8 ms·

Instagram Morphs into an Information Powerhouse

65 points by elsewhen 6y ago

iamkroot 6y ago
> Instagrams doesn't have a traditional share button to drive virality like other major social networks. And that's a big reason why it's the only social networking app I still have on my phone. Please never change, Instagram!
Melting_Harps 6y ago
I don't use IG, nor any social media, and I have never had a desire to do so but this statement underscores just how overtly and far reaching the term 'activism' is used these days: > And then in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's killings, it was primed not just for information, but activism. Spamming peoples feeds or posts with your rants is hardly activism, it's easily ignored/filtered is and never as impactful as if you actually got active on the ground because you will NEVER get a true grasp of the situation behind a keyboard--these situations are often wrought with confusion. This is my main gripe with the so-called SJW forms of 'activism,' whose main form of action is bringing about 'awareness' on social media platforms and engaging in never-ending feuds Online that amount to nothing than a waste of time and energy. And then if they do attend in person refuse to engage with the parties they oppose in open discourse and will seek to 'cancel' the other side. This has had so many dire implications, be it in academia to other things like actors and their career prospects. It's hard for me to think that people honestly think that posting about an issue is as valid as actually being on the ground and involved in the process in order to try and (ideally) come up with alternative solutions to the problems they're trying to solve with those who have also come out to manifest. In this case Police Brutality, that as unpopular as it might seem is not solely limited to just the Black Community, but has been pervasive and incredibly outward in heavy-handedness since 9-11 under these false pretenses of Terrorism. People seem to forget that during the Occupy movement the same amount of violence was being used against what were mainly a white, college educated, (lower to mid) middle class cohort. They, too were deemed terrorist groups and cells for dissent and were infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. [1] And while I'm glad many people finally saw this for what it is, as this time Police violence was used against journalists and innocent bystanders alike, and in the case with Portland and Seattle you have unmarked vehicles essentially kidnapping people, you get a real taste what activists of all leanings have seen all along. I hardly see what some celebrity posting on IG with a sign has to do with activism. Moreover, we saw how quickly they are to retract it if they face scrutiny, during the HK's National Security Law limbo Billie Eilish tweeted out a message in support of HK, only to remove it moments later when the Wumao Army came down on her and she saw some backlash, showing just how feckless and entirely pointless these kind of affairs really are for even 'influencers.' 1: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Awareness does matter, as does agreement in the same set of facts. And sadly most people, celebrities or not, do not have the time for the deeper activism you talk about and usually do not have the same mental model of what the problem is if it exists at all. And having gone through that activism in the UK back in day, from grassroots meetings to media and then advocacy to policy makers, what really really helps is a movement - ordinary people making a noise. And a noise on twitter is heard in the corridors of power today (tomorrow it may change.) So if you want something to change at a local or national level, social media is a big part of your arsenal (but I agree not the whole part)
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > And a noise on twitter is heard in the corridors of power today (tomorrow it may change.) And is listened by who? Other social media users who are equally as unlikely to get involved? This is what happened during the Blueleaks drop in my opinion. Moreover, what is the turn-around in the news-cycle today for even 'newsworthy' events, especially when calamity and Rage are the plats du jour by the Media and served by the 100s a day. I highly doubt you can attribute seeing police budgets get slashed if it weren't for the mass protests, and rioting in the US and the wide-spread violence we saw that followed. Claiming that Social Media's role to be anything but act as a source of the real-time video footage of these events would be really over-reaching its impact. I mean even now, as Portland has removed DHS officers, what can you say the Social Media crowds did to ensure that occurred, because it was mainly a collective of present Human will that did that from what I've seen. I'm open to be convinced, mind you, as I think IF Social Media could fulfill its potential it could be a very useful tool in Activism, instead it just seems like another apparatus of the Panopticon. Which if they can infiltrate a Telegram channel [1], just imagine what they can do on open non-encrypted mediums like Facebook/IG etc... 1: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-dhs-intelligence-report-showed-the-department-had-collected-and-analyzed-messages-between-portland-protesters-a-new-report-says/ar-BB17qOUb?li=BBnb7Kz https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-dhs-intelligence-report-...
