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Influencers Are Abandoning the Instagram Look

167 points by cageface 8y ago

igthrowaway 8y ago
So the over-edited atheistic is over, but the fake candid atheistic is in? But the true content stays the same - more beautiful people trying to convince others they need to buy products to become that beautiful. I've used ig since the beginning and it's only getting younger, thinner and more on the nose. A lot of my friends have serious body images because of who they follow (even their own friend circles have a weird competitiveness about it).
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Yeah, two out of five "authentic" pictures showcased have almost the same weird leg-up pose that definitely didn't happen by accident. But I guess authentic is always appreciated, but not something you have free access to if posing for pictures is your job.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Not that I want to encourage the sort of behavior described in the article, but the leg-up bit may just be a case of convergent evolution. The ladies pictures are trying to show off their shoes, which doesn't work well without a leg up if you're taking a selfie.
- tempinsanity 8y ago
  i just see a bunch of sluts. what am i missing?
- megaremote 8y ago
  I think you mean aesthetic, not atheistic, unless you are suggesting that it is due to a change in their beliefs?
- username223 8y ago
  > more beautiful people trying to convince others they need to buy products to become that beautiful. Pretty much, but you can score lots of swag and make a living for a little while. A friend of mine was an "influencer," and it sort of blew my mind how much money and free stuff companies would throw at her. Of course every other aspect of it was utterly toxic, from the need to constantly pose for and post suitable photos, to the relentless positivity in the comments, to the nasty feedback from people who were jealous or judgmental. It's basically just being a small-time celebrity: fun for a little while, but don't try to make a career out of it.
mromanuk 8y ago
Better would be to say: “the Instagram aesthetics is changing”
- switchstance 8y ago
  Are
  - FabHK 8y ago
    aesthetics | iːsˈθɛtɪks, ɛsˈθɛtɪks | (US also esthetics) plural noun [usually treated as singular]
- hi5eyes 8y ago
  more like one part of instagram isnt into the "intagram aesthetic" ig is too big for these clickbaity headlines to represent the entire platform
dvtrn 8y ago
I’m a bona fide by birth member of this generation and I feel lightyears out of touch with it. Or maybe the way it’s described in so much reporting so often just results in an eye roll of complete jaded disinterest and mild cynicism. Makes me ponder sometimes if the phenomenon happens across other generations or if the ever present nature of having everyone’s “stuff” so accessible online merely amplifies this sense of generational malaise.
- symfoniq 8y ago
  I know exactly what you mean.
- rossenberg79 8y ago
  People like you exist in every generation. Each generation has their own term for them. In the past maybe it would have been names like “nerd”, “geek”, “wiener”, “dufus” or “poindexter”, but I’m not sure what they are called today. In any case, people who were members of these minority groups were commonly subjected to teasing or even bullying by the others for not fitting in.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    Most of those names imply other character traits, not just a sense of generational malaise
- misterdoubt 8y ago
  That's pretty typical, because the "generational" stereotypes are nearly entirely nonsense. What percentage of "Generation X" actually went around wearing flannel and rolling their eyes all day? How many Boomers actually wore tie dye every day, smoked pot, and lived in free love communes? Generational characterizations exist solely to sell books, write silly columns, and make older people feel justified when they dismiss and disrespect the younger people.
  - asveikau 8y ago
    > and make older people feel justified I think it's mostly this. Let's not forget though that the generational dismissal sometimes happens in both directions, eg. those tie-dyed boomers cut their hair and voted for Reagan, now they sit around and complain about the young types for not affording a home, unaware of how easy they had it and their role in wrecking the system. (These are a few of the stereotypes anyway.)
golergka 8y ago
So, basically, whatever Balenciaga has been doing for quite a while now started to catch on. Who would've thought
jayd16 8y ago
Seems to me its mostly a case of kids being kids. How many 15 year olds are going to have "hauled DSLR cameras to the beach and mastered photo editing to get the perfect shot." There's the usual counter culture vibe of trying to be different but if you tried for a bad pose with a bad filter that's not any different than trying for what was a "good" photo 5 years ago. tl;dr 80s pop is out. Its all about 90s grunge.
