Whereas I'm 33 and Instagram is the only social network that I use anymore, because the product prioritizes sharing a human experience rather than a political article or an opinion. Snapchat is the same, but I never got into it (cf. my age).
"In the real world, people slow down and look at car crashes. On the internet, they do the same - but it's interpreted by the system as a demand for more car crashes, which the system will then attempt to supply"
- paraphrase of a comment seen on Twitter
Currently going around on my twitter is a reminder not to retweet screenshots of professional troll / Mail "journalist" Katie Hopkins calling for a "final solution" to Islam (in the context of the Manchester bombing). That's the kind of thing I mean: engaging with it at all is just feeding the outrage machine. Report and block instead.
However, I remember the wild west days of forums made by people for people, with child and sibling forums and all sorts of stuff, and politics was always important, as was art, both to just enjoy and to criticize. Even arguing to show off who knew more or could save face better was great. Maybe that's nostalgia speaking, but we did learn from each other, we did change our opinions sometimes. Maybe it was because it was like 100-300 people, over years, more a village dynamic than a mall or festival. You couldn't just steal or destroy and be never seen again, what we did was and immune and not interesting to those types. We also shared photos and videos like crazy, we wrote poems or whatever, but I also wouldn't have missed the bits where we took ourselves too seriously and had drawn out discussions, those sometimes were the best bit. We weren't so uptight, didn't have such thin skins, as is the norm today, that I'll claim. We spawned from something that spawned from something that spawned from stileproject, after all.
I remember this guy being kind of a racist, and we sometimes called him out for it, but otherwise he was still a member, and after a while he wasn't so racist anymore. I still think fondly of that, having shown him the door for "being in the wrong place" because of his initial remarks would have been a huge waste. He became a photo journalist and showed us many great things, too. Sorry for rambling, I don't think I have a point other than fond memories of political debates, and I bet you every one of the inner core will remember that forum for as long as they live, and we didn't even do anything that special.. it's like back then there was grass, and now there's concrete, and that makes the grass seem like a jungle.
Such a soul sucking compulsion, truly a product of modern times.
I personally have a preference of opinions over pure vanity.
- Vain opinions and opinions based on good marketing that appear on Facebook are still vanity and marketing.
- Curating your feed on any service is paramount, and maybe my anecdotal experience is based on having curated Instagram well, whereas Facebook was a sprawl of vain or disingenuous political theater.
I think the big distinction is in feed curation, and to that end, I believe that Instagram promotes direct follow of highly popular accounts that can reinforce negative self-perception. I just don't really follow any big accounts, just friends whose hijinks I appreciate.
Browsing Facebook 5 hours / week is not the same as browsing Facebook 5 hours a day. So phrased, this seems to be nothing intrinsically new -- television and video games have these kinds of effects as well.
I don't recall ever seeing an ad on Instagram. Must have something to do with the sort of accounts one follows.
It's just down to chance whether the people following you see it, based on how many they're following and how much recent activity there has been with their followings.
Guess I'm a very basic user...
Thanks.