Instagram has turned us against ourselves | Hacker News Reader

Instagram has turned us against ourselves

streaking.app

46 pointsswlkr40 comments

Set your profile to private and stop giving a shit about engagement. If you're selling something, great, make a themed profile and increase your follower count with as many #hashtags as you can cram into that comment section. If you're using it socially, post about your life and chill out on measures of popularity.

I do strongly agree with the idea that we need a better way to reach out to our friends. Posting a photo and getting likes isn't staying in touch. It's fine for acquaintances, but you should talk to the people you care about, not just check up on their recent posts.

I recently deleted facebook and instagram in an effort to take back my privacy. I really miss the stories feature on instagram. Stories don't have a concept of engagement besides views. People actually post what they're doing throughout the day in small, bite size pieces. I think it's a fantastic way to keep up with people.

Interesting - I see this less as "keeping up with people" and more voyeurism. It feels odd to me when I see someone who I haven't talked to in a while but I know all about what they've been doing/etc.

Eh idk. I’d say that it’s more like going to a play to watch an old acquaintance perform while sitting in the way back where they can’t see. Is that voyeurism? Because on social media, typically the idea is people opt to display their lives so that they can be observed. Idk for me voyeurism implies more of a one sided observation where the observed isn’t really aware or intending.

The whole point is that these services use psychological tactics to make it hard to "stop giving a shit about engagement." Your brain gets addicted to all the little dopamine hits you get from using them, so when you try to just stop using them, it's a bit like going cold turkey. Your brain has to adjust to not getting that constant dopamine drip-feed anymore.

Chat apps like Discord are great for groups you actually want to keep in touch with. That's what I use for my friends from college

I think the same thing. I got tired of just liking pictures on IG. I created a side project which sends me email reminders for friends I want to keep in touch with, but are not in my everyday, close circle. Every email has a direct link to Whatsapp, which opens directly into my friend's chat with a pre-set message('Hi!'). It helped me reconnect and start real conversations beyond double tapping a picture.

I agree, but also feel it’s a consequence of a reduced role for public living in our cities. I think of this question: How many locations do I have in my life in which I socialize without buying something? There are homes, of course. A few city parks? I’m a member of no social clubs, so not much else. We are seeking alternatives to public life without having the urban and (more importantly) social infrastructure to achieve it.

the limit is 30 tags

instagram/facebook public posts were always for acquaintances/broader

most people had groups/groupchats for more personal communication with the closer groups... and those groups have instagram gcs..

im confused did people not understand this?

I don't care about how many likes or how many followers I get. I use Instagram to share my photography which is my hobby. I only follow my friends and people whose posts I genuinely want to see. Through Instagram I've been able to connect with other likeminded photographers that inspire me with their work and support me in mine. I also find it a great way to keep up with old friends that never used Facebook in the same way.

If your happiness is dependent on the attention you receive on these social media apps, there are likely deeper problems that you should address beyond simply deleting the app and telling everyone else who uses it to do the same.

There's a certain irony to all of these posts that have been cropping up lately on how "I deleted (insert social media service here) and it made me happier". Many of these posts cite the cessation of the race for validation as the reason for their increase in happiness. If you weren't expecting the same validation that you got from the service you just left, would you have really made the post? Couldn't you have simply just quit and be done with it? Deleting Instagram may temporarily improve your mental health, but it isn't a cure for a deeper underlying problem.

This is true, I probably have a deeper underlying problem, but IG definitely wasn't helping me.

I guess the problem is that they actively try to addict you to get you to use the app more, you may have a stronger mental fortitude than I do, which is why you don't succumb to this.

If it were just a photography app like 500px, things would be a little different, since it's social, a lot of things get conflated that shouldn't.

> I use Instagram to share my photography which is my hobby.

But Instagram has horrific resizing and compression algorithms that make good DSLR photos look like artifacted junk. They're designed to plaster over the smudgy quality of phone photos and when you feed them a 20MB 100% JPEG it all falls apart.

I realised this when IG photos from my ancient 350D beater were less artifacted than photos from the 1Ds3...

And they do something to colours, red-shifting blues to purples; presumably for more POP on mobiles.

You'd be better using a proper gallery site.

that no one would visit

I feel this way about social media in general.

I completely deleted all of my social media profiles about three years ago. A few weeks back, I created an entirely new twitter account because I've been giving more software talks lately and I've noticed that I'm the only speaker without a twitter handle.

But I find myself falling into the engagement trap constantly, since I still have a tiny following. In trying to think "what should I tweet that will get likes?", I'm already conditioning myself to pursue engagement.

The thought of getting my twitter following back to what it was only a few years ago seems really daunting, and I'm already put off by the thought a few weeks in.

"I'm already conditioning myself to pursue engagement."

We are all brand managers now.

You could say we are all influencers now

Do you have a website/app/product you promote?

Nothing wrong with keeping your friends/followers happy with an occasional positive statement.

This way you can post your true feelings later in a less popular post.

> People are reduced to a single identity

You can have multiple accounts and the Instagram UI makes it easy to switch. You can click the name of the account and a drop down appears. You then click the account you want to use and it immediately switches you without any hassles.

Most people I know (18-28 demographic) have several accounts.

I own a reptile and my main account is reptile posting along with some nature photos taken from the odd times I go on hikes. This account is my "nature photography" account. It's the one I use to enjoy the gamification part of Instagram. I enjoy hunting for likes and adjust the photos I post there based on reception.

The second account is a sh*tposting account that is private and is filled with inside jokes. This account is only followed by close friends.

My third account is my family account. It's filled with family photos and my mom and aunts follow it. This account is also private.