Jhsto 8y ago
> She says wall photos had become boring to her audience anyway, who are more interested in entertaining Instagram Stories than flat photos. So it seems like the goofy Snapchat posts have taken over Instagram walls organically after Stories was introduced. Bad for Snap I guess. To elaborate, Snapchat was all about My Stories, with no way to add still pictures to a wall. Now, look at Balenciaga's Instagram profile, which could as well be snapshots taken mid-Snaps.
md224 8y ago
> In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera, has been downloaded more than 16 million times. “Adding grain to your photos is a big thing now,” says Sonia Uppal, a 20-year-old college student. “People are trying to seem candid. People post a lot of mirror selfies and photos of them lounging around.” What I find interesting is that "making your photos look worse" isn't new at all: it's the foundation of the "vintage" vibe that filters have been emulating since the beginning. So what's actually new here is the kind of imperfections being introduced. It makes sense: as media capture reaches maximum fidelity, creative expression increasingly involves the purposeful choice of infidelities. Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to avoid a natural mistake; for modern digital media, on the other hand, it's about subtracting from perfection rather than failing to reach it. EDIT: Thinking about this further, it's possible that I'm focusing on the wrong thing... perhaps the dominating factor is nostalgia, which just happens to involve "imperfections" in this case because the target of the nostalgia is a medium (photography) which has been undergoing an improvement in fidelity. For all I know, perhaps one day the dominating aesthetic will be driven by nostalgia for "boring" filter-free high-fidelity images!
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to correct a natural mistake The question in art is more along the lines of whether you actually want to reproduce, or if you want to interpret. For the vast majority of all history this was fairly firmly on the "interpret" side of things.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Even reproduction involves a fair amount of interpretation. The same camera will yield very different results depending on the skills and priorities of its user. Framing is especially important.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
Invictus0 8y ago
In the right mindset, this article reads like excellent satire.
- jasonm23 8y ago
  Nathan Barley.
gaoshan 8y ago
So the same cycles of fashion and pop culture continue as they always have. What used to be shiny, colorful and crisp should now be dull, muted and soft. What used to be big should now be small, what used to be soft should now be hard, what used to be refined should now be raw, etc., etc. ad nauseam. One thing we can be sure of, it will be back (before going away again only to return)
keyle 8y ago
What a load of crap. Someone had nothing better to write than a counter argument to a non-argument. Instagram is a good product and it's gotten to where it is now being a good and clever design as is. Making changes for the sake of being hip is what would send it to oblivion, like many competitors have done and fell.
- majos 8y ago
  Since you're just getting downvoted -- the article is arguing that the aesthetic of Instagram photos is changing from manicured tableaux to candids (albeit, it seems, pretty staged candids), not that the platform itself is changing.
  - keyle 8y ago
    ok, thank you for that, I admit I rolled eyes and skimmed that one.
code_duck 8y ago
It is expected to see changes in fashion over time. Pinterest isn’t going to die because peoples’ tastes change, and neither is Instagram. I also expect to see changes in social network. It’s unlikely that Instagram will be on top in 10 years, although it could definitely be another app/network/format owned by Facebook. Anectodally, I’ve only used Instagram to promote my art and to network as a hobby with other people who like photos of desolate abandoned-looking buildings. The usage of people in my network is unlikely to change based on popular tastes.
Theodores 8y ago
Annoying how the article is illustrated with different Instagrammers than those cited in the article. This Instagram thing operates at different levels, I live near a popular photography spot for selfies due to the awesome view. That isn't going to ever become unpopular. However, 5 - 10 years ago you wouldn't have had people doing selfies there with the posing that goes with it. People would have once taken a picture of the view, not a picture of themselves that just so happens to have the view in the back. This is what has changed with Instagram and social media. What was people's outlet for this casual narcissism before?
- mikojan 8y ago
  If you're uploading more landscapes than selfies I'm going to unfollow you. Few people on instagram understand themselves as photographers or visual artists and so the most interesting subject naturally is themselves since they have priority access to that.
davidivadavid 8y ago
That's just another iteration of the pendulum between candid/staged photography. It's basically been going on since the beginning of photography, but the author seems oblivious to that?
- davidivadavid 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism
  - caprese 8y ago
    Interesting, I just realized that I am emulating 1860s pictorialism, instead of 1860s limitations in technology for vintage photos. That's hella meta. But I can also accept being a pictorialist, as much as an impressionist isn't just emulating a vintage style but is subscribing to an entire genre.
dpflan 8y ago
I just noticed this when looking at my tabs: The article title is "The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over". The document's title is "Influencers Are Abandoning the Instagram Look" (`document.title`). The document title seems more informative.
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, changed.
  - dpflan 8y ago
    Ah, thanks. I was mainly pondering why there is a difference.
    - dang 8y ago
      HTML doc titles are often more accurate and neutral than the visible title on a page, so this swap is something we do often. Why is that? I'm not sure. Since it's mostly the big media properties that do this, it's possible the two are written by different people with different goals.
skilled 8y ago
Spending your days to appeal for likes on an imagination-based platform seems a little excessive. A great example of how a platform could be used for something great, but isn't.
- 908087 8y ago
  The best use I've found for it is figuring out which of the people I know are fake, shallow and attention starved... and then avoiding those people.
  - berbec 8y ago
    Cat memes
- TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
  This is literally their job in some cases. Once they have a sufficiently large following they start putting out ads and getting sponsorships. Presumably it's a form of artistic expression, although I cannot claim to truly understand the appeal of their content. There are certainly cases where I could see it becoming a real problem, especially for younger people. However, nothing stops you from using the platform for something great! Be the change you want to see in the world.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  One of my passions is restoring, upgrading and modifying old computers and games consoles. I'm very active on IG sharing pictures of my work - and they're generally not very good pictures! I couldn't care less about likes and followers (I have about 700 followers and my posts typically get less than 100 likes) but I have met a lot of likeminded people on there, bounced ideas off of each other and had lots of inspiration for future projects. My posts have even lead to the odd DM conversation with a minor industry "celebrity" or two - Id Software's John Romero and the British tech journalist Jason Bradbury being two recent examples off the top of my head. I suppose I just wanted to share an example of the platform being used for something other than shameless vanity. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in my weird hobby and there are plenty of others out there. Of course a forum might be a better place to discuss these things, but Instagram is very quick and easy. That said, even in the retro tech circles there are the girls whose feeds are endless poses with their boobs hanging out holding an N64 controller and somehow have millions of followers...
imjk 8y ago
This is the most non-story story I’ve ever read. Instagram has nearly a billion users. So there’s a segment of those users that seems to like a certain aesthetic. Great. There are millions of other users who have other aesthetic preferences.
m3kw9 8y ago
Trends come and go, and here it is
willbw 8y ago
This article has cherry picked these photos, if you look at Emma Chamberlain's instagram for instance you will see many 'typical' instagram photos that you would see on a girl with millions of followers - it's just that they are occasionally interspersed by a silly photo of two. https://www.instagram.com/_emmachamberlain https://www.instagram.com/_emmachamberlain There's nothing wrong with that this of course, I have no problem with people posting whatever they want. I just think the article is overstating the shift in content.
- mattlondon 8y ago
  Yep - just took a look and there is a lot of stuff there that is clearly staged and not at all "candid". Like she is sitting on a basket ball net 10ft in the air in perfect lighting from 3 separate angles, followed by another post of her and someone else wearing matching outfits and doing that vapid mouth-slightly-open distant-stare pose (again from multiple angles). So candid. #nofilter. It's fine - I've not got a problem with someone wanting to have their photo taken. But trying to pass that off as anything different than what has gone before seems disengenius. Sure, perhaps the style of photos have changed, but then styles and fashions have always changed in everything from clothes and houses through to pets and holidays.
FrozenVoid 8y ago
They are trying to be authenthic and natural, because the "Instagram influencer" became a cultural trope thats too easily recognized(a polished walking ad): they are pretending to be indie, quirky and non-mainstream - capturing the DiY aesthethic to use as prop to establish their "common man" persona.
tmaly 8y ago
I started on Instagram back in 2012 doing the daily photo competition with my DSLR. I lost interest after a while. Reading this article, I cannot believe the platform has turned into that.
- asdff 8y ago
  It really hasn't, it's just one corner of it. Binned away by hashtags. The photography community is still absolutely massive. Memes are probably the biggest sector by %. Personally I only follow people I know and nat geo, so I only see these when I accidentally slip my thumb and tap one in the search page.
Gatsky 8y ago
This article, its protagonists and the whole influencer-industrial complex is the height of vacuity.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
There's definitely a niche waiting to be filled by AI-generated Instagram influencers. #thisinfluencerdoesnotexist
- PebblesRox 8y ago
  It’s already happening: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automated-instagram-influencer-bot-free-meals https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automat...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
p0nce 8y ago
Marketing that pose as authentic is in fashion (I mean this in a Out of Topic way, no relationship with Instagram). In my segment "technical" arguments that present easy-to-believe falsehoods win customers.
JDiculous 8y ago
This article feels like an advertisement for Emma Chamberlain. This whole "influencer" IG culture is like fast food - no content or substance. It does seem like we may be hitting some kind of peak as people realize that devoting one's time to following random strangers' vain photos on the internet doesn't actually increase one's well-being.
- rezeroed 8y ago
  Absolutely. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, and average Joe is a self-anointed so-called life coach, fitness and nutrition expert, relationship expert, financial expert. I don't use instagram but twitter is crawling with these mediocre poseurs.
- basetop 8y ago
  It's not just the "influencers". It's the entire media system. 99.99% of traditional media and social media are just fillers with no substance or value. And we are nowhere close to peak. Look at the hysteria developing on traditional media and social media for the pending "royal" birth. But then again, who am I to judge. I'm on a social media complaining about social media.
  - kabacha 8y ago
    > 99.99% of traditional media and social media are just fillers with no substance or value. I absolutely and completely disagree with you here. 99.99% media is filler? Just look over the things you read through out the day and tell me it doesn't have more substance than a picture of a girl in an obscure outfit captioned "it's cold outside today". Today I read about game of thrones theories about newest episode, read news about a terrorist being stopped in France, upcoming events in my town, checking what people selling on facebook market and what's the current employment state in crypto world etc. etc. I can actually explain substance and value in all of these posts. Can you explain value in the instagram post? Other than some questionable social-well-being-acceptance pseudo-science? To claim that 99.99% of all media and social media is like the absolutely absurd instagram influencer posts is just completely and utterly silly.
  - 8y ago
coldcode 8y ago
Maybe I am missing something, but what is an "influencer" really? Last I remember these were called advertisers.
gdubs 8y ago
Trends are cyclical. Something is cool until everyone else does it. Then, kids are rocking Steely Dan again and dressing like extras from Seinfeld. What’s interesting here is how the physical world has been changed by the digital world. You can’t just stick that instagramable bathroom in the back of the closet like it’s a paisley tie. But I have to agree with the comment that this feels like an ad for Emma Chamberlain, who doesn’t exactly need it, because every other post in my feed is from an Emma fan account.
taternuts 8y ago
To be honest, I can't really tell much of a difference between the examples they list in the article vs. the usual influencer.
infinitezest 8y ago
I'm confused... Huji Cam looks like a rehash of the filters that have been available in IG for it's entire existence. And hasn't the "faux-fi" thing been super hip for like... over a decade now? Granted, hyper-staged photos have also been pretty popular over the last few years but I never thought the "new" style outlined in the article really went out of style.

