts who manage their social time specifically because they care about the impressions they make on others and find it effortful to manage them; and many extroverts who do the opposite specifically because they don’t think at all about such impressions.
I strongly disagree, and don't think your example supports your conclusions.
Colors are arbitrary and subjective constructs and dont exist in reality. Following your example, identity does not exist. It is not in the reflection either.
The "problem" is that people place more importance on the subjective identity seen by the observer, and less on the equally subjective identity they see them selves.
Just because each are subjective does not mean that they are equally fulfilling, productive, or healthy.
Living a life you find beautiful has objective advantages over living a life someone else thinks is beautiful. Satisfying your arbitrary needs is ultimately more fulfilling than satisfying someone else's arbitrary needs.
It should be no surprise that people who don't live a life they like end up dissatisfied with their life...
Instagram is by far the least horrible of social media platforms.
It doesn't drag you into comments wars or allows you to repost things easily.
It doesn't focus on comments as much as other platforms, but they are just as terrible in my experience.
> allow you to repost things easily
And yet a good chunk of the content is straight from TikTok right now. Or a screen capture of tumblr blog and includes a Tweet of a video from TikTok.
Go right back to being depressed again as soon as she got access to Instagram.
Repeat every three or so months until she moved out. After wasting a couple years of her life she finally got off social media all together and is doing much better.
Her much younger sister is 13 wants social media. It’s a hard no. She complained to her older sister. Older sister was extremely firm on saying to stay off it.
We'll see if he holds out...
It's extremely hard as a parent.
Younger adolescent girls are extremely vulnerable. But this stuff is very hard to lock down and manage. There are no good tools for managing it. The parental controls apps are leaky and crappy. Schools issue (and require!) devices, so even if you can lock your kids device, there's always alternate paths. And as a parent you are easily sidelined and ignored when you try to talk about it and bring up concerns.
Worst problems have been Tumblr and Pinterest, BTW, not Instagram. Both are full of eating disorder and self-harm content. Instagram is at least somewhat moderated. (Reddit and Twitter are also really bad, though less used by teens that I have seen.)
you have control to not use this application. It's not like you're forced to use it. You can also go there casually to see your friends pictures without thinking too much about it.
I'm not sure that this is clearly established.
Scissors can be bad if abused too. Not sure why we're playing this game...
Capitalism turns everything into a commodity. Including ourselves. From a very early age we are taught that it's important to sell ourselves; to survive and thrive. For most people this is just a background nag, mostly ignored, or poorly executed. For some it becomes a primary drive. The internet only accelerates it.
Mediums like Twitter are just as involved; showcasing one's quips for the world. It doesn't have to be a photo or video like Instagram or TikTok.
And as others may be pointing out, Instagram isn't even the worst of it.
Anyways as a parent of teens, it's very distressing.
This is just Goodhart's Law at a personal level. We stop being authentic to chase likes. We inherently turn the measure into a target. We have hundreds of "friends" of FB and we interact with a dozen or less regularly.
It's about being seen and popular. The same crap adolescents have dealt with for decades, but now... automated.
1. start with regular people posting regular stuff - it was great fun
2. the professional users are the most active and polished
3. regular people stop posting because their content isn't polished enough and they resent comparisons of their life to others'
4. regulars follow less (to preserve their sanity) and post less
5. to maintain growth, the platform pushes more and more suggestions (people you don't want to follow, ads you don't want to see, reel encouragement you don't want to do)
Final stage is a platform that has deterred you from participating and constantly assaults you with things that you don't want to see. I used to really enjoy using Twitter and Instagram. I haven't touched Twitter in a couple of months and I usually resent using Instagram (but it's key in my industry).
>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
Covers this effect pretty well.
Silly thing is, I think Instagram would be just fine if they didn't suggest things constantly. Every time, I select to see it less often, but it's inevitably back the following day. Let each person choose what they want their Instagram to be, whether it's following friends or being a creator or treating it like a magazine and looking at reels.
