Instagram 12+

Instagram used to be my favorite social media app and I keep using it hoping that it’ll finally strike a balance between Meta’s attempts at keeping up with tech and serving Instagram’s original purpose: sharing photos and captions. Unfortunately, in its desperate attempt to be TikTok (and graceless failure at becoming so; the attempt is like a cartoonish midlife crisis) it serves up videos that freeze mid-reel (or pause as if they’ve gotten to the end, which they often have not); an explore feature thats supposed to be a FYP with an algorithm that is never quite right on what content you’re interested in; and their AI bot that will serve you up AI hellscapes, but certainly not ones related to your query, never mind the fact that you were simply trying to use the search function. If your post had multiple photos, it might decide not to load them all and to post black squares instead for no apparent reason. And if you manage to get past their impressively unhelpful AI bot to use the search function, it will serve up a curated (read: extremely pared down) version of what it hopes you want to see, whether that matches what you searched for or not, and the captions on what few posts you can see will disappear if you try to read them. Years of trying to report any of this has gotten me exactly nowhere. So here I am, ranting in a review, knowing that is equally futile.

TL;DR if you don’t already have Instagram, you might as well skip it and just download TikTok.

I used to love Instagram as a way to keep in touch with my family and friends. Especially during this time of being apart. However, now with the unbelievable amount of ads it is nearly impossible to see what I want to see (my family and friends) and due to the new - “you’re all done” feature I constantly miss posts and here is why: If I open my feed and look at some posts from friends, I can see there are several I haven’t scrolled to look at yet, I then click over to open a message, when I look back at Instagram those posts are gone and I cannot see them again unless I can possibly remember who posted something and to individually look at each of their pages. I HATE that feature that is now in Instagram. To me the benefit of the posts is I can always just scroll down to review them. Now each post is pretty much a story, see it once and it’s gone forever and now I have ENDLESS ads. Once you have viewed your new posts you can’t see them again all you see are ads. Don’t get me wrong, I do like SOME ads, they are personalized and helpful. But I’d rather they show up only in my stories than on my feed. I’m probably going to delete Instagram as soon as I can find a different way to see friends and family’s posts and not miss any because of the inundation of ads that is here. Intagram used to be about connecting, now it is just advertising.

Instagram used to let me see content of accounts that I actually follow, but lately it’s been flooding my feed with random popular accounts that are “related” to my interests but I don’t follow. Some of them don’t even post content relating to my interests. Just completely random. It’s very frustrating that I have to go to the accounts I follow to be up to date with their posts instead of seeing it in my feed in the order they were posted. I understand that it’s handy to have similar content suggested, but what about newer accounts that aren’t quite popular yet that may have content I enjoy? Those get drowned out if they don’t have a billion likes and views. It’s been causing me to use the app less frequently altogether as a result.

I only use Instagram for art. I use the appropriate hashtags, make reels, etc. it doesn’t seem to matter because my content only reaches a small fraction of my followers and practically no one outside my following (it shows in the analytics). Yet when I post the same content on other platforms, they get much more views and reactions than on Instagram. I’ve become more active on other apps because I don’t see the point in using a platform that doesn’t “platform” my posts.

I want to see the people I follow, and I want to be able to discover new and upcoming accounts with similar content. I don’t know why they’ve changed the way the feed works, but I cannot stand it.