167 points by cageface 8y ago

So the over-edited atheistic is over, but the fake candid atheistic is in? But the true content stays the same - more beautiful people trying to convince others they need to buy products to become that beautiful. I've used ig since the beginning and it's only getting younger, thinner and more on the nose. A lot of my friends have serious body images because of who they follow (even their own friend circles have a weird competitiveness about it).

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Yeah, two out of five "authentic" pictures showcased have almost the same weird leg-up pose that definitely didn't happen by accident. But I guess authentic is always appreciated, but not something you have free access to if posing for pictures is your job.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  Not that I want to encourage the sort of behavior described in the article, but the leg-up bit may just be a case of convergent evolution. The ladies pictures are trying to show off their shoes, which doesn't work well without a leg up if you're taking a selfie.
tempinsanity 8y ago
i just see a bunch of sluts. what am i missing?
megaremote 8y ago
I think you mean aesthetic, not atheistic, unless you are suggesting that it is due to a change in their beliefs?
username223 8y ago
> more beautiful people trying to convince others they need to buy products to become that beautiful. Pretty much, but you can score lots of swag and make a living for a little while. A friend of mine was an "influencer," and it sort of blew my mind how much money and free stuff companies would throw at her. Of course every other aspect of it was utterly toxic, from the need to constantly pose for and post suitable photos, to the relentless positivity in the comments, to the nasty feedback from people who were jealous or judgmental. It's basically just being a small-time celebrity: fun for a little while, but don't try to make a career out of it.

mromanuk 8y ago

Better would be to say: “the Instagram aesthetics is changing”

switchstance 8y ago
Are
- FabHK 8y ago
  aesthetics | iːsˈθɛtɪks, ɛsˈθɛtɪks | (US also esthetics) plural noun [usually treated as singular]
hi5eyes 8y ago
more like one part of instagram isnt into the "intagram aesthetic" ig is too big for these clickbaity headlines to represent the entire platform

dvtrn 8y ago

I’m a bona fide by birth member of this generation and I feel lightyears out of touch with it. Or maybe the way it’s described in so much reporting so often just results in an eye roll of complete jaded disinterest and mild cynicism. Makes me ponder sometimes if the phenomenon happens across other generations or if the ever present nature of having everyone’s “stuff” so accessible online merely amplifies this sense of generational malaise.

symfoniq 8y ago
I know exactly what you mean.
rossenberg79 8y ago
People like you exist in every generation. Each generation has their own term for them. In the past maybe it would have been names like “nerd”, “geek”, “wiener”, “dufus” or “poindexter”, but I’m not sure what they are called today. In any case, people who were members of these minority groups were commonly subjected to teasing or even bullying by the others for not fitting in.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  Most of those names imply other character traits, not just a sense of generational malaise
misterdoubt 8y ago
That's pretty typical, because the "generational" stereotypes are nearly entirely nonsense. What percentage of "Generation X" actually went around wearing flannel and rolling their eyes all day? How many Boomers actually wore tie dye every day, smoked pot, and lived in free love communes? Generational characterizations exist solely to sell books, write silly columns, and make older people feel justified when they dismiss and disrespect the younger people.
- asveikau 8y ago
  > and make older people feel justified I think it's mostly this. Let's not forget though that the generational dismissal sometimes happens in both directions, eg. those tie-dyed boomers cut their hair and voted for Reagan, now they sit around and complain about the young types for not affording a home, unaware of how easy they had it and their role in wrecking the system. (These are a few of the stereotypes anyway.)

golergka 8y ago

So, basically, whatever Balenciaga has been doing for quite a while now started to catch on. Who would've thought

jayd16 8y ago

Seems to me its mostly a case of kids being kids. How many 15 year olds are going to have "hauled DSLR cameras to the beach and mastered photo editing to get the perfect shot." There's the usual counter culture vibe of trying to be different but if you tried for a bad pose with a bad filter that's not any different than trying for what was a "good" photo 5 years ago. tl;dr 80s pop is out. Its all about 90s grunge.

