Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.
Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality (similar to colors not existing in reality).
Having access to a extra mirrors at first creates a sense of control. You know your mom and dad won't give you a "non-distorted" reflection so the reflection from strangers is worth more. Colleagues or friends saying "you're smart!" means a lot more from them.
When each mirror is carefully placed, the "whole" of we we are and would like to be can be understood more deeply just like 7 blind men working together understand the elephant more deeply.
However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life, then the identity becomes overwhelmed by expectation. Just like super high resolution makes your pores look larger, the mirror array makes every aspect of your life feel like shit even if from a rational analysis "extra information should never be a danger"
"Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous."
Wow. I have problems with Instragram, but I've never tried to sum it up into a single statement and while this is rather specific and may not include all the problems I _feel_ are there, it really does bring home the main issue, for me. A little snark in there about democratizing, as some people will always put a positive spin on such things, which I feel is totally appropriate here.
Just... The comment could have stopped right there and been as or more impactful (for me). Thanks. :)
I remember that for a few months before my partner broke up with me, their IG feed was full of reels, posts, 'comedy', 'psychology tips', about people complaining about their partners. And also lots of Insta influencers posts giving relationship tips or encouraging people to break up for diverse reasons.
While I'm aware my relationship wasn't perfect, the standards promoted by those aesthetic Insta influencers were really impossible to obtain in real life. Unless of course your life consisted only of perfectly curated Insta moments.
> While I'm aware my relationship wasn't perfect, the standards promoted by those aesthetic Insta influencers were really impossible to obtain in real life.
In the 4 months I dabbled with Instagram, I was shocked by how toxic and outright false the pop psychology memes were. They were stereotypical, frequently backwards, and deliberately misapplied. And all of that is before the cluster-B LARPing.
"Your partner won't give you access to their financial accounts? That's domestic violence, and he probably has Narcissistic Personality Disorder too! What's his is yours, so just use his credit card to book plane tickets without asking and remember that him yelling at you about it is verbal abuse, so get out while you still can before he starts beating you! And remember abuse thrives in secrecy-- so make sure you tell everybody how he was so aggressive that you were in constant fear for your life!"
Sorry you were on the receiving end of [whatever your case is]. Not even the strongest of relationships can withstand reinforcement of sentiments as corrosive as Instagram, where you're a useless piece of shit if you can't/won't support your partner's ambitions of joining the jet set.
You lost your partner to a cult. They're called "followers" for a reason. It starts with separating victims from their loved ones...
I saw a youtube short like this. It was a video demonstrating the "perfect" guy. It started reasonable, with him saying "oh can you check this on my phone? the passcode is XYZ"
Yeah, I would have trusted my current-wife then-girlfriend with my phone passcode pretty early on, no big deal. She didn't feel the need to know it, but casually telling it to her so she could do something with it is probably a thing that happened.
But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.
> But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.
Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's long-game triangulation, which is little more than domestic violence perpetrated by the other partner. But men are supposed to feel ashamed of themselves if they're not willing to just blindly go along with it.
The irony is, they call this sort of victim the "ideal" guy, while simultaneously deriding him as a "simp" to the rest of their cliques. It's loathesome. I pity anybody involved in the dating game these days.
No, domestic violence is only one thing, that thing is domestic violence. All violence is physical. Other forms of abuse that are not physical are not violence.
If we have a verbal confrontation one of us has hurt feelings. If it turns violent, there is actual violence. Words have meanings.
You can care about other types of abuse. You should care about other types of abuse.
But claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.
This is massively wrong at best and evil at worst.
> Domestic abuse, also called "domestic violence" [...]. Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person.
> Intimate partner violence refers to behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours
> Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship
Yes. The misuse of terms you've shown is exactly the concern I and other victims of domestic violence have.
Meanwhile, here the Oxford English Dictionary:
violence, n.
1. a. The exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.
You are indirectly supporting domestic violence by manipulating the definition of violence to include non-violent offences.
(separately: Wikipedia is not a source at all, let alone an authoritative one)
Again, since you didn't address this: claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.
> Forcibly. If there's no force there's no violence.
I get where you're coming from but enough men figured out that when wife-beating became illegal, they could continue to torment their wives and exes through passive-aggressive, explicitly nonviolent acts enough that the laws were expanded and the definition changed.
The redefinition happened at least 20 years ago and has since propagated across multiple disciplines (law enforcement and psychology inclusive). Even publishing revenge porn falls under domestic violence statutes now.
Yes, it no longer meets the strictly-literal definition of violence. It is what it is. Rather than arguing it here, consider adapting to the times or taking your grievance to the Department of Justice (https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence):
> Domestic violence is a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner. Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.
This is a far stretch in trying to hang on to the last thread of the definition of violence.
Why can't you just use the term "domestic abuse" and stop supporting the misuse of well defined words?
Do you think that if you and others use the term "domestic violence" to include non-physical abuse that it just magically changes the existing definition? Why would you even want to support that when there's clearly another term that's both in general use and clearly fits what you're attempting to refer to, by definition?
Repeating for a third time so you can hopefully read it and actually respond when you hit ‘reply’:
Claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence
I’m not responsible for all of humanity: you should want a clear definition and separation of violent and non violent abuse so why don’t you handle this yourself rather than asking me?
“get with the times” is ridiculous. vague legislation is bad whether it’s new or old. Likewise a lot of progress has obviously been bad much like other progress has been good.
I’m actually not really interested in your replies any more, since you’re not actually responding.
Victims of non physical domestic violence also need money, police time, and medical attention (yes, they do!). So I'd argue that widening the definition of domestic violence actually increases the visibility of the cause. More people are concerned, directly or indirectly.
> “get with the times” is ridiculous
It's not. Language changes all the time for better or worse, and trying to change it back is just not possible. You're wasting your time if you're trying to make your definition the correct one instead of the one that's widely accepted, even if your definition made more sense (I don't have an opinion on that).
Language is a reflection of society, and whether you want it or not, society has decided that physical domestic violence and non-physical domestic violence are the same thing, which we call domestic violence. You can fight words or fight for a cause, your choice.
I have no clue. I mostly get warhammer, video game, and programming videos. It showed up in my shorts one day so I took a look. I have long since purged it from my history because I want to minimize the chances of getting something like that again.
It's funny, I am married with a child, do my best and my wife too, but sometimes she gets dragged into meme-expectation that take her a long time to recover from. I cant see nor understand much of the source of these: Im an immigrant and I cant read her native language, and I dont know if it s a girl thing or if it's actually me not fitting reasonable expectations, but damn I wished everyone could look at their own relationship without trying to copy the appearance of others.
What seems to help is when an idolized version of relationship is suddenly broken into pieces and you discover your model was actually completely miserable and whatever you expected became trivial relative to that.
I had an ex that did this based on fantasy novels. "Why can't you be more of a man's man?" "What, from your romance novels?" "Yes!" "Ummm..."
Ironically, the thought never even occurred to me to respond with "Why can't you be more of a <insert stereotypical sought after characterization here>?"
Oh well, we haven't been together for a long time. :)
Point being, it's not just instagram or even social media at large. They've just made the situation worse. This is deep rooted in most of society and isn't going to end any time soon. Just need to find people that are strong enough to not fall victim to this (even if they don't bring it up, like our partners did).
If someone is constantly projecting relationship advice social media topics on you'd I'd venture to say you're in an abusive/manipulative relationship as opposed to a healthy one. Glad you got out.
I've learned more recently that healthy relationships aren't empirically so. Instead, there's "signs" of a healthy relationship; determining the health of your relationship must be a two way conversation. It requires assessment, honesty, and participation by both parties as a qualifier as well as the ability to listen without your ego involved. That's not to say all of those aren't challenging things to do in their own right just to say that the health of a relationship will be explored differently by different sets of people.
>It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan's dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, the googol game, and the best choice problem.
The internet and the options it gives, I believes leads people to think they have far more relationship options then they actually have, and the options they think they have are not as good as they believe. A lot of people put a lot of work in selling a perfect image online, but those rarely hold up in reality for any amount of time.
Of course this doesn't mean we should stay in bad relationships either. Our society doesn't really teach us how to have good relationships, especially in a capitalistic fashion (hey, just spend more money and everything will be ok), and quite a lot of us had really poor examples from our parents generation on how to treat other people.
