If the author is reading HN, please add something like this: p { line-height: 25px; } The text is hard to read from being so bunched together.
I am reading this, and yes I will do that! Thanks for letting me know
Instagram has turned us against ourselves
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#22My dopamine response system has apparently never bought into the idea that likes actually determine my value in any way. I seem just use them to see what specific friends or colleagues are interested in and invite them for a specific activity. Vegetarian? Invite them for pizza not a BBQ. Outdoorsy? See if they want to go skiing or hiking some time. Based on what I see and hear I feel pretty lucky.
If you are actually using likes as useful data points for meaningful action you are way ahead of most people. To me, and I imagine many others, likes are just a passive acknowledgement of popularity with only wafer thin meaning. Not doing anything with those likes is part of what makes them such a problem and one of many reasons I avoid social media.
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#23I see the reasoning, but I don't think it's necessarily true. Look at someone like Joe Rogan, who has millions of followers but a fairly eclectic mix of content and no one thing that defines what he does (interviewer, commentator, hiker, traveler, hunter, MMA enthusiast, fitness and "nutrition" advocate, etc).
Come to think of it, most of the famous people I follow post random content as well, like musician Ola Englund posting funny videos of his kids or UFC fighter Derrick Lewis posting almost nothing UFC or fighting related. If anything, the unexpected content makes a person MORE worth following because it's not just generic self-promotion the whole time.
It's a mixed bag, and the author definitely has some warrant for concern, but I think it's overblown.
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#24If you are "working on your personal brand" or whatever... sure. I just post pictures of stuff I do, and my friends see it. The end. I don't care at all about "getting engagements"
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#25> People are reduced to a single identity You can have multiple accounts and the Instagram UI makes it easy to switch. You can click the name of the account and a drop down appears. You then click the account you want to use and it immediately switches you without any hassles. Most people I know (18-28 demographic) have several accounts. I own a reptile and my main account is reptile posting along with some nature ph…
Most kids I know have one or more finsta accounts plus a "real" one that they let their family follow.
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#26Set your profile to private and stop giving a shit about engagement. If you're selling something, great, make a themed profile and increase your follower count with as many #hashtags as you can cram into that comment section. If you're using it socially, post about your life and chill out on measures of popularity. I do strongly agree with the idea that we need a better way to reach out to our friends. Posting a phot…
I think the same thing. I got tired of just liking pictures on IG.
I created a side project which sends me email reminders for friends I want to keep in touch with, but are not in my everyday, close circle. Every email has a direct link to Whatsapp, which opens directly into my friend's chat with a pre-set message('Hi!'). It helped me reconnect and start real conversations beyond double tapping a picture.
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#27Counterpoint: IG allows you to curate an online photo album about yourself and either broadcast it to the world or distribute it to a permissioned list, and this has significant value for many people.
It also has intrinsic negative value for many, in the way outlined by the author (and also described by the seminal Wait but Why post [0]). People see their friends posting snapshots of their nominally awesome lives and feel pressure to keep up, and basically everyone makes each other more miserable by generating FOMO in others, etc.
I'm not saying that this sehnsucht-generation isn't real, or that it doesn't mess some people up -- it is and it does. But if we're judging IG on its overall merits the downside has to be weighed against the fact that IG helps people learn about each other through a pretty elegant interface -- right?
Also, the author seems to be eliding the differences between a) best practices for building and monetizing an IG following as an influencer with a public-facing account and b) the general stress of 'keeping up with' your college classmates:
> We can talk about free or paid apps, ads or donations, we can talk about tipping and buy me a coffee, or patreon subscriptions. We can talk about all of that, or we can get to the heart of what really matters. Things that are easy to do, aren't always the best things for us.
By my reading, in this passage he is conflating the measures IG influencers take to help themselves make money on Instagram with the stress and angst that IG users who are not trying to make a living off of IG posts feel with respect to keeping up with their high school classmates and whatnot. Seems like a pretty clear category-mistake to me.
[0]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#28Counterpoint: IG allows you to curate an online photo album about yourself and either broadcast it to the world or distribute it to a permissioned list, and this has significant value for many people. It also has intrinsic negative value for many, in the way outlined by the author (and also described by the seminal Wait but Why post [0]). People see their friends posting snapshots of their nominally awesome lives and…
I've never heard of waitbutwhy, wow this site is amazing.
You're right. I was conflating influencers together with regular users.
I guess I don't usually separate them when I rant about IG, I rant about it quite a bit. It would be nice if it was all IG ads and regular users or if influencers were marked as such… maybe.
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#29> People are reduced to a single identity You can have multiple accounts and the Instagram UI makes it easy to switch. You can click the name of the account and a drop down appears. You then click the account you want to use and it immediately switches you without any hassles. Most people I know (18-28 demographic) have several accounts. I own a reptile and my main account is reptile posting along with some nature ph…
Most kids I know have one or more finsta accounts plus a "real" one that they let their family follow.
Exactly. It's so common that there's even lingo around it. Finsta and Rinsta. Fake instagram account / real instagram account.
Re: Instagram has turned us against ourselves
#30I don't care about how many likes or how many followers I get. I use Instagram to share my photography which is my hobby. I only follow my friends and people whose posts I genuinely want to see. Through Instagram I've been able to connect with other likeminded photographers that inspire me with their work and support me in mine. I also find it a great way to keep up with old friends that never used Facebook in the sa…
This is true, I probably have a deeper underlying problem, but IG definitely wasn't helping me.
I guess the problem is that they actively try to addict you to get you to use the app more, you may have a stronger mental fortitude than I do, which is why you don't succumb to this.
If it were just a photography app like 500px, things would be a little different, since it's social, a lot of things get conflated that shouldn't.