Jhsto 8y ago

> She says wall photos had become boring to her audience anyway, who are more interested in entertaining Instagram Stories than flat photos. So it seems like the goofy Snapchat posts have taken over Instagram walls organically after Stories was introduced. Bad for Snap I guess. To elaborate, Snapchat was all about My Stories, with no way to add still pictures to a wall. Now, look at Balenciaga's Instagram profile, which could as well be snapshots taken mid-Snaps.

md224 8y ago

> In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera, has been downloaded more than 16 million times. “Adding grain to your photos is a big thing now,” says Sonia Uppal, a 20-year-old college student. “People are trying to seem candid. People post a lot of mirror selfies and photos of them lounging around.” What I find interesting is that "making your photos look worse" isn't new at all: it's the foundation of the "vintage" vibe that filters have been emulating since the beginning. So what's actually new here is the kind of imperfections being introduced. It makes sense: as media capture reaches maximum fidelity, creative expression increasingly involves the purposeful choice of infidelities. Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to avoid a natural mistake; for modern digital media, on the other hand, it's about subtracting from perfection rather than failing to reach it. EDIT: Thinking about this further, it's possible that I'm focusing on the wrong thing... perhaps the dominating factor is nostalgia, which just happens to involve "imperfections" in this case because the target of the nostalgia is a medium (photography) which has been undergoing an improvement in fidelity. For all I know, perhaps one day the dominating aesthetic will be driven by nostalgia for "boring" filter-free high-fidelity images!

blattimwind 8y ago
> Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to correct a natural mistake The question in art is more along the lines of whether you actually want to reproduce, or if you want to interpret. For the vast majority of all history this was fairly firmly on the "interpret" side of things.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  Even reproduction involves a fair amount of interpretation. The same camera will yield very different results depending on the skills and priorities of its user. Framing is especially important.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

Invictus0 8y ago

In the right mindset, this article reads like excellent satire.

jasonm23 8y ago
Nathan Barley.

gaoshan 8y ago

So the same cycles of fashion and pop culture continue as they always have. What used to be shiny, colorful and crisp should now be dull, muted and soft. What used to be big should now be small, what used to be soft should now be hard, what used to be refined should now be raw, etc., etc. ad nauseam. One thing we can be sure of, it will be back (before going away again only to return)

keyle 8y ago

What a load of crap. Someone had nothing better to write than a counter argument to a non-argument. Instagram is a good product and it's gotten to where it is now being a good and clever design as is. Making changes for the sake of being hip is what would send it to oblivion, like many competitors have done and fell.

majos 8y ago
Since you're just getting downvoted -- the article is arguing that the aesthetic of Instagram photos is changing from manicured tableaux to candids (albeit, it seems, pretty staged candids), not that the platform itself is changing.
- keyle 8y ago
  ok, thank you for that, I admit I rolled eyes and skimmed that one.

code_duck 8y ago

It is expected to see changes in fashion over time. Pinterest isn’t going to die because peoples’ tastes change, and neither is Instagram. I also expect to see changes in social network. It’s unlikely that Instagram will be on top in 10 years, although it could definitely be another app/network/format owned by Facebook. Anectodally, I’ve only used Instagram to promote my art and to network as a hobby with other people who like photos of desolate abandoned-looking buildings. The usage of people in my network is unlikely to change based on popular tastes.