That's not as valuable to advertisers though. With recommendations and algorithmic sorting, the platform gets to mold what's important, and that influence makes it easy to sell off to the highest bidder.
I find a lot of value in following my friends---and my friends only. It's why we've all generally migrated off traditional social media and into private group chats. There's no algorithm mediating our interactions, and no one is going to try to sell our attention to outside parties.
They're pushing away valuable eyeballs by trying to wring cash out of everyone.
Astute. I have concluded there are social mental illnesses, and celebrity is absolutely a generator of one of those.
There was a young woman highlighted by a popular youtuber for her odd behaviour in a gym recently. She was filming herself exercizing for views and dollars. The rough moment was when everyday gym guys walked past her. She felt pressured enough by their presence to accuse them of being creeps and mocked them on her video feed while complaining at the guys in person. The guys were doing normal gym chores ignoring her.
A young adult has gotten so far into the mental space of her social media job that she is hypersensitive to any attention, or the implication of attention, in real life.
Splitting a person's psyche into cyberspace and real life when your livelihood is on the line, is a real skill. Training healthy habits into full time workers could possibly help.
You're posting on hn about a YouTuber who filmed an Instagrammer... We're all doomed!
It also democratizes the clout, power and protection that the hollywood famous have. Without social media harvey weinstein would not be in jail. A "relative nobody" wouldn't have been able to "out shout" and expose a media mogul like weinstein.
As with everything, there are positive and negative aspects.
Bo Burnham, from Make Happy
That assumes a level of honesty that is missing from social media. On Instagram people explicitly pretend to be someone they are not. The reflection they show is beauty and affluence but the reality is Photoshop and prestige car rental.
When my daughter started playing Hogwarth's legacy, she instantly created a charcter that looked as much as possible like her. Instagram is not that different.
Anecdotally, I know many people in both the very similar and very different camps, and a few who are very similar except for some small thing.
There is no such illness. Like, literally none of them. (And in child stars case, massive amount of their issues can be explained by pervasive abusive situations and exploitation they found themselves in. Which is something that happens to poor unknown kids too.)
Imagine sitting at a shitty job, going to the bathroom, and browsing instagram... hey look, here's Alice eating at a fancy restaurant.. here's Bob on a beach... here's Cecilia at a party... here's Doug moutain climbing... and you're stuck at a shitty job.
Instagram doesn't show eg. Bob working for months to save up for a trip to a shitty seaside location, hotel with bedbugs, overpriced cocktails and a sewage flowing into the sea just out of the visible part in the photo... but you don't see any of the bad stuff, just other people having fun, and you having to deal with all the bad stuff. Add all the filters, and all other people are pretty, have nice skin, look skinny.. and you look like shit after 7 hours on the job and one more to go.
I mean, a generation or two ago, it would be a literal vacation slide show you might be "treated to" when visiting a friend. Obviously they never showed slides of Bob at the GM assembly plant.
With social media you do not have that context, you just see the perfect parts.
Identity is by definition what and who you _are_ and this is _prior_ to thought -- it is a matter of being, not thinking. It is to some extent determined in time; our character is determined by our choices, and choices actualize potentials, or thwart them. The very fact that someone can have a distorted view implies a distinction between the opinion and the real.
You seem to be getting at this in the paragraph that follows. That is, what people _observe_ and know about you is information that can help you learn about yourself. That information can be distorted (through incompetence or malice) and should be therefore be verified before it is accepted.
So your general point has merit. Instagram, for example, feeds approval and validation seeking behavior. What does Instagram reward? Appearance and instant gratification. There is no verification, no contextualization. People not only develop a strong need for approval, but fickle, superficial approval. It's like Goodhart's law. The shallow image of identity, not the real identity, becomes what matters and what people invest all their energy into, and through their investment, reduce themselves to that image and accept it as who they are. People have always done this. Keeping up with the Jones', saving face. We all know people who are slaves to their reputations, to what others think of them, anxiously guarding their appearance from the slightest perceived threat. Social anxiety is largely this. But social media exaggerates and magnifies this flaw, one that young people are more prone to.
