“Two big things happened in 2016. First, there were the changes to the feed. Algorithmic. Well, all right. Then, the Snapchat imitation: the Story. It was whatever. I didn’t mind it. After a while, I stopped posting photos in favour of posting Stories because more people looked at the Stories. There started to be more ads clogging the Stories, so I stopped watching as many. And I stopped posting photos or Stories as often.”
“Then came the ham-fisted video stuff: IGTV, which I avoided as much as I could, and the TikTok imitation Reels, which were much more difficult to avoid. This is where the algorithmic feed really bit people.”
An interesting article and it helps summarise why in the last week it seems it is just getting too much for people. What made Instagram originally great (when I started using it before Facebook bought it) has seemed to have been pushed out of the way. Many younger users have long moved to TikTok and other platforms, and I suppose this is why Instagram is trying to turn itself into a TikTok.
Commercial interests and the greed for money and the advertising that drives that, is what pushes all these changes. It’s no wonder that decentralised -ad-free alternatives like PixelFed are getting strong growth spurts every time these changes happen. But largely it’s the celebrities that either hold everyone back on a platform, or entice them to move. Hopefully the celebrities actually stay off the likes of PixelFed and Mastodon, as I fear that the advertisers and hoards will try to spoil those platforms too.
It would be interesting to see how the alternative decentralised platforms survive such influxes, but maybe the fact that you can switch hosting instances without having to leave the network, will keep competitiveness alive as there is no walled garden lock-in.
See https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/26/23279815/instagram-feed-kardashians-criticism-fuck-it-im-out
#technology #instagram #deletefacebook #socialmedia