    - site-packages1 6y ago
agumonkey 6y ago
It's funny how fads + web = information now. It used to be a transient thing, now it's stored and analysed ad nauseam (I suppose).
roystonvassey 6y ago
I was invested heavily in Instagram as my active social media fix for two years. This was spurred by a comment on HN and similar to what is mentioned here - it was deemed to be a fun, positive and happy virtual party. And it was. For a while. Soon enough, the advertisements and the activism took over. People only posted in Stories, and the inevitable race-to-the-bottom to have the highest followers/likes took over. A friend, who ran fitness gigs on the side, told me how a top branded sports marketer were willing to sponsor his shoes for a certain number of follows and likes on his post, with their brand mentions. Somehow all these appears to be a perverted, caricature of an idealistic life. I got sick of it and i haven’t used it since the beginning of this year. I understand that as I grow older, part of this is feeded by cynicism of having seen similar patterns in the past, starting with IRC chat rooms to whatever is the trend this year. But, the in-your-face commercialisation and incentives for users to keep generating content forever all appears very dystopian to me.
- iamkroot 6y ago
  I only use a third party app to browse Instagram, which both blocks advertisements and stories. I keep the main app on my phone and only use it to create posts of my own. Whenever I open it I'm amazed at the sheer quantity of nonsense that's hurled at the user. I have no idea how people can put up with it.
  - Ruthalas 6y ago
    What third party app do you use, if you don't mind sharing?
    - iamkroot 6y ago
      Friendly for Instagram: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.friendly.instagram https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.friendly.in...
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      I can’t say for sure what OP meant; I know there are Instagram+ type apps on iOS and Android. There’s also this: https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram
mikequinlan 6y ago
I used to think that Twitter's 144-character tweets were the worst possible way to present information. Instagram's `pictures of text` show that it is possible to get even worse.
imglorp 6y ago
Did they just go login only, to see content? No very powerful for me. Also, maybe someone can explain to me why IG displays so much hate for the user through the UX? - Fixed res images. If you dive into the JS, the full resolution is actually present, but the UI scales it tiny with no way to see more. It's almost harder to hide this than to just allow it. - Similarly video. No controls, can't pause or scrub or gosh forbid, closed captions.
- kccqzy 6y ago
  It's an "experience" designed by designers, not a power user tool.
  - site-packages1 6y ago
    Yeah, I really have to agree with this. Working with designers and PMs in my day job makes it clear that there's an experience put together on Instagram and it's not some Flickr alternative. Things are made to be fixed res and laid out as so by design.
  - meristem 6y ago
    An experience designed by designers that was then put through the wringer so that it accomplished marketing and business needs initially not present. Rarely do designs not change as they move through the development/deployment pipeline. Then designs are iterated in search of better or higher X, for whatever X business is optimizing for at that time.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Like reddit, the website is made awful to encourage you to use the app; you can pinch-zoom images on the app. Or, like us, DOM inspector -> delete empty element over image -> right-click open in new window.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
site-packages1 6y ago
I've noticed this as well. I stopped doing any engagement on Facebook and switched to Instagram (you don't need to tell me about who owns Instagram, I already know) a years ago and really loved it. I do mostly post to Stories because I had been using Snapchat as well and Stories filled the Snapchat void but for a bigger audience (my Snapchats were never private or R Rated, just the normal stuff people post to Instagram stories), and because I perpetually feel like my stuff isn't good enough/important enough to post to main Instagram. I feel like people can click and watch my stories if they want, and I don't spam their feeds with regular Instagram photos. Back to the current state of Instagram. People are nonstop posting stories that are just Twitter screenshots, or walls of text, or both. You can click through 20 of someone's stories and it's all just text. I was never under any illusion that people posting perfect lives using certain brands on Instagram were legitimate and so that's not new or disillusioning. I largely ignore that and even de-rate brands I see on Instagram stories/photos mentally. Other people on these comments posted about this, but largely that's just rose tinted glasses, "viral" or sponsored advertisements in photos to make it not look like it's an advertisement has been happening since insta-time immemorial. But, all the text I'm seeing, that's a major change and it's very annoying.
- ffpip 6y ago
  Check out the 'Threads' app. It's an app for Instagram ( made by the Instagram team, not some third party) Zero ads, just chat with your friends, send pictures, and look at their stories. Only friends in the 'Close Friends List' you can make on Instagram You can add any follower to the Close Friends list. So add the people you want
EForEndeavour 6y ago
What an age we live in: the meteoric evolution of the information superhighway has culminated in a Facebook-owned walled garden that retains its original features as a photo- and video-sharing platform, and so delivers substantive information as pictures of text that cannot be copy-pasted or searched for. The platform explicitly bans hyperlinking to ANY resource outside of Instagram, except from the bio section of user accounts, forcing purveyors of information to entice content consumers to follow the "link in bio," of which there can only be one. Users can "save" posts to custom-named "collections" within the platform, but are intentionally prevented from exporting these collections, or indeed saving any post to their local machine in its original format, short of screenshotting in the mobile app, or using browser extensions or digging into devtools on desktop. You can't sort comments by anything. Time, votes (sorry, "likes"), length -- nope, you're stuck with whatever inscrutable, undocumented order "the algorithm" has chosen to present to you, annealed out of some black-box ranking procedure based on various engagement metrics. You can't create comment threads: all levels of replies to a comment pile up in the same indent level, forcing the reader to mentally build conversation threads by reading username tags and scrolling up and down while repeatedly clicking "view more replies." This undermines any hope of substantive discourse about whatever serious issue is addressed by the seven-panel meticulously designed infographic rife with unsupported claims, gross oversimplifications, and handwriting fonts. Oh, and roughly every fifth post or story is a paid ad, just to remind you that you're the product. (Wherever the $7 billion and rising of quarterly revenue is going [1], their comment-system team evidently isn't getting much of it.) Instagram becoming an "information powerhouse" is a slap to the face of information accuracy, accessibility, and credibility. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwide-mobile-internet-advertising-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwi...
- pjc50 6y ago
  The thing is, it was never designed for discussion or politics - you might almost say it was designed against politics, especially by preventing virality and focusing on images rather than text. However, the normal venues for politics having been rendered unusable, it's now become totalising; all communications channels will tend towards politics all the time. This will continue until either sanity is restored and the miscreants permanently removed from the political arena, which seems very unlikely; they win and get opposition effectively criminialised, which also seems unlikely (although this is what happened in Hong Kong); or some exogenous event happens like 9/11 and the country can unify against external enemies rather than internal ones.
melbourne_mat 6y ago
So much hands wringing these days about TikTok - a Chinese company which might pass information to the Chinese government. The big silicon valley tech companies hoover up your data. What could possibly go wrong? Affect the outcome of a democratic election with targeted advertising?
propogandist 6y ago
they're using follower growth on a few accounts to come to this conclusion, which suggests these people have no idea what they are talking about. Follower count is a vanity metric, engagement rates, view through rates and similar metrics would be more meaningful to analyze, along with actual reach data.
throwawaysea 6y ago
The main “feature” of Instagram was that it was free of politics, tribalism, and the news cycle. Then came the activists looking to leverage the captive audiences and the attention of their friend circles for their cause. This change invited those of all causes and parties to participate, because to not do so would be to accept a marketing disadvantage. The political marketing war escalated quickly. Now Instagram has turned into the same cesspool other platforms have - whether it is YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or Facebook - with advanced campaigning, mass manipulation, etc. Like Twitter, it suffers due to the limited format - images allow for a charged newsbite and no nuance whatsoever. I’m starting to think any centralized platform that is very open to the public or doesn’t ban politics will ultimately decay once weaponized.

