Instagram co-founder says Meta starved his business after buying it

Personally I am disappointed with Instagram's web interface. I find it a lot more pleasant to upload photos using either Mastodon (unfunded) or Bluesky (shoestring budget) It doesn't come across like an industry leading product in 2025, rather it looks like it looked with Facebook bought it.

To be fair I shoot with a Sony α7 and develop with DxO so I don't need the filters or crop tool. I independently came to the conclusion that I like making physical prints in a 4x5 aspect ratio (everybody makes 4″x6″ cards, if I am shooting with a crazy small aperture, developing to compensate for that, and color grading to make it look like a photo from an old book shouldn't I have a brand aspect ratio?)

From a recommendation engineering perspective I have mixed feelings about Instagram. The onboarding feed is hand curated and brilliant, as it should be. For certain kinds of content, its habit of putting older stuff into your feed is probably great and helps match the chronology of posters and viewers. On the other hand, student organizations at Cornell often use Instagram as their official communications mechanism about events and there are many things problematic about that, not least that Instagram just sent me a notification about a message dated 4/5 (18 days ago) about how they were selling the last of the dragon day T-shirts they had left over. [1] It's bad enough that I get notifications about cringey blond girls who supposedly want to follow me, but getting spammed with notifications about events that already passed ruins its value as a "be aware about events" platform which it isn't meant to be but that people use it as.

And of course there is the quality/cringe problem. I get followed by endless girls who have the same blond hair in the same hairstyle with the same makeup and the same slinky dress who stand by the squat rack in the same gym. To be fair, there is one of those who shows up at Crunch, but I hear that people in Ukraine, Russia and Myanmar use photos of that kind of girl in catfishing. In real life a girl like that has never taken an interest me and on other platforms maybe 5% of the the people who take an interest in me are that girl, on Instagram it is 50%. Cringe!

It adds up to "we're number one, why try harder". The Economist ran an article in Meta's defense that says with all the problems of social media we don't need more platforms, but behind it all is the problem of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

without a credible threat of exit, platforms like that are just going to get worse, not better.

[1] In this case Facebook might have made the world better by pushing that content onto Facebook which has more structured data and can do a better job of handling notification about real-world events.