This is really fascinating, and I've heard similar stories from my younger cousins about maintaining multiple accounts on FB, Instagram, etc.
"Real" social media = your fake life
"Fake" social media = your real life
edit:
Although, as I think about this, it's not much different from those of us who are a generation or two removed from the people in the story.
I was on a call with a salesperson from a large company last week, so I googled him to put a face to a name.
His linkedin featured a professional picture with a suit and tie, paragraphs written in the third person (like account executives have biographers?), and we had a dozen mutual connections in common. Connected with 500+ people.
His facebook profile told a very different story of vacations, beach voleyball, parties, family events, and life. Connected with 100 people.
what gets me is how hard facebook doubles down on the "single account + real name = authenticity" excuse. it's the exact antithesis of authenticity - the more people you have following a single account, the more guarded and lowest-common-denominator you have to be in order to not leak stuff from one area of your life into another.
I think that approach had some value in setting up a very different atmosphere than MySpace in Facebook's early days. Especially since this was before people started to realize what kind of scrutiny those accounts would face from employers etc.
However, I think at this point they would be better off dropping it. Facebook's tone has already been set, and the most common impact the real name policy has at this point in time is its use as a weapon against transgender users and those who need to maintain anonymity for fear of personal safety.
Too right! My favorite crash-course in the realities of names is "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"[1]. I think any programmer whose work deals with any kind of personal information should google "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About" and read all of them (gender, addresses, etc.).
In Instagram there is pretty substantial amount of traffic about soft core porn. The women get thousands of followers with nicks like "ehg bloblo". If you look who he is and what he follows, it's just other girls who show some cleavage. No sane guy these days would put real name on such account.
If Instagram would double down on those followers, the "models" would also have very little incentive to continue posting. But this does nothing to the market of soft core porn. So Instagram would very likely face competition after that. It might be that Instagram could then cater better for a subset of the current users. But they would risk not being the 800 pound gorilla of social photo sharing.
So the old adage seems to hold so far: the internet platform that is good for porn, wins over internet platform that is not.
Authenticity is an interesting thing to think about.
Beside clear and pseudonymous identities, there is also the idea of having anonymous platforms with no identity at all attached to the created content.
I would argue against this article's assertion about the "real" use of Instagram. As a college student, my interpretation (and AFAIK my fellow students') is that the real use of Instagram IS this small personal community, not unlike Facebook. And indeed, this seems to be more intuitive, as pointed out in some of the other comments here.
"Real" social media = your fake life
"Fake" social media = your real life
edit:
Although, as I think about this, it's not much different from those of us who are a generation or two removed from the people in the story.
I was on a call with a salesperson from a large company last week, so I googled him to put a face to a name.
His linkedin featured a professional picture with a suit and tie, paragraphs written in the third person (like account executives have biographers?), and we had a dozen mutual connections in common. Connected with 500+ people.
His facebook profile told a very different story of vacations, beach voleyball, parties, family events, and life. Connected with 100 people.