Turning Instagram into a Radically Unfiltered Travel Guide | Hacker News Reader

Turning Instagram into a Radically Unfiltered Travel Guide

nytimes.com

88 pointsdpflan52 comments

Wow, like others, I skimmed this and had no idea what the author was trying to say. So I skimmed a bit more carefully, and still don't understand what the point of the article is - very frustrating.

But I did learn something new: Instagram has pages that show the pictures tagged at certain locations.

For example, the article references Goree Island, a place with a terrible history. Here is the instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/745847284/

The volume of pictures is high (20+ a day for well known locations), and it is super cool for me to see pictures at these places every day.

Just a random assortment of places and their recent pictures:

Willis / Sears Tower, Chicago: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/263485600/

Tianmen Sauare, Beijing: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/215668553/

Pyongyang, North Korea: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/246148050/

Cosmopolitan Hotel, Las Vegas: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/866213/

Salento, Colombia: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/215264674/

How do you search for a location?

You can through the API:

https://www.instagram.com/developer/endpoints/locations/

You pass in a lat and a long and it returns all locations within 500 meters by default. The radius is customizable but can't go beyond 750 meters.

Or you can pass in a Facebook Place ID instead [1] although most of the interesting info about Facebook 'Places' is in a cross-referenced thing called a 'Location' [2]

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/pla...

[2] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/loc...

Just use the normal search box. For example, type "SFMOMA" and the third result is the location with the geo pin icon.

also works with tags! e.g. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/Pyongyang/

Oh internet, so stereotypical. Of course the "Top Posts" for most of these is pictures of attractive women (and the occasional man). The notable exception being North Korea.

I don't understand why this is a bad thing on the PC list. They are pictures to be clear, and attractive pictures tend to have more likes. We're also humans, and being attracted to other humans is in our DNA, so, we should stop shaming people for it.

Besides, it's only 9 posts, and they aren't all of "hot chicks." The (argh!!) used-to-be-chronological list starts above the fold. This seems silly to be upset by.

> The (argh!!) used-to-be-chronological list starts above the fold.

I'm pretty confident that the photo lists on tags, etc are still strictly chronological. It's just timelines that have changed.

For the most part, that's an artifact of Instagram (and similar sharing-for-likes services) more so than 'the Internet'.

While there exist many services where a content creator posts photos and gets likes (e.g. Flickr, 500px, Tumblr), Instagram is uniquely person-centric, and most content is either intended to be implicit self-promotion or can be reasonably interpreted to be such [1][2].

This amplifies the popularity of already-popular, conventionally-attractive people projecting successful lifestyles filled with travel, entertainment, and adventure, because that's what we aspire to, or inspired by, or is consistent with what we want to project to our circles.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/life-i...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/07/...

From what I saw, for many of them the "top posts" were just the most recent posts.

Maybe beautiful people travel more? Maybe they use instagram more?

Why shouldn't that be the case? Why would the top posts be just the place in question? There's tons of high quality pro photos out there. And attractive people probably have more "friends" and get more "likes".

It's like people that go on vacation and take pictures of famous landmarks without themselves in it. What's the point?

Apparently Goree wasn't actually the point of departure for many slaves: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/07/01...

Many orders of magnitude more went out through the nearby rivers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor%C3%A9e

Either way, I never knew about this island, and learning about it has been interesting, so thanks for mentioning it!

I was just there a few weeks ago... it's an extremely moving place - I had tears in my eyes reading the info panels and seeing the slave quarters.

There are quotes on the wall from all kinds of world leaders that have been there, very inspirational stuff.

I highly recommend a visit.

So the point is that one can use the more visually-centric social media platforms to do a bit of R&D prior to travelling; that's cool, good idea. I especially like the note on:

    "This approach also affords a window into cultural insights 
     I might not get otherwise. The year before, in Morocco, a 
     group of friends and I were unsure how best to dress when 
     walking around a small town outside Tangier — we wanted to 
     be especially respectful because we were visiting during 
     Ramadan — so we browsed local Instagram posts until we had 
     a sense of what was appropriate..."

I think I'll try this for my next travel.

The correct answer is to dress as you would dress any other day in any other approximate location. Why should someone else's beliefs influence their behavior to such an extent?

You have every right to dress however you want.

However, if you wear shorts, t-shirt and Tevas in a marketplace in Morocco, they will think of you as a clueless tourist, and treat you accordingly.

(And if you wear a burka in France they will fine you and tell you to take it off.)

Having a sense of what the locals wear shows respect. I wouldn't walk into the Vatican without a shirt on, or an Amish farm wearing short-shorts.

In conservative cultures, especially for females, it can be much safer to dress to the local dress code, even if it that is different from your personal beliefs.

I have no idea what this article is trying to get across, but I can share one thing I use Instagram location search for: surf conditions.