A virtuous man is concerned about his character; how he appears is a consequence or the effect of his virtue and who he is, not a deceptive mask that requires maintenance to conceal the filth and vice lurking underneath. And by his virtue, he suffers little from slander and welcomes truthful criticism. The Image Man is destroyed by anything unflattering because, true or not, it involves a negation of the image which he identifies with his very being.
> (similar to colors not existing in reality).
A digression, but this claim bothers me. Colors do exist in reality. Your claim rests on an unjustified Cartesian metaphysics in which color as we mean it is redefined as a surface reflectance property and what we commonly call color is involved in scurried away into the mind or "consciousness". (Materialism can't even pull that trick as the Cartesian mind has been eliminated from the picture.)
> A digression, but this claim bothers me.
From a pure physical point of view, light exist of an infinite number of wavelengths. A mix of light of different wavelengths thus form an infinite-dimensional color space.
Our eyes only has thress sensors to detect the difference, roughly corresponding to Red Green and Blue, so as the light hits our brain, we receive a 3-dimensional color space. The brain collapses this further into a single qualia, that is very remote in structure to the physical light.
By comparison, our ability to comprehend shapes of objects is much more closely related to the objects' acutal shape.
>> Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality
> Identity is by definition what and who you _are_ and this is _prior_ to thought -- it is a matter of being, not thinking.
This is not the definition most commonly used, at least not in the physical sense. What we _are_, all of us, is very complicated. Far too complicated for our brains to relate to. Instead we're telling ourselves highly simplified stories about ourselves, where we "identify with" or "identify as" one or more characters (or personas) in these stories. This is not unlike when we watch a movie or read a book, and start to feel that we are one of the lead characters there.
And just like the color "brown" doesn't have a single essential identity (it corresponds to a relatively large are of the RGB space, and an even larger area of the full physical color space), our mental model of who we are, is extremely simplified compared to our physical selves.
Why do they need so much external affirmation?
Why have some people become so extremely insecure?
Question from a blind man. I know we are supposed to be so stupid that an elephant confuses us... So I have to ask simple questions, because otherwise I will likely not understand the answer, given how stupid we are.
We’ll eventually come up with ways to resist this, but it’ll be hard. We can’t, if we live in the expensive cities where the jobs are, return to the real physical world, because that place was bought by the rich when we weren’t looking and now they own it.
I have to confess. I' think I'll be a bit happier when everything I see doesn't have a Facebook icon and link next to it.
Instagram: Your account will be deleted in 30 days.
Me: ...
Me: Login on day 29
Instagram: Welcome back.
I could probably reduce that to 10 and still catch up on anything from friends and family. But the extra 5 minutes is just enough time to enjoy some interesting content from the hobby-influencers I follow, yet not enough time to get sucked into the click-bait stuff.
Before setting limits I was probably at 30-60 Insta-minutes per day. Now I spend that extra time commenting on HN, which I would like to think is a more productive endeavor.
iOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208982#:~:text=Go%20to%20S....
Android: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9346420?hl=en#zipp...
In those years you could notice Facebook became a wasteland, the Cambridge analytica scandal surfaced and got so stressed just by opening the app - I deleted my account in 2018. But for my surprise, people around here seems to be quite happy with Facebook (which here in Latin America seems to refuse to die!), Instagram, twitter, Snapchat and now tik tok accounts - how do they handle all of that?
I haven't used social media in a while, but when I did they fulfilled these separate functions:
Facebook - Keeping up to data with family (or anyone over the age of 40). Communicating with Social groups/organizing events. Messaging friends and family with Messenger.
Instagram - Maintaining a photo diary of my life. Sharing what I'm doing currently with friends. Following celebrities. Messaging.
Twitter - Following celebrities, but textually rather than with video stories. Keeping up to date on current events and trends.