The joy of exploitative recommendation algorithms. I had a discussion with my daughter about TikTok's Glamour Filter the other day and now my whole feed is full of glamour filter posts. This is so unhealthy (mentally).
All the ideas that the world will be perfect if you would just think thoughts like these...
"manifest what you want from the world" and "think positive thoughts and everything will be ok"
Is actually kind of true when you think about all the algorithms that run social media. If you only ever search for cats and scroll past anything political, the algorithms will learn what you like and feed you more cats.
So, if you're searching up relationship advice, and spending time on those things, that's what you get back from 'the borg'.
You do have control over what social media shows you, it's just that you need to work against your basest desires in order to get there.
It's like those "drug pushers" we were told about in school but don't seem to actually exist who use weed to constantly try to get you onto more lucrative for them heroin no matter how many times you say "no thanks." Heard that so many times at school, never heard anyone encountering anything like it in the real world.
But here we are with google, facebrick et al saying "come on, just try a little culture war" because its lucrative for them, no matter how many times you say no thank you.
It's really sick but yeah, obviously lucrative and Larry, Seregey & Mark clearly need the money.
I think this was an issue that was really only an issue for specific geographic areas, but also an easy bandwagon to jump on and look like you're "fighting the good fight". It was an actual problem in one area from my childhood, but never saw it anywhere else.
Otherwise, fully and wholeheartedly agree that it's now a global issue and is indeed real. Welcome to the "global community" we were always told was going to be such an advancement for society.
The gaps of "what do we show now" are filled with popular content, so culture war content is what you notice but there's probably other tamer things that only the algorithms know is popular.
Yeah, it's very much a game of "well, other people fit this profile, but also tend to watch this other thing, we should recommend that, as it will probably hook this person as well. With any luck, they'll be grateful that we introduced them!"
From the algorithmic feed PoV it's a very high value cluster (average watchtime has to be very high, audience retention is probably quite excellent) so it's unsurprising that it'll try to get you hooked from time to time.
I watched a funny video of the President of my country mis-pronouncing a word in English. The recommended videos afterward were comprised ENTIRELY of the local far-right party's propaganda.
Observe how this amounts to crime. The platform has motive:
-newly single users attract more views
-newly single users are worth more to advertisers because they’re likely to spend on appearance, travel, new hobbies, and big ticket items formerly shared with a partner.
The platform also has opportunity because it has data on exactly what content has highest probability of nudging a particular user to break up. (Perhaps the “you are being abused by a narcissist” stuff others have mentioned works nicely.)
(See also Shoshanna Zuboff)
Is that any more accurate though? I agree that the headline is snark, but... content creators are a large part of the problem, though it's such a complex problem that I'm not sure how to even guess at which is more liable unless you simply take the "whoever is the last in the production line has the ability to prevent this kind of content" view, in which case it's pretty obviously ... well, I was going to say obvious the content provider, but no... it's you. The problem is likely you, and your inability to avoid this kind of content.</more-snark>
The biggest problem with instagram (well and most other photo-based social network) is not the fame and glory of a few individuals, but a selective showing of the best highlights of other people.
Imagine sitting at a shitty job, going to the bathroom, and browsing instagram... hey look, here's Alice eating at a fancy restaurant.. here's Bob on a beach... here's Cecilia at a party... here's Doug moutain climbing... and you're stuck at a shitty job.
Instagram doesn't show eg. Bob working for months to save up for a trip to a shitty seaside ___location, hotel with bedbugs, overpriced cocktails and a sewage flowing into the sea just out of the visible part in the photo... but you don't see any of the bad stuff, just other people having fun, and you having to deal with all the bad stuff. Add all the filters, and all other people are pretty, have nice skin, look skinny.. and you look like shit after 7 hours on the job and one more to go.
This kind of reminds me what I experienced during my first travel to south america. In short, most people I met with shitty jobs or no job wanted to go to either north america or europe. They kind of assumed everything would be fine if they just could go to one of these countries. What they totally forgot is that we had to work our asses of to actually pay for the flight and 2 months or backpacking. At home, we had 9to5 jobs, something the people we talked to would actually consider slavery...
This is what a lot of immigrants during the "refugee crisis" thought too... pay the smugglers a couple of grand, then they come to germany, get a free house, free money, buy a bmw.
I mean, a generation or two ago, it would be a literal vacation slide show you might be "treated to" when visiting a friend. Obviously they never showed slides of Bob at the GM assembly plant.
But a generation or two ago you had context. You knew Bob worked in an assembly plant 6 days a week with tons of overtime sacrificing family time or took that vacation after 3 years and stayed in a cheap hotel to enjoy an amazing beach.
With social media you do not have that context, you just see the perfect parts.
You're right that there is difference in degree. But I don't think that changes the fact that we should already accept that what people post to Instagram are the highlights of their lives and not the drudgery.
It's not a question of acceptance, but rather on the effects it has on people psychologically, whether or not they accept it. Humans don't just operate as rational beings – our brains' perceptions of the world adapt and change based on the things we see and how often we see them. Being aware of this effect is not enough to overcome it, much like being aware of the effects of hard drugs does not prevent you from forming an addiction. It is simply how our minds work. It affects people to varying degrees, but the only way to guarantee avoiding the effect is to avoid such situations in general.
And in the days before budget airlines most people accepted it that an overseas vacation was a bit like that for national lampoon vacations: working stiffs working hard and after years at the job “earning” a vacation. Not jaunts you did while between dead end jobs.
> They say it's the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison - it's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.
>Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection (similar to colors not existing in reality).
I strongly disagree, and don't think your example supports your conclusions.
Colors are arbitrary and subjective constructs and dont exist in reality. Following your example, identity does not exist. It is not in the reflection either.
The "problem" is that people place more importance on the subjective identity seen by the observer, and less on the equally subjective identity they see them selves.
Just because each are subjective does not mean that they are equally fulfilling, productive, or healthy.
Living a life you find beautiful has objective advantages over living a life someone else thinks is beautiful. Satisfying your arbitrary needs is ultimately more fulfilling than satisfying someone else's arbitrary needs.
It should be no surprise that people who don't live a life they like end up dissatisfied with their life...
It isn't Instagram, it is like counts. But the like counts are what drives the addictive behavior and makes the product "free" to use.
This is just Goodhart's Law at a personal level. We stop being authentic to chase likes. We inherently turn the measure into a target. We have hundreds of "friends" of FB and we interact with a dozen or less regularly.
I don't think likes are currently their major issue. Instagram at least created its own problem:
1. start with regular people posting regular stuff - it was great fun
2. the professional users are the most active and polished
3. regular people stop posting because their content isn't polished enough and they resent comparisons of their life to others'
4. regulars follow less (to preserve their sanity) and post less
5. to maintain growth, the platform pushes more and more suggestions (people you don't want to follow, ads you don't want to see, reel encouragement you don't want to do)
Final stage is a platform that has deterred you from participating and constantly assaults you with things that you don't want to see. I used to really enjoy using Twitter and Instagram. I haven't touched Twitter in a couple of months and I usually resent using Instagram (but it's key in my industry).
Silly thing is, I think Instagram would be just fine if they didn't suggest things constantly. Every time, I select to see it less often, but it's inevitably back the following day. Let each person choose what they want their Instagram to be, whether it's following friends or being a creator or treating it like a magazine and looking at reels.
>Let each person choose what they want their Instagram to be
That's not as valuable to advertisers though. With recommendations and algorithmic sorting, the platform gets to mold what's important, and that influence makes it easy to sell off to the highest bidder.
I find a lot of value in following my friends---and my friends only. It's why we've all generally migrated off traditional social media and into private group chats. There's no algorithm mediating our interactions, and no one is going to try to sell our attention to outside parties.
It's not just like counts. That's just a metric/formalism for the narcissistic self-marketing thing that these platforms are really about. You could remove them or obscure them but some other form of observing engagement would take the same place.
It's about being seen and popular. The same crap adolescents have dealt with for decades, but now... automated.
