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I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway...

My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community for the same thing that has a disturbing tendency to flame out and generally mock newbies.

What I take away from this is that Instagram, like all metaphorical tools, is what you make of it. If you only follow beautiful people, you may only get shallow content. If you follow interesting people who share interesting things, you'll get interesting content.

Completely agree. I do however think the way the instagram app works you are guided down a path littered with product sales pages, advertising and general mundane materialism. I think at its core this culture is good for their business model.

Without hawking other items, they’re mostly just making instagram money. I’m not saying it’s good, but the it’s the expected behavior for this incentive structure.

Somehow I've grown blind to the ads on instagram. I know they are there, if I actively look for them I will find them, but if I close my eyes cannot picture the contents of any ad I've seen lately on on Instagram.

When I scroll through the feed it's like I've subconsciously trained myself to immediately scroll past and ignore sponsored posts, and immediately click past sponsored stories. I can't be the only one in this boat.

Same here. I only follow woodworkers and immediately unfollow anyone who gets outside the line of what i want in my feed. It has allowed me to find interesting niches in the hobby and connect with people with 10x the skill who like teaching and talking about technique, but it takes a pretty brutal type of curating to keep the influencers & garbage out.

This comment is surely too late, but I feel like it's worth preserving. I think the woodworking community is more prone to that than the metalworking community. I hate to say it, but I think it's a question of barrier to entry. It's hard to be dilettante in metalworking when it requires a huge investment and moving tens of thousands of pounds of equipment.

What's your ig account so i can see what you follow? (presumebly not being privatE)

I agree with you. Instagram is the only social media I still use, and it's mainly because it's so non-toxic. I mostly see stuff related to my hobbies, some comic stripes, some friends I care about. It's by definition a bubble, but it's one that is actually chosen by me. Mainly, its pleasantness comes from the sensation of not being inundated by contents, by the lack of importance that comments have, etc. I bet it's possible to have a different experience, if I followed influencers and whatnot it would be much worst. However, for how I use it, I don't mind it and I actually get to know interesting things.

Adjacently related, I follow a lot of artists on Twitter. A recurring complaint, including for myself when I previously used Instagram was non-permissioned and uncredited reposting of artist’s content. As an artist it is a problem for obvious reasons, for a user if I like the work I want to know exactly who did it and why.

Of course this can and does happen on twitter, but I think two thinks make the results more favorable. The first is the poster can get called out on what they did. Secondly, Twitter’s less reliance on algorithmic feeds mean the content theft is less “rewarded.”

The whole Tumblr fiasco upset a lot of artists and pretty much terminated the use of any artists whose work triggered the nudity detection filter, which was easy to do. Twitter gets complaints about compression, especially with videos and pixel art. All of the extra tweets that come with the art has forced me to unfollow a lot of artists whose work I like. Instagram has the issue I just described. All of those billions of dollars invested in consumer content sharing apps and this is the current state of things.

I want to use Instagram as you describe but only if I could remove the like button. Its existence makes it feel like I’m pandering for likes about anything I post so I just uninstall the app. I want to share things with people with nothing expected in return.

Snapchat fills that role for me. Just fleeting moments or interesting things from the day to day. The impermanence is refreshing.

With pictures posted on social media, I came to realize that I had a certain audience in mind with each post. If I posted a picture of me hiking, I want my hiking friends to see it. So instead of dragging everyone else through my life, I just text my hiking pics to my hiking friends and get a lot more genuine and direct communication as a result.

That's good for you. It's great that you found interesting people in Instagram, but that doesn't change the fact that for 95% of users Instagram is as the GP described: a cesspool of shallowness, materialism, false appearances, and a great harm to the mental health of our youth (and not only youth).

Do you have anything to back that up? Most people I know who use Instagram use it for hobbies or a local version of Etsy.

I don’t know a single person who follows these useless Reality TV personalities. I mean, they obviously have a lot of followers, but there is a billion people on Instagram and the highest amount of followers is still in the millions. That’s hardly 95%.

Exactly....the problem is not Instagram, the problem is what our culture has become. Our technology has helped accelerate that, but it isn't the root cause.

Indeed. Instagram was (is) just a place where people congregate on-line, with particular focus on the visual aspect. It's marketing that infected it, just like it does everything in our lives. If Instagram is to be blamed, it can only be blamed for not fighting back. Unfortunately, it's in their interest for this infection to take hold.

This is a great point. It's not one I would have figured out myself until I actually went and made an interest specific Instagram. It turns out that having absolutely zero ties to people I know in real life makes that account way more pleasant, as it is directly and solely related to my aesthetic and artistic interests.

Same here, except with astronomy/astrophotography and outdoors stuff. I like Instagram in that way and don't follow any big celebrities or big influencers, so never see any #ad sort of stuff.

> There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it.

I'm not convinced that's a fair measure. Instagram, YouTube, and maybe a couple of things are some of the few advertisements that actually reach me. I run an adblocker and don't watch TV commercials. The ads are generally about things I like, I find them non-offensive, and I have actually made purchases as a result.

> It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies.

I have an "insta-famous" dog more as a hobby than anything, and businesses often offer us things for free or deeply discounted in exchange for fair review and a post with our dog; we never offer/ask. We also have had (major brand) businesses who wanted us to shoot pictures of our dog with their product for their website for free, with no attribution, and with no discount or free products. So, from my perspective, the businesses aren't exactly being taken advantage of here.

Even worse are the kid influencers on YouTube. Kids advertising to other kids. And parents trying to turn their own kids into influencers.

The whole thing is just gross.

you mean parents forcefully making their children prodigies in teenis, chess etc. is bad? same goes with youtubers

You don't see the difference between Chess and trying to be famous for being famous?

