Ask HN: Is Instagram “Dying”?

I saw a tweet from a VC that made a point that Facebook used to be the place to go to when you first met a person if you wanted to know more about them, and then Facebook began to become less popular so Instagram became "that" platform but that now it is slowly dying as we see Instagram recommending more IG reels and less things about your friends. So, the VC is saying that there is an opportunity to create something that will become the go to platform to get to know what someone is like. The VC labeled it "profile of records."

My idea is a social app where your profile has different categories, so for example "Relationship", "Travel", etc. In these categories you can upload content based on what the content is about. So if you're traveling, you would post it and have it under your "Traveling" album. The goal would be to allow you to create as many categories as you want and give you the ability to use whichever medium you want to use as your form of expression (video, text, photo, audio).

This would then show what you enjoy, and allow others to also see what you enjoy. You'd be able to compartmentalize whatever content you choose to put out.

Hopefully that makes sense, and I'd love to hear your feedback on this whole discussion. Thanks!

This is the premise for bereal, right?

Sounds a bit contradictory.

Getting to know someone involves getting to know their full self. Part of that is how frequently they post about food or their friends.

Segmenting a user’s personality into categories bifurcates the experience.

"You'd be able to compartmentalize whatever content you choose to put out."

I wish this were mandatory.

On Twitter, when it still made sense to use it (no, it's not about Musk, it sucked by shadowbanning almost everybody who wouldn't pay well before Musk came), several people whom I should really follow for my work basically FORCED ME TO UNFOLLOW THEM, because:

- their work-related tweets were ACTUALLY important for MY job (papers they published, slides from their talks, professional conversations...)

- but they buried them under garbage, meaning every work tweet was lost in 20/30 other tweets about food porn, what movie they were watching, what shirt they got for Christmas, and tons of other totally personal, totally irrelevant shit that was impossible to filter out, all coming as one stream

No matter how relevant their work tweet were, extracting them from that endless drivel just was not worth the time.

Not all HN users interact with Instagram, but thankfully, no one is forcing other users to comment on topics they don't find interesting. It's already gathered 5 votes in an hour, so if you categorize Instagram as not interesting to all of HN, you may need to recalibrate how you judge Instagram users.