RealAboutInstagram – a replica highlighting harmful strategies | Hacker News Reader

RealAboutInstagram – a replica highlighting harmful strategies

realaboutinstagram.netlify.app

87 pointsSantiDev32 comments

Hello HN! I'm a creative technologist and recently decided to develop RealAboutInstagram, a replica of the current About page of Instagram replacing its content with their current harmful strategies used on the platform and the negative impacts of social media.

The information on the website is extracted from resources such as the Digital Minimalism book by Cal Newport, Ted Talks, and many others that can be found in the footer.

This is one of many projects for my career, and I appreciate anyone taking the time to read this and check out the website.

You can check out my other projects at https://santiagoaguirre.netlify.app/

Thank you for your time!

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While the site is pretty cool I don't think it will convince anyone because it argues both from the perspective of someone who isn't on IG to people who aren't on IG. Nobody who's on IG actually thinks about IG like this. As crazy as it sounds to people on HN people seem to generally like the ads on IG. Stories are about posting and seeing what your friends are up to just like Snap stories, Reels are just IG posts but in TikTok format.

This kind of content is dangerously close to "kids today and their rap music" or "it's those violent video games." If you want to persuade more than just my parents whose only experience with IG is what the nightly news says about it you have to show how my posting my vacation photos and scrolling through is bad for my mental health. Because it absolutely is but it doesn't touch on why in a way that's actually relatable to IG users.

> This kind of content is dangerously close to "kids today and their rap music" or "it's those violent video games."

Agreed - several statements on this page seem to stem from disliking what Instagram does and favoring what it doesn’t, seemingly assuming that you should automatically agree to that world view. For instance, this site seems to argue against short reels and for long form videos. I for one find videos generally inaccessible, I seem to lack the necessary attention span, and reels or shorts are the only video format that works for me. My point being - neither is better than the other, and preferring one over the other, even as a platform, isn’t inherently bad, as this page seems to suggest.

> "kids today and their rap music"

I feel like teens are on other platforms? Many 30 and 40-somethings I know spend a ton of their idle time scrolling instagram, sharing reels with each other, and buying random stuff that pops up

Gen Z (like actually in high school still) are on Instagram still, at least in Australia; they do use discord a huge amount, and TikTok obviously. This is what I’ve observed of the younger people in my online gaming group (Valorant Premier is a lot of fun, as an aside), but then that’s also likely got some selection bias.

It looks like you're using a demo font, so it's missing some characters and is probably in violating of its license.

Karla is a free font that's somewhat similar to the design of Meta's corporate font: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Karla

Might this use be protected and allowed since this is a parody?

I don’t think so because the critique is not of the font. Something like Times Newer Roman[0] might fall into that category?

(Fair use is notoriously misunderstood, and I am no exception.)

[0]: https://timesnewerroman.com/

Is that really legal?

Seems that they are using Time News Roman's glyphs.

i once heard somewhere that the shapes aren't copyrightable so as long as you change the name you're good? but maybe not since they claim on that page to have used a similar free font (Nimbus Roman No.9 L) as the basis

Fair Use only applies to the thing being critiqued/parodied. You can’t just violate a license because you’re critiquing some completely different thing.

It’s interesting, but before reading the explanation I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. If you never went on the Instagram "About" page you don’t understand what this is refering to.

I feel like this would be 100 times cooler if it was a fake “feed” scroll with posts that are made to mirror the techniques and dark patterns they abuse to keep you hooked.

That is a fantastic idea!

IMO it is not about social media influencing the youngs' culture, but in contract, just welly-designed products that fit most of their target audiences' needs.

The world is constantly changing and each generation is special and different.

I enjoyed this. I'd like to see some deeper examination about becoming your own product, and living with an audience in your mind. Prostitution where the currency is Likes.

I cringed when Zuckerberg said "We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living" in the press.

Did you even ask creators?

Creators don't want that BS. Creators want their work to be seen in the format that is best suited to their work. Not all art forms lend themselves to short, low-res videos.