Snapchat - To be honest, Instagram stole SnapChats cake completely for me when they made Stories. Younger generations use it more from my experience. Used it largely for messaging without a paper trail.
TikTok - Entertainment and following social trends. It's like YouTube, but with a better recommendation algorithm and shorter form videos.
And that was around the time Facebook's original audience had their parents joining Facebook, making it less of a safe/cool place to screw around with your friends. Instagram had less appeal to parents because of all those limitations, so young people migrated there. Eventually the parents got on Instagram too, and they moved to Snapchat, which has so far done a pretty good job at being indecipherable to older generations, and focuses on making everything private, only sending stuff to people directly or whitelisted groups of people who can see your stories. Not to mention, everything having an expiration date means people won't be able to scroll back and see cringey/embarrassing posts you made a few years ago.
This interaction pattern isn't possible in the app, and users are forced to view the most captivating post in their feed upon opening.
Truly a bizarre experience.
After I tweeted about it I discovered there's an underground economy of people claiming to be able to restore your account.
I use Instagram for my hobby/business (coin & paper money collecting & dealing). I have mercilessly curated my feed to be ONLY people who post content purely related to the numismatic world. No real-life friends, no travel posts from random semi-friends, no selfies, none of that garbage. If someone starts posting it, I unfollow them.
And for the ads -- I click on ads related to cat toys and pet food, just to let the algorithm know to feed me more of it.
SO: My instagram feed is 100% hobby-related posts & cats. I think I may be victorious (for the time being....).
PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.
I have a 6 figure instagram id and have never opened the explore tab.
But I also stopped using instagram when I realized the ads are more interesting than the people in my feed. Maybe early instagram folk just aren’t the target market anymore.
Sometimes I miss my quirky candid real life photography app.
edit: to clarify for the downvoters — professionally interesting people (influencers) bore me and my friends highlight reels … are kinda boring too because they all end up looking the same since they’re all trying to promote an idealized version of their lives instead of just being themselves. The ads were great, but I don’t need an app for ads. So like the commenter above, I curated heavily – by never checking the app.
I miss the same too. BeReal is has the closest experience for candid photography. Unfortunately is not that widely used in my group
It's desperate behaviour from Meta.
Then Facebook decided to throw that all out the window and now I have a wall of pure garbage. Just random low quality memes and content.
I actually preferred that, as until recently there were no ads in the posts you saw (top level of course).
I made a point to not like or comment on anything, and seemed a decent diversion for a few minutes.
It's basically a hopeless problem.
Enjoy your victory while it lasts, I guess.
I actually found some coin videos through my explore page
Eventually they'll figure out how to keep you from doing that.
There is a reason why Meta has spent millions on psychologists studying on ways to hook in users and increase screen time, scrolling and getting more people addicted to Instagram; hence the billions of users having difficulty deleting the app.
Even if they do, they end up re-installing it and logging back in again to scroll up for the entire day about what they missed, then the addiction cycle continues.
The problem became:
1. Ads, the ads are bad because they're well targeted and mostly for things which are unnecessary or scams/knockoffs. I found myself buying things I didn't need from dubious brands.
2. Thots. Maybe because I'm a male between 25-50 or something, but even though I subscribe to 0 people on Instagram that qualify as thots, my feed started getting filled with women using Instagram to advertise their OF/services. Usually these seem cross-recommended as related to comedy shorts, cosplay/gaming, or cars, but aren't really any of those things.
3. Notifications. Instagram generates unnecessary notifications which ends up driving you back into the app, especially if you are like me and require there to be no number badges on any apps on your phone to eliminate FOMO anxiety.
The net effect was that I talked with my wife and deleted the app. It was the only social media app I've attempted to use in the last 3 years, and it lasted about 30 days before I felt it was necessary to delete it once again. I had used Instagram from 2015-2017, but had deleted it in 2017 previously. It's gotten much worse, and even in 2017 I felt it was unhealthy.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure Instagram is "better" (in the sense of less bad) than TikTok and many other apps that are more popular.