I think that is an insanely insightful comment. It is very scary having an 11 year old and wondering when that day comes when his friends are on social media and he wants to participate. I am skeptical of a lot so don’t fall for get rich scams or ads on these platforms but do enjoy perusing for sometimes too long
There's hope: My 12 year old son recently got his first phone. After seeing what's happened with his older sister (very bad), he steadfastly refuses to install any games or social media on it.
We'll see if he holds out...
It's extremely hard as a parent.
Younger adolescent girls are extremely vulnerable. But this stuff is very hard to lock down and manage. There are no good tools for managing it. The parental controls apps are leaky and crappy. Schools issue (and require!) devices, so even if you can lock your kids device, there's always alternate paths. And as a parent you are easily sidelined and ignored when you try to talk about it and bring up concerns.
Worst problems have been Tumblr and Pinterest, BTW, not Instagram. Both are full of eating disorder and self-harm content. Instagram is at least somewhat moderated. (Reddit and Twitter are also really bad, though less used by teens that I have seen.)
My oldest got instagram and such at 16. She became depressed, moody, rude, and isolated. We would take the social media away, she became happy engaged, involved with friends and family.
Go right back to being depressed again as soon as she got access to Instagram.
Repeat every three or so months until she moved out. After wasting a couple years of her life she finally got off social media all together and is doing much better.
Her much younger sister is 13 wants social media. It’s a hard no. She complained to her older sister. Older sister was extremely firm on saying to stay off it.
Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection..
That assumes a level of honesty that is missing from social media. On Instagram people explicitly pretend to be someone they are not. The reflection they show is beauty and affluence but the reality is Photoshop and prestige car rental.
Insta is like a computer role playing game, where the player usually plays a character that closely resembles themselves, but often as a more idealized version.
When my daughter started playing Hogwarth's legacy, she instantly created a charcter that looked as much as possible like her. Instagram is not that different.
It would be fascinating to take a sample of people, compare their avatars to their real life appearance, and then have them spend an hour talking to a shrink about why they are so similar/different.
Anecdotally, I know many people in both the very similar and very different camps, and a few who are very similar except for some small thing.
May be true for extroverts, but as an introvert I don't give a cent about what random people think about me (which also explains why I do not use Instagram in the first place).
Whatever personality trait you’re talking about is orthogonal to introversion/extroversion.
There are many introverts who manage their social time specifically because they care about the impressions they make on others and find it effortful to manage them; and many extroverts who do the opposite specifically because they don’t think at all about such impressions.
Impression shaping doesn't define who you are, it's a completely artificial front, and it takes an effort exactly because impression has nothing in common with person's essence.
However there is a certain kind of dissonance between deciding to publicly state "I don't care what you think" that sort of implies that they do care actually.
It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the first place?
Is there not a middle ground here? I don't think this is a binary situation where a person has to have no care at all, or it is their full obsession with life.
Like, I don't care if you think my clothes are shit, and I don't keep up with the latest javascript flavor of the day. At the same time I don't want, at least the general public around me, thinking I'm some creepy hermit murderer so they don't rise up with torches and pitchforks either.
That’s what the comment you’re replying to is saying, you just used more words. You’re downstream from someone who asserted they are a hard 0 on the caring, which it sounds like you agree is… unlikely.
>It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the first place?
That seems rather reductive given the topic here.
I don't own an EV auto, or any auto for that matter. By your logic, I shouldn't engage in discussions about EV vs. ICE or anything to do with transportation. Is that correct?
>If you said that you have no interest whatsoever in cars or electric cars, or no care for things tangentially related (impact on climate or similar).
A fair point. However, that's not what GGP[1] said. They said:
> Who people think we are is who we are
May be true for extroverts, but as an introvert I don't give a cent about
what random people think about me (which also explains why I do not use
Instagram in the first place).
I was responding to a reply[0] to that comment which asserted that:
However there is a certain kind of dissonance between deciding to publicly
state "I don't care what you think" that sort of implies that they do care
actually.
It seems to me that people who truly do not care would just not engage in the
first place?
As I said, I think that's pretty reductive. If you don't care what people on Instagram (or other social media) think, then not using such platforms makes perfect sense. Which is what GGP said.
It seems reasonable to comment on the perceived "quest for likes" in a discussion about such things, even if you don't use those platforms and/or don't care what others think.
I don't agree with GGP's point about being an introvert, as I'm an extrovert and I don't give a rat's ass about such things either. Nor do I use Instagram or other (mainstream) social media.
Despite my (potentially) poor analogy, GP seems to be implying that if you state that you don't care about something, then you actually do care. Which, as I said, seems pretty reductive. And is also a poor use of logic.
Please feel free to disagree and/or down-vote me, as I (at least as far as this, and most topics goes) don't really care what others think.
Rather, I'm interested in discussion that sparks interesting exchanges. GP's shallow dismissal of GGP doesn't do that. In fact, it may well stifle discussion. And more's the pity.
If you actually don’t care you wouldn’t post because it wouldn’t occur to you to.
Edit: I find that most people who scream “I don’t care what you think” generally mean “I’m not influenced by what you think”. Which is an important difference, and helps explain getting red in the face about someone else’s opinion about which one don’t care.
That's because delusion is ugly and thus invokes complaint, so yes sufficient ugliness has influence, but the influence of ugliness is invocation of complaint about ugliness, it doesn't define who you are.
> Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality
Identity is by definition what and who you _are_ and this is _prior_ to thought -- it is a matter of being, not thinking. It is to some extent determined in time; our character is determined by our choices, and choices actualize potentials, or thwart them. The very fact that someone can have a distorted view implies a distinction between the opinion and the real.
You seem to be getting at this in the paragraph that follows. That is, what people _observe_ and know about you is information that can help you learn about yourself. That information can be distorted (through incompetence or malice) and should be therefore be verified before it is accepted.
So your general point has merit. Instagram, for example, feeds approval and validation seeking behavior. What does Instagram reward? Appearance and instant gratification. There is no verification, no contextualization. People not only develop a strong need for approval, but fickle, superficial approval. It's like Goodhart's law. The shallow image of identity, not the real identity, becomes what matters and what people invest all their energy into, and through their investment, reduce themselves to that image and accept it as who they are. People have always done this. Keeping up with the Jones', saving face. We all know people who are slaves to their reputations, to what others think of them, anxiously guarding their appearance from the slightest perceived threat. Social anxiety is largely this. But social media exaggerates and magnifies this flaw, one that young people are more prone to.
A virtuous man is concerned about his character; how he appears is a consequence or the effect of his virtue and who he is, not a deceptive mask that requires maintenance to conceal the filth and vice lurking underneath. And by his virtue, he suffers little from slander and welcomes truthful criticism. The Image Man is destroyed by anything unflattering because, true or not, it involves a negation of the image which he identifies with his very being.
> (similar to colors not existing in reality).
A digression, but this claim bothers me. Colors do exist in reality. Your claim rests on an unjustified Cartesian metaphysics in which color as we mean it is redefined as a surface reflectance property and what we commonly call color is involved in scurried away into the mind or "consciousness". (Materialism can't even pull that trick as the Cartesian mind has been eliminated from the picture.)
From a pure physical point of view, light exist of an infinite number of wavelengths. A mix of light of different wavelengths thus form an infinite-dimensional color space.
Our eyes only has thress sensors to detect the difference, roughly corresponding to Red Green and Blue, so as the light hits our brain, we receive a 3-dimensional color space. The brain collapses this further into a single qualia, that is very remote in structure to the physical light.
By comparison, our ability to comprehend shapes of objects is much more closely related to the objects' acutal shape.
>> Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality
> Identity is by definition what and who you _are_ and this is _prior_ to thought -- it is a matter of being, not thinking.
This is not the definition most commonly used, at least not in the physical sense. What we _are_, all of us, is very complicated. Far too complicated for our brains to relate to. Instead we're telling ourselves highly simplified stories about ourselves, where we "identify with" or "identify as" one or more characters (or personas) in these stories. This is not unlike when we watch a movie or read a book, and start to feel that we are one of the lead characters there.
And just like the color "brown" doesn't have a single essential identity (it corresponds to a relatively large are of the RGB space, and an even larger area of the full physical color space), our mental model of who we are, is extremely simplified compared to our physical selves.
