Counterpoint: 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 thi

Counterpoint: 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-unhappy.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...