On Instagram Becoming Obsolete

For many years I would go for a hike, a via ferrata, scuba diving and more and I would take photos. I would then share them on Instagram to friends, colleagues and family. Facebook then bought Instagram and within a few months it went from being a social network built around our friends, colleagues and family to a network of influencers sharing irrelevant trash. Between that trash we would get ads. Within half a year I dumped Facebook controlled Instagram because the community that I used Instagram had been deliberately destroyed.

You might think, “But IG is fine as it is, I like to see random videos by strangers” but that’s because you’re married, with job security, a fulfilled life, and you’re a mid to late adopter, so the loss of personal connections changes nothing. For me, it made the difference between being on a social network, and a reminder of my solitude and isolation, especially during the COVID pandemic years.

Instagram and other social sites went from being intimate and personal, and tight knit, to broadcasting. You might think “Who cares” and the truth is all the locations that now suffer from instagram centric over-tourism. Travelling to a location to see something is nice. Travelling somewhere to queue to take a photo for social media is absurd. It’s absurd because you lose a sense of the beauty of locations. You lose the relaxed atmosphere that there once was.

I heard more than once, via overheard conversations, and newspaper articles that spots such as Forclaz were saturated with Instagrammers going up to snap a photo of the eclipse.

For me, Instagram, and social media, is about having a social network for sharing photos of shared experienced, appreciated landscapes during a hike and more. For me Instagram is not about likes, and shares. It’s about the third space in between meeting friends and colleagues on various adventures.

Recently I was struck by two things. The first one is that photos have almost vanished from Instagram, replaced by reels, and that these reels are becoming longer and longer. Not only are we expected to scroll endlessly and passively, but we’re encouraged to waste ever-increasing amounts of time, from 10 seconds all the way up to several minutes.

What was once a healthy, dynamic social community has become a network of users having their time wasted to push more ads. Simultaneously people are going to locations, to get a social media friendly photo for likes and views,on a network where conversations ended a decade ago.