There was a young woman highlighted by a popular youtuber for her odd behaviour in a gym recently. She was filming herself exercizing for views and dollars. The rough moment was when everyday gym guys walked past her. She felt pressured enough by their presence to accuse them of being creeps and mocked them on her video feed while complaining at the guys in person. The guys were doing normal gym chores ignoring her.
A young adult has gotten so far into the mental space of her social media job that she is hypersensitive to any attention, or the implication of attention, in real life.
Splitting a person's psyche into cyberspace and real life when your livelihood is on the line, is a real skill. Training healthy habits into full time workers could possibly help.
The question I have is, why do people behave like Narcissus, then?
Why do they need so much external affirmation?
Why have some people become so extremely insecure?
Question from a blind man. I know we are supposed to be so stupid that an elephant confuses us... So I have to ask simple questions, because otherwise I will likely not understand the answer, given how stupid we are.
> Instagram democratizes the mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.
It also democratizes the clout, power and protection that the hollywood famous have. Without social media harvey weinstein would not be in jail. A "relative nobody" wouldn't have been able to "out shout" and expose a media mogul like weinstein.
As with everything, there are positive and negative aspects.
Spot on except I don’t think identity can be boiled down to perception. It’s also not really necessary to make your point - some people simply care a lot (too much) about the perception of others. Others don’t precisely because their sense of self isn’t so dependent on others.
> mental illness that used to only affect child stars and the hollywood famous.
There is no such illness. Like, literally none of them. (And in child stars case, massive amount of their issues can be explained by pervasive abusive situations and exploitation they found themselves in. Which is something that happens to poor unknown kids too.)
I think this is a great analysis, though I think in reality it's not limited at all to Instagram specifically but more broadly to the self-promotional and self-marketing aspect of our culture in general at this point. Social media throws kerosene on it, certainly, but it's a much broader phenomenon of which this experience of Instagram is only one symptom.
Capitalism turns everything into a commodity. Including ourselves. From a very early age we are taught that it's important to sell ourselves; to survive and thrive. For most people this is just a background nag, mostly ignored, or poorly executed. For some it becomes a primary drive. The internet only accelerates it.
Mediums like Twitter are just as involved; showcasing one's quips for the world. It doesn't have to be a photo or video like Instagram or TikTok.
And as others may be pointing out, Instagram isn't even the worst of it.
Anyways as a parent of teens, it's very distressing.
> However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life,
you have control to not use this application. It's not like you're forced to use it. You can also go there casually to see your friends pictures without thinking too much about it.
You also have control to not be a celebrity and avoid the paparazzi. This is the parent's point. While you may have free will, it's hard to argue that having cheap access to fame is not appealing to everyone.
A lot of things can be bad if abused. Alcohol, eating, watching TV, video games even healthy activities like sport can be addictive or have risk of injuries. Social medias aren't different. They are entirely harmless for most people. Not that a big of a deal.
> A lot of things can be bad if abused. Alcohol, eating, watching TV, video games even healthy activities like sport can be addictive or have risk of injuries.
Scissors can be bad if abused too. Not sure why we're playing this game...
> We looked into the top 30 most popular apps people most want to delete in the United States by delving into regional search volumes for “delete” and “deactivate” apps/accounts by each state.
They’re not going off of actual app deletion or account deactivation data… they’re going off of how often people search for how to do it?
Here’s the thing - if I want to ‘delete Facebook’ then I’ll do it - there’s no searching involved, I go to my home screen, long-press the ‘f’ icon and then choose the ‘trash’ option. My decision to delete Facebook is not captured in their data.
What they’re measuring is stats on people too technologically illiterate to manage the apps installed on their own device, right? That’s a significant skew on the conclusions they’re drawing isn’t it?
They are also counting absolute numbers instead of numbers relative to the size of the social network. That means the bigger ones will generally be higher. Instagram seems to be about 5 times the size of Snap but only has roughly 3 times the number of people seeking to leave the platform. That means relatively people are seeking to leave Snap more than Instagram.
Honestly this isn't a very good article and seems to just be blogspam.
I'm currently taking applications for my upcoming invite-only social media platform, which is more successful than Instagram because there is zero search trends for how to deactivate your account on it.
I didn't equate this metric with being more successful. In fact, it is closer to the opposite. Instagram is at the top of this list because they are more successful and have more users than several smaller social networks that have higher turnover.
> My decision to delete Facebook is not captured in their data.
I think for some people, it is. If I want to "delete Facebook" then I want to delete my account and every data associated with it. This is often not a straight forward process because sometimes the delete account option is buried in settings, you have to contact support, fill out a form, etc. Hence a quick search will guide you through the deletion process.
I deleted my FB account years ago, so this might have changed... but it's even less straightforward then you think. Instead of burying the "delete account" option in settings, they hid it entirely. You could find "deactivate account," but permanent deletion was only accessible if you knew the URL. Even then, Facebook kindly imposes a 30 day delay before deleting your account; if you log in in any way, even accidentally, before the 30 days pass, it resets the timer, reactivates your account, and you have to start from 30 again.
Instagram had a similar problem when I deleted it a year or so later: you couldn't delete your account from the app. You had to log in via a browser, navigate the very dated UI through to advanced settings, and request a deletion there. A lot of folks don't even know their Instagram password -- I think they just used SMS codes originally -- so it was surprisingly hard to get a password associated with my account so I could even log in via a browser!
> Here’s the thing - if I want to ‘delete Facebook’ then I’ll do it - there’s no searching involved, I go to my home screen, long-press the ‘f’ icon and then choose the ‘trash’ option.
But you haven't deleted your Facebook account. You've removed the app from your phone.
If your goal was to delete your Facebook account you've failed.
Each company has a different way to actually achieve (or come as close as they allow you) removing your account from their service. It's completely reasonable that (even technologically literate people) would need to search for how to accomplish that goal for service X, since the services tend to be intentionally somewhat hidden.
Note the search term in the article isn't "Delete Instragram *app*", it was "Delete Instagram Account". Those are different things.
It's been many years since I deleted my Facebook, but it was absolutely hidden like you describe. As far as I could tell there was no way to navigate directly to it from the site itself.
I hate to inform you but, as someone that has to directly deal with the average person that uses technology, the vast majority of people fall into the 'too technologically illiterate to manage the apps installed on their own device' category.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “delete facebook” then doesn’t it.
Deleting an app is deleting an app. Deleting your account with a company is something different. You could keep the app installed on your phone, but delete your account.
The other skew is how straight-forward account deactivation is. Sites/apps that make deactivation obvious won't have as many searches. Deleting apps is equally easy for all apps.
>Here’s the thing - if I want to ‘delete Facebook’ then I’ll do it
stop to think about how many people in the world are not techy smart people and might need a reminder/refresher from time to time on how to delete an app. or maybe possibly, "delete an app" can mean something more like actually deleting their content from the platform and then deleting their account? but hey, they're technology illiterate anyways so who cares, right?
The submitted title was "Americans want to delete Instagram more than any other app", which (assuming the article hasnt' changed) looks like an editorialized title, which is against HN's rule ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Since the article's own title is misleading, I've edited it to make it clear that they measured searches for "delete".
> they’re going off of how often people search for how to do it?
Yes, its called a proxy. It's not perfect, but it's very likely has a strong correlation and low standard deviation from the truth.
> What they’re measuring is stats on people too technologically illiterate to manage the apps installed on their own device, right? That’s a significant skew on the conclusions they’re drawing isn’t it?
It's enough of a population to demonstrate probability.
Fair, but I guess that extrapolating that proportionally it is still relevant is not toooo far fetched. Certainly not accurate data, but a valid indication as pre-research.
I use Instagram for my hobby/business (coin & paper money collecting & dealing). I have mercilessly curated my feed to be ONLY people who post content purely related to the numismatic world. No real-life friends, no travel posts from random semi-friends, no selfies, none of that garbage. If someone starts posting it, I unfollow them.
And for the ads -- I click on ads related to cat toys and pet food, just to let the algorithm know to feed me more of it.
SO: My instagram feed is 100% hobby-related posts & cats. I think I may be victorious (for the time being....).
PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.
What I hate is that even if you curate it that meticulously (gid forbid you click on the wrong thing and mess it all up), you still get fed so many random ads and "people you could follow". Just a completely whack user unfriendly platform in my experience.