Reels and the idiotic algorithmic prioritization of Reels over still images destroyed the storefronts of thousands who depended on still images to sell themselves.

Cute, but I think that people who are addicted to Instagram are probably aware of and immune to this kind of argument, which means it ends up being for people who are already resistant to Instagram. Which is to say, it's not going to change anybody's mind. Hope I'm wrong.

Great work! I think I'm on the right path because I've read, or saw mentions, to most of the links in the footer, specially the book from Cal Newport. A small CSS detail: there's a horizontal scrollbar, which you can fix by removing the width property from #nav.

The app download link at the bottom is to the Spanish app store

Easy to criticize, much more difficult to provide solutions

You expect single open source developers to provide solutions. That’s like telling you to lay off plastic straws to save the planet.

What's the issue with single open source developers providing solutions? I would expect they'd have an easier time than married ones because of the time commitment married people should give to their family.

Some problems are not solvable in software. They are emergent human behavioral issues that are not obvious until larger scales are reached. When you reach scale you have issues with threat actors at different levels. One is the platform operator itself, scale costs money to run and exploiting human weakness is one way to pay for the operation. Others would be scammers/spammers in a system. Then you have the users in the system that can be threats to each other.

There is no easy time for anyone to provide solutions to these problems and it's possible there are not solutions at particular larger scales.

Was Zuck married when he started Facebook? Cuz it's done fairly well for itself.

Could lightning strike twice?

As for this fellow's approach: I like it! If this could be turned into a popular meme attacking all evil corporations/phenomena, I think it could make the world a better place.

> Easy to criticize, much more difficult to provide solutions

Easy to say it's easy to criticize, much more difficult to write a substantial comment ;-)

Ok, here's a set of solutions:

- Don't build systems intentionally designed to be addictive or make people feel worse about themselves.

- When you are told that the things you've built make people feel worse about themselves, don't keep building them.

- When choosing where to work, don't work for places that don't follow the above.

- Stop equating 'not making as much money as possible' with an unbearable or inconceivable personal sacrifice.

- Stop looking at the incentive structures around you and pretending you don't have any personal agency.

- In general, stop fobbing off personal responsibility on the collective crowd, especially when choosing where to apply your skills and what impact you can make on the world as a relatively privileged and well-to-do tech worker.

(with the obvious, HN-required caveat that if your child is dying because they need an infusion of Meta stock every 3 months or their heart will explode or your parents inadvertently crossed the Cali cartel and the only way you can keep yourself and everyone you've ever met alive is by working for as many Zuckerbucks as you can afford, I'm not speaking to _you_ specifically. The rest of you need to stop pretending you're morally obligated to build shit that makes society worse, though.)

> solutions

What problem is Instagram solving?

For one, artists and photographers use Instagram to promote their work. The viral nature of social media makes it a lot easier for posts to get traction compared to, say, having to go through making your own portfolio site and then having to do website SEO etc.

Maybe this doesn't bother the more technically minded, but as an artist you just want to get eyeballs on your art and any hurdle between you and that is taking time away from what you actually want to do.

The use case for photographers seems like a side effect of Instagram's popularity, not the problem they wake up every day trying to solve.

Exposure (excuse the pun) is incredibly difficult for photographers. A platform like instagram removes a barrier (a self-run website).

The popularity of instagram helps with the number of eyeballs.

Just a few seconds of microwaving that Android or iPhone tends to solve all such problems in a whiff (of smoke). Turn off, tune out, drop in - the opposite of Leary's mantra but just the sort of thing which can help when confronted with "social" media. Turn that damn phone off, tune out of the fake rate race and drop in for a cuppa tea or something. Live, that is, in person, not by clicking some stupid thumbs-up symbol or sending an animated ideogram of a smiling something.

I think it is somewhat unprofesional to not be on your own domain and own the address to your slice of the internet. If you can't afford it, it's ok, but using custom domains with Netlify is really easy and free.

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