There are a few spots (that will remain nameless) I like to surf that are kinda in the middle of nowhere. Wind forecasts for them are usually off, and it's a big commitment to drive there myself just to find it ripped up by the wind.

These spots are, however, really popular for tourists driving down the coast. It's really easy to search Instagram, find a bunch of selfies in front of the ocean, and know what the wind was doing ~30m ago.

That's cool, and that is what the article is trying to get across - using Instagram (and other sources) to assess the (near current) state of a location. A dedicated webcam or drone could be useful here too (or even errant Pokemon Go players with GoPros? :))

For most well known spots there's http://surfline.com. Drones is an interesting idea. I suppose we're not quite there yet.

It would be interesting to see a "realtime" view of all of those spots on one page.

In reference to the Green Book, which I just had learned about last week, the US had so-called "sundown towns" [1] where it was ill-advised for people of color to be out after sundown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

Sundown towns to some degree still exist. Maybe not so much that they are unsafe after dark, but that they're still 95+% white and intolerance still exists.

Waverly, OH is one example — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverly,_Ohio

I am planning a trip. So this is interesting to me. The photos for my destination are telling me something but I'm not sure what. There's hardly any text.

I recently found the strange little town of Marfa, TX on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/214761100/

> What I see there is wildly unfiltered

Actually, what you see there is heavily filtered.

Wow this could use a tl;dr .. Scanned through but didn't come across anything of substance.

Is there a takeaway to this?

tl;dr Location-based photofeeds are like surveillance cameras and give you a taste of a destination in real-time to help you make a decision.

Many of the most popular accounts and aggregators will post "latergrams" and since the most popular photos are featured at the top, one should consider that the feed is realtime relative to when users post but not necessarily realtime relative to when photos were taken.

For example, in a big city like NYC you'll see shots posted with snow even in the middle of summer.

yes. and platforms like Hootsuite lets you easily queue up and post them at a pre-scheduled time.

my thought is. is there an interest for hyperlocal/true realtime instagram clone. so people can really discover what's around them

I wonder if Instagram preserves the metadata for capture time, etc on posted images.

The TLDR created as a reply to this is good, but perhaps the article highlights the need for an service that integrates the app siloed data into a coherent experience rather than shuffling through apps.

THey're saying you can use the geo-tags on pictures (along with the site's ability to find pictures taken in a certain area) to determine whether you'd like to go there or not, and plan your trip accordingly. They keep saying "guidebook", like you'd make your own list of destinations in that area that you want to visit.

I basically made our Tokyo tour without using a professional tour guide, and knowing this about Instagram (assuming it applies to Tokyo) would have been very nice at the time.

Edit: After playing with it a bit, I don't see how this would work well at all. I was unable to "explore" without knowing exactly what I wanted to explore in the first place, so it wasn't any good for planning a trip to a new place.

You could browse common hashtags like #tokyo or the location tags of the major neighborhoods, but you're right that this works better when you have a list of destinations or places that you're curious about and would like to see what they're really like. I do this myself, but even I admit the author's point, or terminology at least, is exaggerated.

Sometimes I bookmark restaurants in NYC after seeing some particularly good food on Instagram.

Non mobile: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/turning-instagram...

Thanks! I meant to edit the URL, but I forgot. X_x

erm, are the images going insane for anyone else on that page? example https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/08/28/magazine/28ontech... has what looks like weird barcode effects animating in and out?

Yeah, that's super weird. I'm assuming not deliberate.

Safari 9.1.2 on OS X 10.11.6

Win 7, tried in latest Chrome and Firefox, thought it might be a graphics driver issue, but I'm assuming not if it's across OS X as well

The captions mention "Photo Illustration by ..." with a credit to the source photography, so this actually looks intentional.

It's very jarring and distracting.

Definitely deliberate. Captions say "Photo Illustration."

Win10, Chrome. Same effect here. Weird, but cool.

Incredibly distracting and visually painful. I had to scroll them just out of view to read the article. I'm surprised the NYT would do this intentionally.

@dang - Can we please change the url from mobile to desktop?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/turning-instagram...

Actually, I liked that it linked to mobile -- no paywall on mobile it seems.

The paywall being shown varies, and you can generally get around it by clicking the web link at the top.

I know how to get around the paywall but it's still a pain and a lot easier when it doesn't show up, and it may vary, but for me, it shows up 100% of the time on desktop and 0% of the time on mobile.

Yes. I did that because it's standard practice to use canonical URLs here, but if there really is a significant difference in paywalls, maybe we shouldn't. Man I wish this weren't so complicated.

or google maps

I used to find interesting spots by browsing the pictures at a certain location on the old Google Maps; I've used Flickr for this as well.

However: for real stories, I'm still visiting WordPress.com and read the entries there.

I think this works well on Google Maps because you pan around and find nearby towns you might not have heard of.

Noticed the floating 'subscribe' bar. Does anyone really subscribe to read news sites online? Could see more and more of these paywalls on news sites lately.

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