So Instagram turns 10 today. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny how these apps all seem to fail in the same way – they reach a point at which, for whatever reason, it\u2019s not enough for you to see what you asked to see; they MUST show you things you didn\u2019t ask for in hopes of triggering \u201cengagement\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019re 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\u2019t have a good answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So Instagram turns 10 today. I don\u2019t 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 … <\/p>\n