Theodores 8y ago

Annoying how the article is illustrated with different Instagrammers than those cited in the article. This Instagram thing operates at different levels, I live near a popular photography spot for selfies due to the awesome view. That isn't going to ever become unpopular. However, 5 - 10 years ago you wouldn't have had people doing selfies there with the posing that goes with it. People would have once taken a picture of the view, not a picture of themselves that just so happens to have the view in the back. This is what has changed with Instagram and social media. What was people's outlet for this casual narcissism before?

mikojan 8y ago
If you're uploading more landscapes than selfies I'm going to unfollow you. Few people on instagram understand themselves as photographers or visual artists and so the most interesting subject naturally is themselves since they have priority access to that.

davidivadavid 8y ago

That's just another iteration of the pendulum between candid/staged photography. It's basically been going on since the beginning of photography, but the author seems oblivious to that?

davidivadavid 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism
- caprese 8y ago
  Interesting, I just realized that I am emulating 1860s pictorialism, instead of 1860s limitations in technology for vintage photos. That's hella meta. But I can also accept being a pictorialist, as much as an impressionist isn't just emulating a vintage style but is subscribing to an entire genre.

dpflan 8y ago

I just noticed this when looking at my tabs: The article title is "The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over". The document's title is "Influencers Are Abandoning the Instagram Look" (`document.title`). The document title seems more informative.

dang 8y ago
Ok, changed.
- dpflan 8y ago
  Ah, thanks. I was mainly pondering why there is a difference.
  - dang 8y ago
    HTML doc titles are often more accurate and neutral than the visible title on a page, so this swap is something we do often. Why is that? I'm not sure. Since it's mostly the big media properties that do this, it's possible the two are written by different people with different goals.

skilled 8y ago

Spending your days to appeal for likes on an imagination-based platform seems a little excessive. A great example of how a platform could be used for something great, but isn't.

908087 8y ago
The best use I've found for it is figuring out which of the people I know are fake, shallow and attention starved... and then avoiding those people.
- berbec 8y ago
  Cat memes
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
This is literally their job in some cases. Once they have a sufficiently large following they start putting out ads and getting sponsorships. Presumably it's a form of artistic expression, although I cannot claim to truly understand the appeal of their content. There are certainly cases where I could see it becoming a real problem, especially for younger people. However, nothing stops you from using the platform for something great! Be the change you want to see in the world.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
One of my passions is restoring, upgrading and modifying old computers and games consoles. I'm very active on IG sharing pictures of my work - and they're generally not very good pictures! I couldn't care less about likes and followers (I have about 700 followers and my posts typically get less than 100 likes) but I have met a lot of likeminded people on there, bounced ideas off of each other and had lots of inspiration for future projects. My posts have even lead to the odd DM conversation with a minor industry "celebrity" or two - Id Software's John Romero and the British tech journalist Jason Bradbury being two recent examples off the top of my head. I suppose I just wanted to share an example of the platform being used for something other than shameless vanity. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in my weird hobby and there are plenty of others out there. Of course a forum might be a better place to discuss these things, but Instagram is very quick and easy. That said, even in the retro tech circles there are the girls whose feeds are endless poses with their boobs hanging out holding an N64 controller and somehow have millions of followers...

imjk 8y ago

This is the most non-story story I’ve ever read. Instagram has nearly a billion users. So there’s a segment of those users that seems to like a certain aesthetic. Great. There are millions of other users who have other aesthetic preferences.

m3kw9 8y ago

Trends come and go, and here it is

willbw 8y ago

This article has cherry picked these photos, if you look at Emma Chamberlain's instagram for instance you will see many 'typical' instagram photos that you would see on a girl with millions of followers - it's just that they are occasionally interspersed by a silly photo of two. https://www.instagram.com/_emmachamberlain https://www.instagram.com/_emmachamberlain There's nothing wrong with that this of course, I have no problem with people posting whatever they want. I just think the article is overstating the shift in content.

mattlondon 8y ago
Yep - just took a look and there is a lot of stuff there that is clearly staged and not at all "candid". Like she is sitting on a basket ball net 10ft in the air in perfect lighting from 3 separate angles, followed by another post of her and someone else wearing matching outfits and doing that vapid mouth-slightly-open distant-stare pose (again from multiple angles). So candid. #nofilter. It's fine - I've not got a problem with someone wanting to have their photo taken. But trying to pass that off as anything different than what has gone before seems disengenius. Sure, perhaps the style of photos have changed, but then styles and fashions have always changed in everything from clothes and houses through to pets and holidays.