And the worst part is that if your curated feed isn't overly active (because Instagram is degrading their experience too), you get yet more suggestions and ads to fill the gaps. Plus the badgering to make reels, no matter how many times you ask it to stop suggesting that.
It's way too big of a task for any one person to do individually (like trying to block ads online), and then you have the problem that people collaboratively moderating a stream together wouldn't have the same opinions on what content they actually want to see.
At some point, wouldn't it be better to build your own RSS bridge for posts from Instagram accounts you want to follow? At least you'd get to exercise some programming skills that way, instead of running around in Meta's dark pattern labyrinths.
The Algorithm owes no loyalty to your efforts. I think many of us have watched well-curated social feeds revert to noise when an algorithm got tweaked or irrecoverably fixated on some irrelevant interaction we once made. These things are not built to let you have the control you’ve found. It’s an happy accident when that happens.
> PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.
I have a 6 figure instagram id and have never opened the explore tab.
But I also stopped using instagram when I realized the ads are more interesting than the people in my feed. Maybe early instagram folk just aren’t the target market anymore.
Sometimes I miss my quirky candid real life photography app.
edit: to clarify for the downvoters — professionally interesting people (influencers) bore me and my friends highlight reels … are kinda boring too because they all end up looking the same since they’re all trying to promote an idealized version of their lives instead of just being themselves. The ads were great, but I don’t need an app for ads. So like the commenter above, I curated heavily – by never checking the app.
They already have on Facebook. I can keep my Insta stream within certain bounds but Facebook always serves me fresh nonsense no matter how tightly I try to control it.
My wife convinced me to install Instagram so she could send me videos of stuff. My experience was that at first it was annoying, then I found out I could follow some cool hobbyist folks working on cars, old computer systems, electronics, and of course all the mechanical keyboard content, as well as travel (I'm an extensive world traveler and used to post travel content on Instagram over 5 years ago) and I got sucked in. I started getting recommendations for comedy shorts and cat/dog videos which I enjoyed, and pretty soon I had a list of subscriptions which made it possible to scroll for hours watching videos which interest me without repeats.
The problem became:
1. Ads, the ads are bad because they're well targeted and mostly for things which are unnecessary or scams/knockoffs. I found myself buying things I didn't need from dubious brands.
2. Thots. Maybe because I'm a male between 25-50 or something, but even though I subscribe to 0 people on Instagram that qualify as thots, my feed started getting filled with women using Instagram to advertise their OF/services. Usually these seem cross-recommended as related to comedy shorts, cosplay/gaming, or cars, but aren't really any of those things.
3. Notifications. Instagram generates unnecessary notifications which ends up driving you back into the app, especially if you are like me and require there to be no number badges on any apps on your phone to eliminate FOMO anxiety.
The net effect was that I talked with my wife and deleted the app. It was the only social media app I've attempted to use in the last 3 years, and it lasted about 30 days before I felt it was necessary to delete it once again. I had used Instagram from 2015-2017, but had deleted it in 2017 previously. It's gotten much worse, and even in 2017 I felt it was unhealthy.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure Instagram is "better" (in the sense of less bad) than TikTok and many other apps that are more popular.
> 2. Thots. Maybe because I'm a male between 25-50 or something, but even though I subscribe to 0 people on Instagram that qualify as thots, my feed started getting filled with women using Instagram to advertise their OF/services. Usually these seem cross-recommended as related to comedy shorts, cosplay/gaming, or cars, but aren't really any of those things.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS. I have consistently resisted ever following, or even looking at the profiles of obvious IG thots and yet recently, because my IG account only follows a handful of others and runs out of content quickly, IG has been FILLING my feed with IG models. Not just one, not just a few, like a healthy amount of scrolling is required to get beyond them to other types of sponsored content.
I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I'm sure something I did or revealed has tagged me as "likely to find this content captivating" but I don't and I wish I could flag it as such. My best guess is that because I follow some "BRO" accounts (qualified captain, i70 things, etc) and happen to fall in gender/age pairing where that kind of content is a reliable draw, they'll keep trying.
I mostly maintain my account to follow hobbies and local businesses, but I'm about to shitcan it for the second or third time.
>I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I'm sure something I did or revealed has tagged me as "likely to find this content captivating" but I don't and I wish I could flag it as such
A lot of engineers in SV (and in this forum) think they know better than the users. They think they are so much better than everyone else that they feel a allowing the user to tell them they don't like something is just extra noise that doesn't provide useful information.
What probably happened, is that you watched a video for 1 second too long, and the algorithm took that as a positive signal, and since the average amount of dudes probably spend longer than you, they assume they can increase your engagement through biology and your monkey brain alone.
I hate it too, don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of a nice pair of Tatas, but I don’t need them in my face all day. You have to actively steer your feed away from it by gaming the algorithm harder. If a Thot shows up in your feed, swipe away instantly. Don’t even stop for a second. Then when something comes in that isn’t a thot but engages you, smash that like button so hard the algorithm thinks you’ve got the shakes.
I had the same problem and hated it. What fixed it was clicking "Not Interested" on enough of the posts to where it eventually gave up trying to show stuff like that. I think you're correct about the fact that it figures out you're an adult male and assumes you want that content, since a common theme with adult males is, well, an interest in attractive women.
The algorithm has now decided to just show me cute animal stuff for several months, which is fine by me. It's all low-effort and mostly dumb, but it's better than unsolicited butts popping up everywhere when I just want to see what my friends are up to.
Now if I could just fix the scenario where somehow it decides I really like garbage pay-to-play mobile games and shows me _nothing_ but ads for them for days on end.
>Now if I could just fix the scenario where somehow it decides I really like garbage pay-to-play mobile games and shows me _nothing_ but ads for them for days on end.
My wife used to use instagram just to look at cat videos and wedding dresses. She wasnt into cars or gym workouts or whiskey or whatever. She's also surprisingly female. Her suggested posts and ads were always just girls with onlyfans accounts. I thinks it's just a matter of what most of the platform offers at this point.
I don't use a whole lot of social media with targeting as part of the core feature set (just Instagram and Snapchat.) Instagram has their algo honed into exactly the type of people I like to see, and my search page is filled with basically nothing except that. This is despite the fact that I don't engage (comment or like) with any posts. They must have some intense screen lingering analytics to figure out what people like. I find it very annoying and wish I could see what data they're basing recommendations on. It's a large impetus for me to get rid of my Instagram account entirely.
> Ads, the ads are bad because they're well targeted and mostly for things which are unnecessary or scams/knockoffs. I found myself buying things I didn't need from dubious brands.
I make it a rule to never click on an ad no matter what. On the rare occasion I see any ad at all, if I do see something I think I want, I'll search for it later on my own. That let's me look at reviews, compare other similar items, and it means I'm buying from reputable sources only. Block every ad you can, never click or interact with any ad you can't block (or just haven't blocked yet).
You don't have to click on ads to be fed relevant ads. Your search history, app usage history, browsing history, credit card purchase history, ___location history, your social network (using any of those signals), can all be aggregated to profile you and your (potential) interests.
Searching and purchasing the item later can and (often but not always) is fed back to the system so it knows you purchased something you got an ad for.
All true! I block whatever ads I can to minimize the odds, and I take some comfort in the fact that when I see an ad for an item and end up buying later, what I pick up is not always the same product that was advertised or bought from the same place that paid for the ad.
We cannot avoid being influenced by advertising, and sometimes ads are even useful. It's just a shame that the ad industry has become so corrupt and obsessed with surveillance that the smartest thing is to avoid ads entirely whenever possible.
The enshittafication of TikTok is just starting. Right now they are still doing their best to provide a quality service rather than extract value. Instagram is about a decade into getting steadily worse, more addicting, and more unhealthy.
So IMHO no not yet, but it will get there eventually.
Ooc why didn't you disable notifications? I have them disabled and with a nicely curated feed (like yours) it's pleasant. The hard part is limiting your usage. I trick myself by putting the app many screens deep and in a folder so it's not one tap away.
The thing I dislike the most about Instagram is it seems like at some point it will be like "I'm done showing you content from your feed, here is generically popular stuff". There's a divider and a little message, but if I'm casually scrolling I might miss it and I'm on my timeline, if I wanted to be on Discover I'd be on Discover.