65 points by elsewhen 6y ago

> Instagrams doesn't have a traditional share button to drive virality like other major social networks. And that's a big reason why it's the only social networking app I still have on my phone. Please never change, Instagram!

Melting_Harps 6y ago

I don't use IG, nor any social media, and I have never had a desire to do so but this statement underscores just how overtly and far reaching the term 'activism' is used these days: > And then in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's killings, it was primed not just for information, but activism. Spamming peoples feeds or posts with your rants is hardly activism, it's easily ignored/filtered is and never as impactful as if you actually got active on the ground because you will NEVER get a true grasp of the situation behind a keyboard--these situations are often wrought with confusion. This is my main gripe with the so-called SJW forms of 'activism,' whose main form of action is bringing about 'awareness' on social media platforms and engaging in never-ending feuds Online that amount to nothing than a waste of time and energy. And then if they do attend in person refuse to engage with the parties they oppose in open discourse and will seek to 'cancel' the other side. This has had so many dire implications, be it in academia to other things like actors and their career prospects. It's hard for me to think that people honestly think that posting about an issue is as valid as actually being on the ground and involved in the process in order to try and (ideally) come up with alternative solutions to the problems they're trying to solve with those who have also come out to manifest. In this case Police Brutality, that as unpopular as it might seem is not solely limited to just the Black Community, but has been pervasive and incredibly outward in heavy-handedness since 9-11 under these false pretenses of Terrorism. People seem to forget that during the Occupy movement the same amount of violence was being used against what were mainly a white, college educated, (lower to mid) middle class cohort. They, too were deemed terrorist groups and cells for dissent and were infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. [1] And while I'm glad many people finally saw this for what it is, as this time Police violence was used against journalists and innocent bystanders alike, and in the case with Portland and Seattle you have unmarked vehicles essentially kidnapping people, you get a real taste what activists of all leanings have seen all along. I hardly see what some celebrity posting on IG with a sign has to do with activism. Moreover, we saw how quickly they are to retract it if they face scrutiny, during the HK's National Security Law limbo Billie Eilish tweeted out a message in support of HK, only to remove it moments later when the Wumao Army came down on her and she saw some backlash, showing just how feckless and entirely pointless these kind of affairs really are for even 'influencers.' 1: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Awareness does matter, as does agreement in the same set of facts. And sadly most people, celebrities or not, do not have the time for the deeper activism you talk about and usually do not have the same mental model of what the problem is if it exists at all. And having gone through that activism in the UK back in day, from grassroots meetings to media and then advocacy to policy makers, what really really helps is a movement - ordinary people making a noise. And a noise on twitter is heard in the corridors of power today (tomorrow it may change.) So if you want something to change at a local or national level, social media is a big part of your arsenal (but I agree not the whole part)
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > And a noise on twitter is heard in the corridors of power today (tomorrow it may change.) And is listened by who? Other social media users who are equally as unlikely to get involved? This is what happened during the Blueleaks drop in my opinion. Moreover, what is the turn-around in the news-cycle today for even 'newsworthy' events, especially when calamity and Rage are the plats du jour by the Media and served by the 100s a day. I highly doubt you can attribute seeing police budgets get slashed if it weren't for the mass protests, and rioting in the US and the wide-spread violence we saw that followed. Claiming that Social Media's role to be anything but act as a source of the real-time video footage of these events would be really over-reaching its impact. I mean even now, as Portland has removed DHS officers, what can you say the Social Media crowds did to ensure that occurred, because it was mainly a collective of present Human will that did that from what I've seen. I'm open to be convinced, mind you, as I think IF Social Media could fulfill its potential it could be a very useful tool in Activism, instead it just seems like another apparatus of the Panopticon. Which if they can infiltrate a Telegram channel [1], just imagine what they can do on open non-encrypted mediums like Facebook/IG etc... 1: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-dhs-intelligence-report-showed-the-department-had-collected-and-analyzed-messages-between-portland-protesters-a-new-report-says/ar-BB17qOUb?li=BBnb7Kz https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-dhs-intelligence-report-...
  - site-packages1 6y ago

agumonkey 6y ago

It's funny how fads + web = information now. It used to be a transient thing, now it's stored and analysed ad nauseam (I suppose).

