Ask HN: What's so bad about Instagram?

[pkdpic]

I feel like I hate IG for personal reasons and reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam. But as an artist I feel like it's the only place to share work with professional peers. That said I very intentionally shifted to a dev career to not be financially dependent on my art, platforms like IG, broken arts institutions, toxic art communities etc. In any case considering fully getting off IG at long last but wanted to solicit some general wisdom from my favorite dev community. Thanks in advance :^p

[aosaigh]

I think if you treat Instagram (or Twitter/TikTok/...) as a professional tool and distance yourself personally from it, it can probably be a great place to promote your work and keep up-to-date with your industry. By creating boundaries on when you post, how often you check it, who you follow etc. you can probably have a healthy relationship with it.

That said, this requires you to swim upstream and fight against the design. It's designed to create an addict. It wants to grab as much of your attention as possible and will do it in the most devious of ways. Outside of its design, the entire ecosystem of social media encourages people to present themselves in certain ways, which fosters insecurities on both ends: "I need to show everyone that my life is great" and on the other hand "why is everyone having more fun then me".

I know you didn't mention TikTok but I remember the first and only time I used TikTok being so cynically impressed with how well they had curated the first 10 or 15 minutes of your time on the platform. When you open the app, it begins to show you videos of young, attractive women, usually dancing. As you continue to scroll, you see that this gets interleaved with other genres of monkey-brain content. It works incredibly well and after 20 minutes or so I had to delete it.

[slater]

it's overrun with scammers and trolls. and of course, who could forget the "can't ever leave anything good alone" endless design tweaks, and the hamfisted shoe-horning of whatever the other platforms are doing, oh and the algorithmic sorting instead of chronological sorting of the feed.

[pkdpic → slater]

That's a pretty good list. I've also heard an increasing number of stories about concrete plagiarism instances with a power dynamic of, if you're established and have resources you can effectively coordinate some form of cease and desist, if you're unestablished you're in no position to stop others from using instagram as a free originality idea farm to cherry-pick from.

Very much how it feels on there for me right now. I find myself super hesitant to post artworks I'm really excited about knowing that a large percentage of my IG artist peers have essentially unlimited time / resources (don't have to work for a living... sigh) and that there isn't really a strong distinction between plagiarizing something and being influenced by something when your brain is in doomscroll mode.

[trinovantes]

Like most social networks, it's really good at messing with people's dopamine. It's specifically designed to create addicts. Other addictive products like nicotine and alcohol are highly regulated whereas kids can easily access Instagram on their phones.