My fourth account is my developer / workplace account and has no photos. It is temporary because it is registered using the corporate email account and when I change jobs, I create it again from scratch.

Most kids I know have one or more finsta accounts plus a "real" one that they let their family follow.

Exactly. It's so common that there's even lingo around it. Finsta and Rinsta. Fake instagram account / real instagram account.

Frame or Fake?

Autocorrect. Thanks, caught it in time to edit.

My dopamine response system has apparently never bought into the idea that likes actually determine my value in any way. I seem just use them to see what specific friends or colleagues are interested in and invite them for a specific activity. Vegetarian? Invite them for pizza not a BBQ. Outdoorsy? See if they want to go skiing or hiking some time. Based on what I see and hear I feel pretty lucky.

If you are actually using likes as useful data points for meaningful action you are way ahead of most people. To me, and I imagine many others, likes are just a passive acknowledgement of popularity with only wafer thin meaning. Not doing anything with those likes is part of what makes them such a problem and one of many reasons I avoid social media.

Counterpoint: IG allows you to curate an online photo album about yourself and either broadcast it to the world or distribute it to a permissioned list, and this has significant value for many people.

It also has intrinsic negative value for many, in the way outlined by the author (and also described by the seminal Wait but Why post [0]). People see their friends posting snapshots of their nominally awesome lives and feel pressure to keep up, and basically everyone makes each other more miserable by generating FOMO in others, etc.

I'm not saying that this sehnsucht-generation isn't real, or that it doesn't mess some people up -- it is and it does. But if we're judging IG on its overall merits the downside has to be weighed against the fact that IG helps people learn about each other through a pretty elegant interface -- right?

Also, the author seems to be eliding the differences between a) best practices for building and monetizing an IG following as an influencer with a public-facing account and b) the general stress of 'keeping up with' your college classmates:

> We can talk about free or paid apps, ads or donations, we can talk about tipping and buy me a coffee, or patreon subscriptions. We can talk about all of that, or we can get to the heart of what really matters. Things that are easy to do, aren't always the best things for us.

By my reading, in this passage he is conflating the measures IG influencers take to help themselves make money on Instagram with the stress and angst that IG users who are not trying to make a living off of IG posts feel with respect to keeping up with their high school classmates and whatnot. Seems like a pretty clear category-mistake to me.

[0]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...

I've never heard of waitbutwhy, wow this site is amazing.

You're right. I was conflating influencers together with regular users.

I guess I don't usually separate them when I rant about IG, I rant about it quite a bit. It would be nice if it was all IG ads and regular users or if influencers were marked as such… maybe.

Sure, but less Skinner boxlike alternatives have always existed. Flickr, Google Photos, Apple Photos, hell even Facebook's own photo albums are less designed to maximize engagement and compulsion. Of course, these options have smaller audiences because of network effects, fostering IG's domination, and so on.

I see the reasoning, but I don't think it's necessarily true. Look at someone like Joe Rogan, who has millions of followers but a fairly eclectic mix of content and no one thing that defines what he does (interviewer, commentator, hiker, traveler, hunter, MMA enthusiast, fitness and "nutrition" advocate, etc).

Come to think of it, most of the famous people I follow post random content as well, like musician Ola Englund posting funny videos of his kids or UFC fighter Derrick Lewis posting almost nothing UFC or fighting related. If anything, the unexpected content makes a person MORE worth following because it's not just generic self-promotion the whole time.

It's a mixed bag, and the author definitely has some warrant for concern, but I think it's overblown.

I've noticed this too, like pewdiepie on youtube, similar situation. Of course he also spent years as the "guy who streams himself playing games"

There's something really unsettling about the way this article casually drops a Ted Kaczynski reference without, you know, even doing so much as alluding to the messed-up things that he did. There are probably better examples of people to use, right?

Yeah you're right, definitely not a great person, but I used the reference because he turned out to be right about the negative effects of "over-socialization"

If you are "working on your personal brand" or whatever... sure. I just post pictures of stuff I do, and my friends see it. The end. I don't care at all about "getting engagements"

Did anyone notice the website for this post? The author of this post seems to have created the site too:

-- https://streaking.app/about

-- https://streaking.app/@sean

This idea of tracking streaks is good; is there a meta-service/platform for monitoring "streaks" of "anything"?

Guilty . Yeah that would be cool! The closest I've seen is wip.chat, but something meta that's just for streaks would be great, sign me up as the first user!

Two big services in the indie-maker space are:

-- Makerlog (free): https://getmakerlog.com/

-- WIP (paid): https://wip.chat/

Both allow you to record what progress you've made while also tracking the number of days in a row you've been delivering.

> deleting accounts and ostracizing yourself socially

I read this as the former implying the latter, and was reminded of a tweet by Mike Monteiro that was something like[1]:

> I’ve seen excuses from people who say they want to leave Facebook but can’t that would make heroin addicts blush

[1]: He was part of DeactiDay, so the account and tweet are no longer available.

When I click this link I am "turned against myself" by what seems like an automatic history.back(). Is this a metaphor? (edit: A half hour later and it is still doing this for me despite other people seemingly commenting on the content of an article. I am using iOS 10.)

Oh interesting… there shouldn't be anything like that there. In fact, it should work with js disabled entirely, assuming js is the culprit here. For what it's worth, I don't have access to iOS 10, but I did try it on Safari in the latest iOS and had no issue, sorry I can't help more

If the author is reading HN, please add something like this:

  p { line-height: 25px; }

The text is hard to read from being so bunched together.

I am reading this, and yes I will do that! Thanks for letting me know

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