roystonvassey 6y ago

I was invested heavily in Instagram as my active social media fix for two years. This was spurred by a comment on HN and similar to what is mentioned here - it was deemed to be a fun, positive and happy virtual party. And it was. For a while. Soon enough, the advertisements and the activism took over. People only posted in Stories, and the inevitable race-to-the-bottom to have the highest followers/likes took over. A friend, who ran fitness gigs on the side, told me how a top branded sports marketer were willing to sponsor his shoes for a certain number of follows and likes on his post, with their brand mentions. Somehow all these appears to be a perverted, caricature of an idealistic life. I got sick of it and i haven’t used it since the beginning of this year. I understand that as I grow older, part of this is feeded by cynicism of having seen similar patterns in the past, starting with IRC chat rooms to whatever is the trend this year. But, the in-your-face commercialisation and incentives for users to keep generating content forever all appears very dystopian to me.

iamkroot 6y ago
I only use a third party app to browse Instagram, which both blocks advertisements and stories. I keep the main app on my phone and only use it to create posts of my own. Whenever I open it I'm amazed at the sheer quantity of nonsense that's hurled at the user. I have no idea how people can put up with it.
- Ruthalas 6y ago
  What third party app do you use, if you don't mind sharing?
  - iamkroot 6y ago
    Friendly for Instagram: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.friendly.instagram https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.friendly.in...
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    I can’t say for sure what OP meant; I know there are Instagram+ type apps on iOS and Android. There’s also this: https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram

mikequinlan 6y ago

I used to think that Twitter's 144-character tweets were the worst possible way to present information. Instagram's `pictures of text` show that it is possible to get even worse.

imglorp 6y ago

Did they just go login only, to see content? No very powerful for me. Also, maybe someone can explain to me why IG displays so much hate for the user through the UX? - Fixed res images. If you dive into the JS, the full resolution is actually present, but the UI scales it tiny with no way to see more. It's almost harder to hide this than to just allow it. - Similarly video. No controls, can't pause or scrub or gosh forbid, closed captions.

kccqzy 6y ago
It's an "experience" designed by designers, not a power user tool.
- site-packages1 6y ago
  Yeah, I really have to agree with this. Working with designers and PMs in my day job makes it clear that there's an experience put together on Instagram and it's not some Flickr alternative. Things are made to be fixed res and laid out as so by design.
- meristem 6y ago
  An experience designed by designers that was then put through the wringer so that it accomplished marketing and business needs initially not present. Rarely do designs not change as they move through the development/deployment pipeline. Then designs are iterated in search of better or higher X, for whatever X business is optimizing for at that time.
pjc50 6y ago
Like reddit, the website is made awful to encourage you to use the app; you can pinch-zoom images on the app. Or, like us, DOM inspector -> delete empty element over image -> right-click open in new window.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jhoechtl 6y ago

site-packages1 6y ago

I've noticed this as well. I stopped doing any engagement on Facebook and switched to Instagram (you don't need to tell me about who owns Instagram, I already know) a years ago and really loved it. I do mostly post to Stories because I had been using Snapchat as well and Stories filled the Snapchat void but for a bigger audience (my Snapchats were never private or R Rated, just the normal stuff people post to Instagram stories), and because I perpetually feel like my stuff isn't good enough/important enough to post to main Instagram. I feel like people can click and watch my stories if they want, and I don't spam their feeds with regular Instagram photos. Back to the current state of Instagram. People are nonstop posting stories that are just Twitter screenshots, or walls of text, or both. You can click through 20 of someone's stories and it's all just text. I was never under any illusion that people posting perfect lives using certain brands on Instagram were legitimate and so that's not new or disillusioning. I largely ignore that and even de-rate brands I see on Instagram stories/photos mentally. Other people on these comments posted about this, but largely that's just rose tinted glasses, "viral" or sponsored advertisements in photos to make it not look like it's an advertisement has been happening since insta-time immemorial. But, all the text I'm seeing, that's a major change and it's very annoying.

