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This is why algorithmic based curation/display of content is a bad thing, it can be gamed. Show me the accounts I follow in chronological order and the only way
by leejo 8y ago
This is why algorithmic based curation/display of content is a bad thing, it can be gamed. Show me the accounts I follow in chronological order and the only way it can be gamed is if those accounts continually post over and over again to push their content to be the most recent - and that's easy to fix: limit the number of posts to one per hour.
As a photographer Instagram is pretty much over as a platform for me, there is very little content on there now I would call "photographic" other than a few accounts I follow, but those are shown out of order and with ads mixed in-between. The explore page has become a mass of memes, "viral" videos, half naked women, spam, reposts from reddit, reposts of other reposts, and so on. I can see the same content multiple times on the explore page, reposted over and over. I recently unfollowed most of the accounts to put an end to the "such and such liked this so we will show it to you" as well.
And of course, as per the article, you have a massive amount of accounts that are liking and following to try to get followers in return. Some of these are more obvious than others. If you use Tinder you'll have seen an increasing trend of matches wanting you to follow them on Instagram, because they want to up their follower count.
All that said, I'm guilty of this too. I have a personal Instagram account that I do very little with[1], but also an account for the gallery I volunteer at[2] to try to spread the word to people in the area - I have a script that will like + follow anyone that posts to Instagram with tags and/or a location in the village. This script has been running once a day for about 6 months, and I believe it has brought some people into the gallery.
I also run an events page on Instagram[3] with a script that will like + follow any content tagged with various programming related keywords. Looking at some of the accounts it's followed (or have followed us back) it's bizarre - you can see accounts in which the content is just someone posting images of their laptop once a day and they have follower counts in the tens of thousands.
Anyway, it feels as if Instagram is at a tipping point. It's no longer a platform for photography but now a platform for driving traffic to other businesses. I'd give it another year or two before it collapses in on itself or they do a root and branch purge of all the spam, which probably won't happen as long as it is driving revenue to Instagram/Facebook itself.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/leejebay/ https://www.instagram.com/leejebay/
[2] https://www.instagram.com/galeriealpine/ https://www.instagram.com/galeriealpine/
[3] https://www.instagram.com/perl_events/ https://www.instagram.com/perl_events/
- iClaudiusX 8y agoWhat you described sounds exactly like the arc of Facebook, only forced to its natural conclusion at a much faster pace. FB started as a network for college students. Then once it expanded to the general public it turned into a gold rush of businesses trying to grab attention. FB slowly turned into the AOL of its day--a captive portal where people largely ignored the rest of the web. Why check the news on a publisher's site when I can just scan headlines while waiting for my friends' updates? I remember a time before every website decided they needed a Twitter/Facebook button, before coffee cups were plastered with those app icons next to the store's brand. The whole thing seemed strange and desperate as it was happening. Now the lag between "cool new social medium" to "spam/meme repository" is fast enough that I don't even have to bother. Anything fun and user-focused on the web ends up getting bought and repurposed to serve ads.
- salsadip 8y ago> The explore page has become a mass of memes, "viral" videos, half naked women, spam, reposts from reddit, reposts of other reposts, and so on. You can heavily influence what you see in the discover view, and I do so regularly to get more photography related content. View the content that annoys you, click on the three dots in the upper right and then tap ~"view less of this" (only loosely translated, don't know what it says exactly). Do this for 15 posts that you don't want to see, view and like the few photography related posts that you wanna see more of and this will completely change what kind of content you will get! Takes about maybe 3 sessions of doing this for seeing greatly improved results. The algorithm learns to give you posts which you give attention to, so try to avoid looking at memes etc; I have the same problem and with some time and me giving some attention to memes again brings more of them back - so rinse and repeat. You can actually use this to influence quite specifically what you want to see - from time to time I pick a specific theme of photography I want to discover (i.e. black and white photography with lots of elevated blacks), only like those kind of pictures in the discover view and definitely start getting way more of these kinds as a result. You can absolutely create your own bubble, you just have to tell Instagram what you wanna see.
- nasredin 8y agoI wonder if future archeologists will think "like" and "follow" and "subscribe" are some kind of (useless) currency. 21st century Tulip Mania.