I think there's huge amount of difference between chess or tennis prodigies promoting their activity by teaching kids the proper techniques vs. Timmy unboxing a new box of Legos and dunking them in Jello #sponsored.

Tennis, chess, violin, singing — these are at least skills that may be valuable later in life. "Instagram influencer" is a net negative for the kid's future. But, yes, I'd say parents making their children excel at anything by force are doing it wrong, and not setting them up for lifelong satisfaction.

Yep, some parents are really making narcissistic douchebags

>used their specific influencer promo code.

This is like the difference between old web advertising pay per click and new web advertising pay per impression. Getting someone to use a code is an order of magnitude harder to get than a click through.

If you think you are going to get more than just an impression, you're delusional. And most impressions are fake.

> it is the antithesis of the issue

Friendly nitpick: antithesis means the opposite of something. You probably want epitome, archetype, exemplar, quintessence, apotheosis, or similar.

It is a complicated issue, because if you are reviewing products in a niche, and producing truly useful content around it, then getting all the stuff for retail price could be prohibitively expensive.

And doing all of that for hoping that posting the content with a promo code MAY refer 30 people, so that you could get the same item at a discount?

That seems unreasonable.

On the other hand, I have 1st hand experience on how hard it is doing marketing profitably. You are throwing most of your money straight out the window, most campaigns bring in 0 conversions, some even 0 impressions..

So being a busy businessperson juggling all the daily operations stuff, being so done with the bullshit marketing opportunities bringing in nothing, and the freebie seeker influencers, why would this next person asking for stuff be different?

It looks like most of that behavior is a sham and brands are waking up to that. Hopefully people in general are waking up to the sham and don’t get influenced by shallow actors.

> It’s highly ineffective

Other than a click through and sale, it's hard for any advertising to prove effectiveness. Yet, there are still ads on TV and the radio. For many brands, small influencers are a cheap way (some free product and maybe some money) to keep product in front of people when thought of in aggregate.

> Other than a click through and sale, it's hard for any advertising to prove effectiveness.

Advertising industry has a vested interest in keeping things this way, and only maintain perception of effectiveness to milk customers.

Then what happens when competing ad agency calls up your client and explains how bullshit your metrics are? Advertisers compete more than they collude, we don't have a cartel (yet).

How would they know what my metrics are? Chances are, their whole business is based on pulling the same bullshit as I am anyway.

Competition in an industry whose core competency is lying to people doesn't breed trust.

For the most part you are right. But isn't this the normal outcome of a successful business model eventually attracting many imposters because they hear about pros making money.

Companies like Traackr offer saas services to analyze the social graph to make a massive impact with 30 real influencers. This service starts at $30k and they delivered for watch brands and telcos primetime media exposure to millions of potential customers without directly advertising.

If so many people are doing something it probably means some of them are actually making a ton of cash.

https://www.traackr.com/

I dont have Facebook as I found it stupid as fuck when it started.

I dont have Instagram cause why the fuck I would?

I don't even have a LinkedIn since I like privacy on my carreer and because I wanted to do it before it existed lol

I have a "read only" Twitter to follow some friends and technical people which I barely use.

You know what the problem is? Dota2, Hearthstone, Overwatch... Too much time "wasted".

> I dont have [social network] cause why the fuck I would?

Because you have friends, family, and former coworkers in far away places that you enjoy keeping in touch with. It's one thing to write them an email or letter regularly, but it's also nice to open the app and see a random picture of your nephew at the zoo or see a pic from an office birthday gathering or maybe a short clip of a former coworker playing their new guitar. It's a low friction, low effort way to stay connected and it generates happiness.

> it's also nice to open the app and see a random picture of your nephew at the zoo or see a pic from an office birthday gathering or maybe a short clip of a former coworker playing their new guitar.

Serious question: Is there a social network that allows me to do any of those things anymore? The first 10 things on my Facebook feed are:

1. My own un-republished 'memory'. 2. A 'humorous' re-post. 3. Someone else's re-published memory of a humorous re-post. 4. A scammy ad. 5. A photo from someone I know posted to someone I know that I have no interest in. 6. A real person status (in large text with obnoxious background that I thought was a re-post of some meme). 7. A humorous re-post. 8. "People You May Know" 9. A real, honest to god, set of pictures of family and friends. 10. Someone else's memory of a humorous re-post.

If I'm honest, I care about (6) but I'd like it to be actual text, and (9). (5) is acceptable because depending on the photo I'm sometimes interested. So at best we're looking at 30% of content I want, 10% ads, 10% FB trying to sink its claws a little deeper, and 50% other noise. I know I can make my experience better by doing certain things. But those things move around, change, and feel like switches that don't do anything plugged into a black box that just does whatever it wants. So, I'm kind of at a place of 'why bother'.

Instagram mostly works for me, but its photo-oriented and most of the people I know on it are my younger friends. Twitter is a mess. Anything else I've heard of none of my friends or family use.

I’m in the same boat. I want an actual social network to keep in touch with people. No memes, no ads (give me the ability to opt out of ads by paying), no creepy “people you may know”, etc.

Is that so hard? I feel like there’s opportunity for a honest business with non-intrusive ads that you can opt out of by paying.

Instagram is the only social network that works for me. Photos are exactly what I want to see when I open the app (which I do once or twice a week). I follow only people I know personally and I don't follow hashtags or brands.

The percentage of ads is going up and that bothers me. If I could pay a reasonable fee (maybe $5 / month) to get rid of them, I would.

That is an entirely unconvincing argument. Social Networks facilitate those sorts of activities to an astonishingly marginal degree.

Maybe, but there's nothing better right now.

Apologies for my "lmfao" comment after reading hiven's post. The comment didn't add anything to the conversation and was a dumb mistake.