When TikTok runs out of relevant content and starts showing me generic/popular stuff; I say aloud "Ope, I'm out of tiktoks".
These days I don't check TikTok every day or I hit the normie soft cap after 5 minutes. My friends rely on me to be the "TikTok" guy since none of them have it installed for various reasons, so I "save them up" by waiting to view my fyp for longer periods of time.
>The thing is, I'm pretty sure Instagram is "better" (in the sense of less bad) than TikTok and many other apps that are more popular.
Users judge these apps based on different criteria and at different stages of use. On Instagram I found someone I wanted to follow but had to be approved to follow their content, I immediately uninstalled the app.
I get tons of excellent content on TikTok about tech, science, programming because I've "shaped" my algorithm well. I find people judge these platforms, as I have with instagram, before they have cultivated their best possible platform experience.
TikTok skews younger on average; Instagram skews more egocentric. You can mostly avoid both negatives but it won't be your first experience on these platforms.
VCs with no personal skin in the game have funded what is essentially addiction engineering. It’s wild that the industry does not seem to have the awareness to understand or care about this. People are getting paid fat salaries to figure out how to covertly manipulate users into abdicating their attention and time to wholly isolated, disconnected, and malnourishing behaviors.
Now the techies are concerned with the mental health crisis.
I'm not going to feign surprise that there is no shortage of young, white, straight men with engineering degrees that either don't care or can't comprehend that they are contributing to a mental health crisis in exchange for $250k/yr.
The majority of people in engineering roles in the tech industry aren't white, engineering in tech is now a heavily East Asian/South Asian dominated segment of the industry, especially in the tech companies that are producing these things. Young, definitely, straight probably, men mostly, but not so much white.
All of those things likely don't matter, what matters is $250k/yr puts you in the top 5% of earners in the United States of America and the top 0.01% of earners globally. That's a major motivation to do whatever is necessary to earn. Upton Sinclair said it correctly nearly a hundred years ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
All available evidence indicates socioeconomics trumps demographics every time. The issue you're describing is because people are being paid large sums of money (relative to the rest of global society) to do work that is bad for the rest of society. It wouldn't matter if they were purple aliens with no genitalia, they're being paid to do a job that is a net negative for society, and the pay for that job is significantly higher than their alternatives.
Maybe stop trying to make everything about identity politics, especially in a conversation where there's actually important political issues at hand that impact everyone globally?
I don’t use FB or IG, but my partner is able to do amazing things with IG. She’s able to market her business and convert to sales. I’m pretty good at finding info but for local topics she frequently finds more up-to-date stuff from IG than I can find through public channels. She connects me to stories about nieces and nephews that aren’t posted elsewhere. I do catch her doing the glazed eye infinite scroll sometimes, but we all need downtime. If it seems excessive or stress inducing, I’ll gently point it out so she can self-moderate.
I set a 15 minute daily limit on Instagram. I also have my phone setup to block all non-essential apps between 7:00AM and 6:00PM on the weekdays, and I am not usually hitting my 15 Insta-minutes on those days.
I could probably reduce that to 10 and still catch up on anything from friends and family. But the extra 5 minutes is just enough time to enjoy some interesting content from the hobby-influencers I follow, yet not enough time to get sucked into the click-bait stuff.
Before setting limits I was probably at 30-60 Insta-minutes per day. Now I spend that extra time commenting on HN, which I would like to think is a more productive endeavor.
my iPhone saves my login credentials when I delete/reinstall it, so I delete instagram every Sunday or Monday then reinstall on Friday/Saturday, because I don't have the self control to actually limit myself with the screentime functionality.
It’s not cheap (like $99 annually) but I’ve gained a ton of time back with Opal. I think this is a referral link, but I’ve already paid for it. Founders are young, out of Paris.
https://link.opal.so/D3ttGLGSF9xGFNVj7
I don't have much in the way of social, but I've kept Instagram mostly to look at locations when I travel.
Instagram seems to have leveled off, but I personally don't find the Instagram annoyances nearly as dire as the TikToks posted to Youtube Stories.
Those seem the most annoying, and especially fake.. with all the amateur comedians, clickbait-y vid behaviors and voiceover triggers, and fake couple dynamics.
I actually really love instagram more than most other social networks I use.
I follow ~1500 Japanese cat accounts, ~50 personal friends (who mostly post food/travel/etc.), and ~100 "influencer" and "brand" accounts for companies I like, and ~10 meme accounts.
I mostly post random photos during travel, ranging from food photographs to cats to landscapes to sometimes things from conferences, mostly going for "visually interesting.
Locked to friends-only, and just remove people if they're slightly annoying even if I know them IRL.
The only thing I dislike about my use of IG is the lack of "easy to download photo from someone else's IG", but that's a product decision. I keep wanting to set up an actual self-hosted photo gallery but never get around to it, and the iphone cameraroll to IG workflow is so easy.
Where are we headed? What app should we use to share/communicate with others in a group setting without ads or having an option to have our data not to be mined or sold?
Is there a HN poll of a range of apps and how many is using each (and maybe a daily/weekly time usage of each)?
LinkedIn is a paradox. It's basically a free online resume to most people. A small subset actually post on it trying to build their brand. And then an even smaller subset don't understand that it's basically social media at work and spend their time posting political opinions and conspiracy theories that make them look bad.
I've never used LinkedIn for anything other than to respond to recruiters and look up people's backgrounds.
It can be useful for job seeking and maintaining contact with professional connections, but reading the feed full of self congratulatory and/or virtue signaling posts is a complete waste of time.
I think it's highly dependent on the user. A technically inclined HN user probably knows people who shifted to a tech Mastodon instance (like infosec.exchange).
As a personal anecdote, the people I know who cut back on Twitter did so long before Musk due to general social media burnout.
Quite a lot of my feed was Popehat, Tqbf, and Mjg59, who have all left the platform (more or less). Also a handful of low volume, personal friends went to Mastodon or retired from the platform.
I don't have an active twitter account, so one of the things I like from post-Musk Twitter is that it no longer requires me to login for reading tweets or for searching.
Same, site's actually way, way better now for us non-account-havers.
And the dumb shit Elon posts and all the times he kicks himself in the balls are way funnier than before he acquired 'em.
Overall, I'm happier with the site since he took over, personally. But then I'm rooting for its demise, preferably with as much drama and humor along the way as possible, so of course I like it.
I've been having a great time using LinkedIn. I only like and follow data people. My feed is only data and there are a lot of high-quality creators. I unfollow anyone that posts personal content or low-quality data "self-help"/motivational stuff. Just checked my feed and the top 10 posts were all good.
Social media is getting closer to fast fashion. Every app is doomed on creation to live a short life. I'm happy with this, since in reality, its ultimately a tool for marketing and social media is just the side effect. Superficial way of connecting to the masses? use the latest Social media. The real way of staying in touch with people? giving them a call or an email if not meet in person. Nothing beats the personal touch. Super
This is all true, but the result of social media is that people feel like they’re getting social fulfillment despite, in most cases, getting anything of value. So people are irritable, exhausted, and feel no need for offline socialization.
We’ll eventually come up with ways to resist this, but it’ll be hard. We can’t, if we live in the expensive cities where the jobs are, return to the real physical world, because that place was bought by the rich when we weren’t looking and now they own it.
I hate how I got rid of TikTok because of the addictive short form content and now I find myself somehow in Instagrams short form content. Now YouTube are also doing it.
These companies are just selling attention crack disguised as "creativity".
I'm still baffled about how TikTok hooks people. I installed it to check out an AI filter and look for a certain person doing live videos I found on YouTube. I've browsed the main feed a few times now and it's honestly 90-95%+ garbage and altogether just super annoying.
Why would you expect it to immediately know what to show you? This isn't YouTube's front page in 2007 where everybody gets suggested the same popular videos. You need to give it some input data first. The types videos you stick around and watch will be shown more frequently, the types you scroll past without watching will be shown less. It'll seed you stuff that it shows to people who watch similar stuff to you, and narrow your taste down. Everyone's feed becomes pretty unique, and chances are if you have any interests or hobbies, there's creators out there making something for your tastes.
In my experience it does a pretty good job of figuring this out. Especially compared to YouTube which seems to mostly show me videos from channels I've been watching frequently, and not necessarily similar types of content.
