Instagram and Net Neutrality

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When videos are older, or are not viewed often their quality will be downgraded until they are either viewed regularly or never at all. This decision showstype: posts that Instagram is forgetting that it should promote net neutrality rather than a two tier system where influencers get the red carpet, and normal human beings are treated badly.

The idea of Net Neutrality is that all content is delivered from all sources to all people at the highest available speed and quality available. By choosing to downgrade old, less viewed content Instagram is instilling a two tier system that rewards influencers and clickbait, to the detriment of posts by normal people.

When Instagram went from a chronological timeline to an algorithm based timeline it made my posts invisible, and now, with their new tweak it will make the videos I share of a lower quality. In theory it doesn't matter, because I don't share videos on Instagram.

In reality this means that people that have less popular content will have low quality videos being shown, and this will discourage people to watch videos in full. The consequence is that it will give influencers an unfair advantage, and encourage further degradation of Instagram as a social network and social app.

Years ago I posted at least one photo a day for years but that's when the app was social. Now it's noisy, and showing content by strangers. I see that they have hundreds, or several thousand views, and I get one or two likes.

Not only did the app become less relevant, for following friends but it reinforced that feeling of isolation and solitude. During Lockdown I stopped using Instagram because within a few posts I felt bad about my life as it was then, and I never returned. Instagram is owned by Facebook and Facebook has a history of making people miserable or depressed. That's why I quit Facebook too, and why I am weary of threads.

“Smaller creators historically haven’t gotten their fair share of reach on Instagram, and we want to change that. So we’re making some changes to how we rank recommendations to give smaller creators a better chance of breaking through.”

The thing about Instagram is that we're not creators. We're human beings with a human desire to connect with others, and follow friends. If Facebook does not respect our social use of Instagram then it becomes irrelevant. This is just another reason not to touch instagram.

In private circles I call influencers binfluencers and instagram bingstagram. Sharing videos on Whatsapp, Signal and other apps is often a waste of time because of the degradation of quality.

When you encode videos you can encode to three or four qualities simultaneously and it's often the original video that takes up a lot of storage. Getting rid of videos that are not viewed often just means more time spent rendering later.

The other consequence is that if TikTok and YouTube keep the best quality versions of videos, for all, then they will have an advantage as people who are not big on Instagram dump the anti-social network, like I did, a number of years ago. With preferential treatment, user engagement is lost.