What an age we live in: the meteoric evolution of the information superhighway has culminated in a Facebook-owned walled garden that retains its original features as a photo- and video-sharing platform, and so delivers substantive information as pictures of text that cannot be copy-pasted or searched for.
The platform explicitly bans hyperlinking to ANY resource outside of Instagram, except from the bio section of user accounts, forcing purveyors of information to entice content consumers to follow the "link in bio," of which there can only be one.
Users can "save" posts to custom-named "collections" within the platform, but are intentionally prevented from exporting these collections, or indeed saving any post to their local machine in its original format, short of screenshotting in the mobile app, or using browser extensions or digging into devtools on desktop.
You can't sort comments by anything. Time, votes (sorry, "likes"), length -- nope, you're stuck with whatever inscrutable, undocumented order "the algorithm" has chosen to present to you, annealed out of some black-box ranking procedure based on various engagement metrics.
You can't create comment threads: all levels of replies to a comment pile up in the same indent level, forcing the reader to mentally build conversation threads by reading username tags and scrolling up and down while repeatedly clicking "view more replies." This undermines any hope of substantive discourse about whatever serious issue is addressed by the seven-panel meticulously designed infographic rife with unsupported claims, gross oversimplifications, and handwriting fonts.
Oh, and roughly every fifth post or story is a paid ad, just to remind you that you're the product. (Wherever the $7 billion and rising of quarterly revenue is going [1], their comment-system team evidently isn't getting much of it.)
Instagram becoming an "information powerhouse" is a slap to the face of information accuracy, accessibility, and credibility.
The thing is, it was never designed for discussion or politics - you might almost say it was designed against politics, especially by preventing virality and focusing on images rather than text.
However, the normal venues for politics having been rendered unusable, it's now become totalising; all communications channels will tend towards politics all the time.
This will continue until either sanity is restored and the miscreants permanently removed from the political arena, which seems very unlikely; they win and get opposition effectively criminialised, which also seems unlikely (although this is what happened in Hong Kong); or some exogenous event happens like 9/11 and the country can unify against external enemies rather than internal ones.
> ...some exogenous event happens like 9/11 and the country can unify against external enemies rather than internal ones.
That never happened. Muslim and Sikh Americans, and anybody who could mistakenly pass for them, north African or middle eastern, were treated as internal enemies by the government, its private contractors and by "fellow" american citizens. If you felt unity in that moment, then I surmise that islamaphobia didn't impact your friends and family. I did not experience a unified country after 9/11.
Instagram always felt like it was specifically designed to just get away from Facebook/twitter style discussions. Yes, there's a comments section, but 99%+ is hidden "below the fold". Stories are comments free (you can DM the poster, but 15 people can't start a discussion on the topic unless it's a linked post, which tbf is a majority of story content)
Instagram was the only "real" social media I was engaging with (besides LinkedIn, I guess?) specifically because of this. I could still keep up with (most) of my friends goings on but without my mother explaining how her racist ideas weren't actually racist in 5 paragraph essay form. I could see dank memes, and babies making cakes and generally have fun.
Then the world caught fire. The politics came from Instagram HARD. And the more time I spend on it (while myself feeling more politically engaged) the more I'm recognizing its shortcomings. It's not a placid information farm with a cute cat facade anymore. It's the same putrid swamp as everywhere else, but you have to have an image (or an image of text) associated with whatever you're trying to say.
TL;dr- Instagram users skew "younger", so I like it more than Twitter or Facebook. Other people seem to agree.
Have you read the comments on Instagram? The vast, vast majority of comments and comment impressions are essentially just "+1" or @-mentions, typically used in lieu private sharing.
It's the 2020s internet equivalent of walking around a museum with friends, repeatedly telling them about an absent third party, "so and so would just LOVE this". It's an interesting form of signaling that I think Instagram has cultivated really well.
If you look at IG comments through this lens, ranking or sorting is basically unnecessary.
The platform explicitly bans hyperlinking to ANY resource outside of Instagram, except from the bio section of user accounts, forcing purveyors of information to entice content consumers to follow the "link in bio," of which there can only be one.
Users can "save" posts to custom-named "collections" within the platform, but are intentionally prevented from exporting these collections, or indeed saving any post to their local machine in its original format, short of screenshotting in the mobile app, or using browser extensions or digging into devtools on desktop.
You can't sort comments by anything. Time, votes (sorry, "likes"), length -- nope, you're stuck with whatever inscrutable, undocumented order "the algorithm" has chosen to present to you, annealed out of some black-box ranking procedure based on various engagement metrics.
You can't create comment threads: all levels of replies to a comment pile up in the same indent level, forcing the reader to mentally build conversation threads by reading username tags and scrolling up and down while repeatedly clicking "view more replies." This undermines any hope of substantive discourse about whatever serious issue is addressed by the seven-panel meticulously designed infographic rife with unsupported claims, gross oversimplifications, and handwriting fonts.
Oh, and roughly every fifth post or story is a paid ad, just to remind you that you're the product. (Wherever the $7 billion and rising of quarterly revenue is going [1], their comment-system team evidently isn't getting much of it.)
Instagram becoming an "information powerhouse" is a slap to the face of information accuracy, accessibility, and credibility.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwi...