insta at 10

So Instagram turns 10 today. I don’t recall the exact timetable but I think it lasted a couple of years before being eaten by Facebook for what in retrospect was the low price of $1 billion. It was of its time when it began: yet another photo app offering filters to help make up for the comparatively shitty experience of phone cameras of the era (don’t forget, at the time it launched 5 MP was the new hotness from Apple) but within six years, it had grown to be the only part of Facebook I could still tolerate the use of.

And that’s sort of gone by the boards now. Constant UI tampering, the privileging of Stories and the addition of Reels and the focus on shopping and above all, the constant Facebook-ian need to show you things you didn’t ask to see. Having turned Facebook from a millennial college party into the canonical safe space for racist Boomers, Werner von Zuckerberg needed something new he could crap up beyond recognition, and Instagram is it.

It’s funny how these apps all seem to fail in the same way – they reach a point at which, for whatever reason, it’s not enough for you to see what you asked to see; they MUST show you things you didn’t ask for in hopes of triggering “engagement” or some bullshit like that. It happened with Twitter and the algorithmic timeline and the dry-snitching from what other people liked (or even just follow). Instagram has gone all in with a continuous scroll of stuff you didn’t ask for, presumably in an attempt to ape TikTok (because Insta is where Facebook rips off any possible competition now, be it TikTok or SnapChat or whatever).
Meanwhile, you’re back to the problem of wanting to follow your friends without having to bring all of their friends along into your private space, and either having a dozen different apps or just giving in to the modern social media world. I still don’t have a good answer.

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