The Social Contract
I’m over it. This is nothing new. I’ve been over it for a while. Instagram sucks. . . and so does the rest of social media. Tik-Tok, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc…they all suck. What was once promised as a “democratizing force” to connect all of humanity with each other has turned out to be nothing more than a corporate mega advertising and sales engine. Let’s be real, do you even recognize Instagram anymore? Remember when it first popped off and you struggled to fit your rectangular photo into a square and then maybe added a few words for a description? I miss the innocence of those days. Just a place for photographers and creatives to share their most epic photos. Today it is a full on marketing sales desk for any company willing to throw some advertising dollars down on promoting their posts. Ads have proliferated all over the feed, multiplying like rabbits. Couple that with the algorithm’s prioritization of random accounts that you don’t follow and it has progressed to the point that I don’t even see my friends posts anymore. Friends and artists that I have chosen to follow no longer see their work shared to my feed. I often think my friends have gone silent, when in reality the algorithm has just pushed them into the ether of obscurity. Myself included. 18K followers but 100 likes. Do the math, that is pathetic. I used to receive multitudes of likes on my posts. Comments, reposts, shares…now it’s just crickets or a slew of fire emojis. Half of the accounts trying to message me in my dm’s are ai bots for prostitutes or scammers or “collaborations” aka Influencer opportunities. Zuckerberg, you have failed us greatly. For the life of me I cannot figure out why people still use these platforms. They’re all trash. It’s a dopamine addiction for users chasing the social dragon of “likes” but who are being fed nothing but ad’s.
And I haven’t even touched on the whole issue of what it does to your mental state. Nothing good, I’ll tell you that. Endless feelings of inadequacies. I for one feel much happier when i’m not logged on to social media. Life IS better offline.
What to do? I don’t know anymore. You can log off and stop posting, but you’ll be all alone and forgotten. It’s the Collective Action Problem. You can quit, but nobody else will put their phone down. (trust me, i tried this back in 2023) Users are entranced by the endless scroll of twitter-like posts. At this point IG is merely twitter by another name. Threads? What the hell is that? The twitter bots are taking over. Instagram has gone to shit and AI won’t save us. . . what happened to the Art? My feed used to be full of creative stuff. Now it’s just crap.
I’ve developed my own rules of logging on for no more than 10 minutes at a time and under 30 minutes per day. Even that is too much time wasted there. I could be reading a book. Painting. Walking my dog. Napping. There are so many more productive uses of my time than to be fighting thumb-lock while scrolling down my screen. I like to take weekends off. Because, well, it is the weekend, put your phone down and go outside!
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