What's equally fascinating from this list is how thoroughly and completely Meta has wasted the opportunity of WhatsApp. Notice how it's one of the most used/downloaded apps and not high in the list for deletes.
I interviewed at WhatsApp post acquisition, but it seemed pretty obvious that the Facebook PMs and leadership that they installed post acquisition had neither the will nor ability to actually develop a strategy and make clear decisions in the absence of data and metrics.
Mark doesn't care of course, because you can't expand an ad network into a product hardened against surveillance. They tried for a while by investing in Messenger as a potential WeChat-like platform, but it was the wrong horse to bet on when WhatsApp already won internationally and iMessage/iPhone was the platform of choice among US teens.
Meta is the new Yahoo. One huge blue/purple legacy app they will continue to milk as it slowly fades, and then just a trail of death and decay in a long list of acquired products. Thank god Signal has come around and is being invested in.
I didn't want to delete my Instagram account but they went ahead and algo'd it into the trash can anyway, after first making me upload a selfie with a piece of paper with a random code written on it.
Truly a bizarre experience.
After I tweeted about it I discovered there's an underground economy of people claiming to be able to restore your account.
I guess I am too slow in that I opened a Facebook account for the first time ever in may 2012 and it was where everybody seemed to be at, only for a couple years later everybody started to open a parallel Instagram account - I never could understand why people would want to use another thing additional to a thing that could do the same?
In those years you could notice Facebook became a wasteland, the Cambridge analytica scandal surfaced and got so stressed just by opening the app - I deleted my account in 2018. But for my surprise, people around here seems to be quite happy with Facebook (which here in Latin America seems to refuse to die!), Instagram, twitter, Snapchat and now tik tok accounts - how do they handle all of that?
The same way people handle Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. They fulfill different functions to different people. I could do notes, make spreadsheets, or produce presentations in any one of those apps, but each task is more or less practical in each tool.
I haven't used social media in a while, but when I did they fulfilled these separate functions:
Facebook - Keeping up to data with family (or anyone over the age of 40). Communicating with Social groups/organizing events. Messaging friends and family with Messenger.
Instagram - Maintaining a photo diary of my life. Sharing what I'm doing currently with friends. Following celebrities. Messaging.
Twitter - Following celebrities, but textually rather than with video stories. Keeping up to date on current events and trends.
Snapchat - To be honest, Instagram stole SnapChats cake completely for me when they made Stories. Younger generations use it more from my experience. Used it largely for messaging without a paper trail.
TikTok - Entertainment and following social trends. It's like YouTube, but with a better recommendation algorithm and shorter form videos.
Instagram was much simpler back then. It wasn't a general social media platform, it was just for posting square images with captions. No DMs, no videos, no stories (that wasn't even a thing back then really), no status updates, etc. And it was only accessible on smartphones.
And that was around the time Facebook's original audience had their parents joining Facebook, making it less of a safe/cool place to screw around with your friends. Instagram had less appeal to parents because of all those limitations, so young people migrated there. Eventually the parents got on Instagram too, and they moved to Snapchat, which has so far done a pretty good job at being indecipherable to older generations, and focuses on making everything private, only sending stuff to people directly or whitelisted groups of people who can see your stories. Not to mention, everything having an expiration date means people won't be able to scroll back and see cringey/embarrassing posts you made a few years ago.
The Facebook experience seems to depends a lot on the age group. For the older than 1970s age group, Facebook experience is very similar to what early Facebook was for high school and universities in the 2000s. With lots of photo updates from friends.
Facebook Marketplace and Groups have nearly killed off hobby forums and Craiglist. I have an account for that purpose specifically. I don't even have a single friend on FB and it seems to really bug them -- I get a prompt to befriend at least one person from a list when I log in.
From a person who constantly deletes and reuploads the apps I have different reasons for each. Instagram is very addictive, Twitter demolishes me from the inside, Linkedin drags my confidence down, Spotify & I have a personal problem. When I feel that way with the apps I delete them to get rid of those situations and when I feel better I reupload them. Because it is my fault to feel those things not the apps. In these cycle of deleting and reuploading the apps, I built better relationship with the apps. It sounds very toxic I know but it gets better every time. Sometimes I caught up in a feeling to delete all socials, forever but it would be very bold to do that in this era.
If you're willing to share, I'm curious on what issues you're having with Spotify. Do you feel you're filling the silence too much with it, or something else?
I'm tired of Spotify too, in part because I don't see an endgame where I shut the family plan off. My family uses it a lot.
First of all, Spotify recommends music way too related with what I already listen. I want to hear new songs, genres and want it to remind me old songs that I grew up with. But Spotify can't fulfill that. Also I think Spotify has a very good UX design so that it is very easy to access every time comfortably when I go silent as you say. Mainly for those reasons I switched Spotify with YouTube Music for now. And financially YouTube Premium is more advantaged, you can watch videos without ads and you can listen whatever you want even covers.
Deleting facebook, instagram, and snapchat and all the dating apps was one of the best decisions of my life hands down. And I still got friends and I can still meet people, "social media" is a lie, the only thing the internet should be used for is sharing information and debate. The Internet used to be a place to watch weird fetish porn and discuss your interests with others from across the world, now all these corporations have come in and used that basic, narcissistic desire for attention to extract vast profits and fundamentally alter social life for their own benefit.
That app is super addicting and totally toxic. The shit it puts in my feed is crazy. It's like 100s "normal" posts and then all of sudden it's like here some whacky shit what do you think about this eh?
Instagram has added a word list feature that allows you to hide posts by keyword. This has been very useful to hide politics and topics I find negative. It's also much better without following influencers.
The default feed I get is at most two posts from people I follow, and then only ads and weird shit.
There's a minor mitigating factor: if you tap on Instagram logo, it will show a drop down letting you switch to a chronological timeline from accounts you follow. You have to force-refresh it though because by default it refreshes perhaps once an hour.
Society is so weird now. On the very rare occasion I get curious and visit tiktok or instagram and start scrolling it's like these windows moving up my screen and each one has a human face desperately trying to get my attention, and I just scroll past them. That reddit live thing is one of the weirdest. Play that piano motherfucker, play it better than the previous guy, dance while you're doing it and look like a star, keep my attention, oh no, you lost me.
Somehow Instagram is the only social media I can tolerate. Doesn't seem to have the hate and anger that I encounter constantly on Twitter and Reddit. Perhaps text format is not for me. I'm sure there is ugly stuff on Instagram but when it comes to images and video clips I naturally follow artists, musicians, and foodies rather than political or other incendiary content.
I’ve had a very positive experience with instagram — it’s my favorite social media thing. My feed is friends, paintings, photos, bikes, and furniture.
I also used the shopping tab (never bought anything there though) because its recommendations were great for finding specific things with the aesthetic I was looking for. I wish it was still in the app.
Used to be an app where I would check what friends have been doing on their spare time and vacation. Since the stupid tik too videos started the content I want to see is basically ratiod by an ownslaught of ads and silly videos from people I’ve never interacted with.
Wish I could delete but then I might lose contact with friends.
Thanks for this. I was looking for someone to comment on this point.
The list of apps that people most "want to delete" is highly correlated with apps with the list of apps with the most MAUs.
The right thing to look at here is the percentage of users who want to delete the app. Otherwise this table is just telling us that Instagram has more users than other apps—e.g., 1% of 1 billion > 1% of 1 million—which I suspect most people already know.
I wish I could delete my Instagram account. A bug with my account means the app stops functioning as soon as I sign into it, no matter whose phone I use or what country I’m in.
I signed up for Meta Verified on Facebook, hoping that their paid support feature would help me. They said that since it’s a technical issue, I have to report the problem through the app. I explained that my app stops functioning after I’ve logged in, and they said there’s nothing else they could do for me.
If anyone knows of a way I can get my account removed without needing to log in, please let me know.
Can't you login in a browser? Option two: move to the EU. The option to delete your account is required by law. And if that is not possible, try vpn? No idea if that works.
Thanks for the suggestions! Unfortunately, logging in with a browser gives me the message “confirm your info using the Instagram App to try to get back to your account”. Meta support assures me my account is in good standing, so I can only assume this is a bug.