ffpip 6y ago
Check out the 'Threads' app. It's an app for Instagram ( made by the Instagram team, not some third party) Zero ads, just chat with your friends, send pictures, and look at their stories. Only friends in the 'Close Friends List' you can make on Instagram You can add any follower to the Close Friends list. So add the people you want

EForEndeavour 6y ago

What an age we live in: the meteoric evolution of the information superhighway has culminated in a Facebook-owned walled garden that retains its original features as a photo- and video-sharing platform, and so delivers substantive information as pictures of text that cannot be copy-pasted or searched for. The platform explicitly bans hyperlinking to ANY resource outside of Instagram, except from the bio section of user accounts, forcing purveyors of information to entice content consumers to follow the "link in bio," of which there can only be one. Users can "save" posts to custom-named "collections" within the platform, but are intentionally prevented from exporting these collections, or indeed saving any post to their local machine in its original format, short of screenshotting in the mobile app, or using browser extensions or digging into devtools on desktop. You can't sort comments by anything. Time, votes (sorry, "likes"), length -- nope, you're stuck with whatever inscrutable, undocumented order "the algorithm" has chosen to present to you, annealed out of some black-box ranking procedure based on various engagement metrics. You can't create comment threads: all levels of replies to a comment pile up in the same indent level, forcing the reader to mentally build conversation threads by reading username tags and scrolling up and down while repeatedly clicking "view more replies." This undermines any hope of substantive discourse about whatever serious issue is addressed by the seven-panel meticulously designed infographic rife with unsupported claims, gross oversimplifications, and handwriting fonts. Oh, and roughly every fifth post or story is a paid ad, just to remind you that you're the product. (Wherever the $7 billion and rising of quarterly revenue is going [1], their comment-system team evidently isn't getting much of it.) Instagram becoming an "information powerhouse" is a slap to the face of information accuracy, accessibility, and credibility. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwide-mobile-internet-advertising-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwi...

pjc50 6y ago
The thing is, it was never designed for discussion or politics - you might almost say it was designed against politics, especially by preventing virality and focusing on images rather than text. However, the normal venues for politics having been rendered unusable, it's now become totalising; all communications channels will tend towards politics all the time. This will continue until either sanity is restored and the miscreants permanently removed from the political arena, which seems very unlikely; they win and get opposition effectively criminialised, which also seems unlikely (although this is what happened in Hong Kong); or some exogenous event happens like 9/11 and the country can unify against external enemies rather than internal ones.

melbourne_mat 6y ago

So much hands wringing these days about TikTok - a Chinese company which might pass information to the Chinese government. The big silicon valley tech companies hoover up your data. What could possibly go wrong? Affect the outcome of a democratic election with targeted advertising?

propogandist 6y ago

they're using follower growth on a few accounts to come to this conclusion, which suggests these people have no idea what they are talking about. Follower count is a vanity metric, engagement rates, view through rates and similar metrics would be more meaningful to analyze, along with actual reach data.

throwawaysea 6y ago

The main “feature” of Instagram was that it was free of politics, tribalism, and the news cycle. Then came the activists looking to leverage the captive audiences and the attention of their friend circles for their cause. This change invited those of all causes and parties to participate, because to not do so would be to accept a marketing disadvantage. The political marketing war escalated quickly. Now Instagram has turned into the same cesspool other platforms have - whether it is YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or Facebook - with advanced campaigning, mass manipulation, etc. Like Twitter, it suffers due to the limited format - images allow for a charged newsbite and no nuance whatsoever. I’m starting to think any centralized platform that is very open to the public or doesn’t ban politics will ultimately decay once weaponized.