I think Meta is doing a decent job with Instagram. I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform. And the only one still allowing for engagement with your actual friends rather than exclusively professional content creators.
WTF are you on about? no one likes instagram shorts and the feed is a jumbled mess of bullshit and advertisements. I deleted mine a long time ago and don’t regret it for a second.
Even if you ignore all the ads and data-mining IG its still a shit experience.
- You can’t share any links, which does nothing but make it a worse experience, because people just use annoying workarounds.
- All the buttons for user profiles, hashtags, and comments are impossibly small.
- In the search function you can conveniently “flick” between posts so you don’t have to line each one up perfectly on the screen, but this works nowhere else in the app for some reason.
- They created what are essentially 2 completely isolated social media platforms (posts and stories) into the same app, which results in fragmentation of where people post and where you have to look find their posts.
- Every time I try to scroll down, I scroll to the side instead.
- Every time you open the app, it shows you a post, and then that post disappears 2 seconds later.
- They abuse the DM system by cramming other notifications into it for tags and “broadcasts”, presumably to force you to receive them after you’ve disabled all the other notifications.
- Of course there’s the flaw of not allowing text posts, which again does nothing except force people to post photos of text, which undermines the fundamental purpose of the platform.
- Incessant “suggested” posts that I do not have and have never expressed interest in.
- No scroll bar for video, so if there’s something you missed or want to watch again, you have to watch to the end or start from the beginning.
- Read receipts subject users to abuse. Any other platform you can disable them.
- Standard image posts are hidden by the algorithm, so no point in even posting them anymore, which essentially makes it almost entirely a TikTok/Snapchat clone.
- You click the play button on an image, thinking it’s a video, but it’s just a still image with annoying ass audio.
- Auto-playing videos.
- Stories just flip along without you doing anything, and trying to go back and see them again is a nightmare.
I could go on but I digress.
I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.
I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.