I’ve unfortunately also tried VPN, as well as logging in on other people’s phones in different locations (including overseas).
I wish I didn’t have to move to Europe just to delete a social media account.
I really hate that I can't even delete it on my phone. Had to do some `adb` magic to finally get it disabled. There is a really horrible policy for Android on some phones which doesn't allow you to uninstall apps (and some phones like Oppo don't even let you disable it too).
Don't know if it's the same on iPhone (having never owned one) but I reckon they are no better as I have to install 'Notunes' on my laptop just to disable Apple music popping up when I connect bluetooth (and now way to uninstall Apple apps either).
What a horrible ecosystem this is with these companies nowadays.
... doesn't this list correlate positively with the most popular apps in America? Yeah, there's a high # of how do I delete Instagram searches, there's a high # of Instagram users.
Seems like the article fails to realize that the more popular an application is, the more likely it is to be deleted. Which is a very basic assumption to make.
Also, it might be with something with how hard it is to uninstall the app in a specific platform. For example - I actually didn’t have a “delete” button for the Facebook app on my previous phone. This might popularize the search term significantly.
Interesting article, but the information here is skewed in two ways. If the data were normalized in relation to how many users or downloads they have we would get a better picture. Also the search use skews towards cases where users need to search for how to delete their app or deactivate an account vs just doing it (apps that make it difficult or user base who needs help doing this).
> Also the search use skews towards cases where users need to search for how to delete their app or deactivate an account vs just doing it (apps that make it difficult or user base who needs help doing this).
But this is a very good thing to know and to be concerned about.
Is there a way to safely determine what my most used services are (by time and by device(mobile/desktop)? (gmail, voice, outlook, figma, youtube, amazon, etc) - and see a daily/weekly/monthly chart of each at any time? My guess is that I would need to install an app on my phone and have a Windows/MacOS desktop app to do this?
I wonder if inability to hide "Reels" drives disdain.
I get forced Reels into the stream which are just creepy and sleazy, in no way personalized beyond narcissistic women making spectacles of themselves, targeted to me evidently since i'm male, since i loathe that.
Maybe loitering looking at them like "wtf?" is enough to perpetuate them?
I have posted photos to Instagram but I don’t understand the point. I rarely take picture of myself . Mostly I take photos using my macro camera , cool things I have seen like architecture or the local environment and graffiti and real life stickers. Is it mainly just to share photos of yourself?
I bookmarked the messages page in instagram in my web browser and deleted the app, that way I can stay in contact with friends and family without the distraction.
This interaction pattern isn't possible in the app, and users are forced to view the most captivating post in their feed upon opening.
I made an Instagram account recently and within 10 minutes they banned my account for being suspicious, asking for a mobile number. I gave them my number and then the account got banned again for the same reason. I didn't post anything or do anything suspicious, is this common?
This has happened to me, except I was banned instantly upon creation and they wanted a mobile number AND a selfie. Which I refuse to give them and ended up deleting Instagram.
I suspect my IP address was suspicious to the algorithm, but it's a mobile app on a mobile network so I'm not sure why it's so strict.
Instagram is a reflection of the stuff you click on. So long as you take that to heart, then you'll do fine.
Make sure you flat out reject and ban anything you don't like (either use the ... or long press and say "I don't like this").
Make sure you turn off feed suggestions (they are the ones with the x in the top right) That'll stop Instagram injecting targeted, and stuff some poor IC has been forced to cram into your feed to suit some metric. Then you'll have a feed that shows you updates from people you follow, then when you get to the end suggested posts.
The explore tab has a different persona to who you follow. So you can be obsessivly following knit crafters in your feed, but your explore tab could be filled with something entirely orthogonal. You will get inclusions from explore into your main feed suggestions, but you can reject them by either scrolling over them quickly (not that effective) or long press -> I don't like.
multiple accounts for different interests is also a good idea.
> multiple accounts for different interests is also a good idea.
...Until a bunch of them get suspended without recourse because having more than one account as an individual violates their ToS. Don't ask me how I'd know...
I dunno. I only follow tattoo artists on ig now and log on once a month or so to think about my next tattoo and also to laugh at the DMs my partner sent me from weeks earlier. I’m quiet quitting ig I guess?
Well for billions of users, it's very hard for them to quit a digital drug like Instagram when the feverish notifications, updates and posts are tempting cold turkeys everywhere resisting the urge to log in to the app.
There is a reason why Meta has spent millions on psychologists studying on ways to hook in users and increase screen time, scrolling and getting more people addicted to Instagram; hence the billions of users having difficulty deleting the app.
Even if they do, they end up re-installing it and logging back in again to scroll up for the entire day about what they missed, then the addiction cycle continues.
The Canva infographics set destroyed IG. It became hyper topic after 2016 and never recovered. Good example of how not to run a platform.
Now it’s all ads and nonorganic posts. People only really use stories anymore. A few of
My friends are influencers and they’ve all given up on IG and moved to TikTok.
I was similarly confused and looked it up. I believe it’s just a set of templates for making infographics. Hard to draw the dots between “free templates” and “toxic social media app”
- Twitter post-Musk: most of the interesting people i followed moved to Mastodon and stopped posting interesting content on Twitter. Plus App and Site went slower, same old trolls and Musk now is the center of attentions. No removed, since i go there once in a while to read what the Crypto community has to speculate.
- Facebook: I refuse to use, i have absolute no interest to see content from "friends" in that form. I used FB groups a while ago but the read format was horrible. I only keep the account because its the only way to keep somekind of contact to old co-workers.
- Whatsapp: I do use, for some friends. I like it. I miss general content infomation, therefore i use more Mastodon or Instagram.
- Tiktok: The recommendation engine is brilliant. Its like an addition, but i barely use it due to Privacy reasons. Also i have no interest to post any content on Tiktok.
- Signal: I use to contact my family. Apple Messages as well.
- Reddit: I go to some subreddits to keep me informed about some hobbies, but i take the information and comments with a huge grain of salt. My experience tells me Reddit cannot be used for serious exchange of information.
- Instagram: I use it for some hobbies, I was able to find interesting content but the Experience itself Meta wants to provide to the users is bad. Ads everything, useless suggestions often show and lack of identity. What does Meta want to do with Instagram ? Does it have an identity right now ? Does it want to be Tiktok, the old photos based Instagram, Facebook replacement or what else ? Also i hate the fact its difficult to access external links and the comments system.
- Youtube: its ok, it is what it always is. The amount of Ads its annoying, maybe I need to pay premium at some point in time.
- Linkedin: Its horrible in everyway. I have an account to check some old colleagues.
- Discord: I don't like the concept, its difficult to keep track of information and its too chaotic. I use it to keep up with some friends for Gaming. Its also fun to interact with Bots.
- Pinterest: my wife loves it, but i never found a use for it.
- Mastodon: is the only Social Network i can safely say i have been having a very good experience. The Apps are great, most of the interesting users from Twitter are now on Mastodon, descentralized, Privacy friendly, no Ads, no Algorithm to sell you ads.
Bonus:
- HN: I like it, moderation works great! Lots of interesting content! :)
So yeah, social media in 2023 its not a good experience. It seems everybody wants to exploit something out of their users and fight for their time. In addition they are breaking search engines because the average user posts content on social networks instead of open websites which could be seached from Search Engines.
Mastodon is great...I like how all of the wild ass american taliban leftist people are leaving twitter to go join their own boxed in caliphate's. It's a better situation for the world in general. let these maniacs cancel themselves on their own ruby servers vs polluting Twitter with their nonsense.
Who people think we are is who we are because identity is a reflection, not an actual thing in reality (similar to colors not existing in reality).
Having access to a extra mirrors at first creates a sense of control. You know your mom and dad won't give you a "non-distorted" reflection so the reflection from strangers is worth more. Colleagues or friends saying "you're smart!" means a lot more from them.
When each mirror is carefully placed, the "whole" of we we are and would like to be can be understood more deeply just like 7 blind men working together understand the elephant more deeply.
However when the mirrors are mass produced and cheap and you have no control over their place in your life, then the identity becomes overwhelmed by expectation. Just like super high resolution makes your pores look larger, the mirror array makes every aspect of your life feel like shit even if from a rational analysis "extra information should never be a danger"