These days I don't check TikTok every day or I hit the normie soft cap after 5 minutes. My friends rely on me to be the "TikTok" guy since none of them have it installed for various reasons, so I "save them up" by waiting to view my fyp for longer periods of time.
Users judge these apps based on different criteria and at different stages of use. On Instagram I found someone I wanted to follow but had to be approved to follow their content, I immediately uninstalled the app.
I get tons of excellent content on TikTok about tech, science, programming because I've "shaped" my algorithm well. I find people judge these platforms, as I have with instagram, before they have cultivated their best possible platform experience.
TikTok skews younger on average; Instagram skews more egocentric. You can mostly avoid both negatives but it won't be your first experience on these platforms.
So IMHO no not yet, but it will get there eventually.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS. I have consistently resisted ever following, or even looking at the profiles of obvious IG thots and yet recently, because my IG account only follows a handful of others and runs out of content quickly, IG has been FILLING my feed with IG models. Not just one, not just a few, like a healthy amount of scrolling is required to get beyond them to other types of sponsored content.
I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I'm sure something I did or revealed has tagged me as "likely to find this content captivating" but I don't and I wish I could flag it as such. My best guess is that because I follow some "BRO" accounts (qualified captain, i70 things, etc) and happen to fall in gender/age pairing where that kind of content is a reliable draw, they'll keep trying.
I mostly maintain my account to follow hobbies and local businesses, but I'm about to shitcan it for the second or third time.
The algorithm has now decided to just show me cute animal stuff for several months, which is fine by me. It's all low-effort and mostly dumb, but it's better than unsolicited butts popping up everywhere when I just want to see what my friends are up to.
Now if I could just fix the scenario where somehow it decides I really like garbage pay-to-play mobile games and shows me _nothing_ but ads for them for days on end.
Lords Mobile
My wife used to use instagram just to look at cat videos and wedding dresses. She wasnt into cars or gym workouts or whiskey or whatever. She's also surprisingly female. Her suggested posts and ads were always just girls with onlyfans accounts. I thinks it's just a matter of what most of the platform offers at this point.
A lot of engineers in SV (and in this forum) think they know better than the users. They think they are so much better than everyone else that they feel a allowing the user to tell them they don't like something is just extra noise that doesn't provide useful information.
User: "Fuck off."
Dev: "No."
User: "Also, I have some feedb--
Dev: "HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLL NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW"
User: "What--"
Dev: /dev/null
I hate it too, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of a nice pair of Tatas, but I don’t need them in my face all day. You have to actively steer your feed away from it by gaming the algorithm harder. If a Thot shows up in your feed, swipe away instantly. Don’t even stop for a second. Then when something comes in that isn’t a thot but engages you, smash that like button so hard the algorithm thinks you’ve got the shakes.
That's the most common issue with MetaZuck - advertisements are riddled with fraud.
Outside of Facebook Local marketplace, they are utterly horrendous.
You can disable badges (in iOS) in notifications separately from the others (that is, allow notifications but not badges).
I found that out because, like you, I require that there is no counter.
I make it a rule to never click on an ad no matter what. On the rare occasion I see any ad at all, if I do see something I think I want, I'll search for it later on my own. That let's me look at reviews, compare other similar items, and it means I'm buying from reputable sources only. Block every ad you can, never click or interact with any ad you can't block (or just haven't blocked yet).
Searching and purchasing the item later can and (often but not always) is fed back to the system so it knows you purchased something you got an ad for.
We cannot avoid being influenced by advertising, and sometimes ads are even useful. It's just a shame that the ad industry has become so corrupt and obsessed with surveillance that the smartest thing is to avoid ads entirely whenever possible.
Also, users don't know how to delete apps off of their phones and have to search.
I suspect my IP address was suspicious to the algorithm, but it's a mobile app on a mobile network so I'm not sure why it's so strict.