FrozenVoid 8y ago

They are trying to be authenthic and natural, because the "Instagram influencer" became a cultural trope thats too easily recognized(a polished walking ad): they are pretending to be indie, quirky and non-mainstream - capturing the DiY aesthethic to use as prop to establish their "common man" persona.

tmaly 8y ago

I started on Instagram back in 2012 doing the daily photo competition with my DSLR. I lost interest after a while. Reading this article, I cannot believe the platform has turned into that.

asdff 8y ago
It really hasn't, it's just one corner of it. Binned away by hashtags. The photography community is still absolutely massive. Memes are probably the biggest sector by %. Personally I only follow people I know and nat geo, so I only see these when I accidentally slip my thumb and tap one in the search page.

Gatsky 8y ago

This article, its protagonists and the whole influencer-industrial complex is the height of vacuity.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

There's definitely a niche waiting to be filled by AI-generated Instagram influencers. #thisinfluencerdoesnotexist

PebblesRox 8y ago
It’s already happening: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automated-instagram-influencer-bot-free-meals https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automat...

deleted 8y ago

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p0nce 8y ago

Marketing that pose as authentic is in fashion (I mean this in a Out of Topic way, no relationship with Instagram). In my segment "technical" arguments that present easy-to-believe falsehoods win customers.

JDiculous 8y ago

This article feels like an advertisement for Emma Chamberlain. This whole "influencer" IG culture is like fast food - no content or substance. It does seem like we may be hitting some kind of peak as people realize that devoting one's time to following random strangers' vain photos on the internet doesn't actually increase one's well-being.

rezeroed 8y ago
Absolutely. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, and average Joe is a self-anointed so-called life coach, fitness and nutrition expert, relationship expert, financial expert. I don't use instagram but twitter is crawling with these mediocre poseurs.
basetop 8y ago
It's not just the "influencers". It's the entire media system. 99.99% of traditional media and social media are just fillers with no substance or value. And we are nowhere close to peak. Look at the hysteria developing on traditional media and social media for the pending "royal" birth. But then again, who am I to judge. I'm on a social media complaining about social media.
- kabacha 8y ago
  > 99.99% of traditional media and social media are just fillers with no substance or value. I absolutely and completely disagree with you here. 99.99% media is filler? Just look over the things you read through out the day and tell me it doesn't have more substance than a picture of a girl in an obscure outfit captioned "it's cold outside today". Today I read about game of thrones theories about newest episode, read news about a terrorist being stopped in France, upcoming events in my town, checking what people selling on facebook market and what's the current employment state in crypto world etc. etc. I can actually explain substance and value in all of these posts. Can you explain value in the instagram post? Other than some questionable social-well-being-acceptance pseudo-science? To claim that 99.99% of all media and social media is like the absolutely absurd instagram influencer posts is just completely and utterly silly.
- 8y ago

coldcode 8y ago

Maybe I am missing something, but what is an "influencer" really? Last I remember these were called advertisers.

gdubs 8y ago

Trends are cyclical. Something is cool until everyone else does it. Then, kids are rocking Steely Dan again and dressing like extras from Seinfeld. What’s interesting here is how the physical world has been changed by the digital world. You can’t just stick that instagramable bathroom in the back of the closet like it’s a paisley tie. But I have to agree with the comment that this feels like an ad for Emma Chamberlain, who doesn’t exactly need it, because every other post in my feed is from an Emma fan account.

taternuts 8y ago

To be honest, I can't really tell much of a difference between the examples they list in the article vs. the usual influencer.

infinitezest 8y ago

I'm confused... Huji Cam looks like a rehash of the filters that have been available in IG for it's entire existence. And hasn't the "faux-fi" thing been super hip for like... over a decade now? Granted, hyper-staged photos have also been pretty popular over the last few years but I never thought the "new" style outlined in the article really went out of style.