Instagram plummets towards the abyss

[rock_dinosaur]

I never liked Instagram much, but I joined it and have stuck with it for several years because I didn't want to lose touch with various old friends after I jettisoned Facebook. But I've found Instagram increasingly annoying recently: the posts no longer appear in chronological order but in a random, constantly-changing jumble (as on Facebook), more

Comments

[coercedbynutmeg]

I've never had Instagram. I joined FB back when it was "exclusive" in Spring 2004, otherwise probably would not have bothered. Instagram (and increasingly Twitter) doesn't want people to look at content without having an account, though imginn.org is a viable bypass for public posts.

How does a person even find friends on Instagram? Typing in their name and hoping for the best? Email address book cross check? I have no interest in this as a hobby.

For FB, probably like Instagram, it seems like bots and algos are rampant, and that leads to the deterioration of the platform because the bots inevitably make bad decisions, from showing the same post 720 times, to showing things a person doesn't care about, to hiding things they do care about, to accusing them of spamming their followers, to requiring unexpected password changes.

[rock_dinosaur]

I think it is possible to search for people by real name on Instagram; however, the site is obviously geared towards persuading people to follow others on the basis of how attractive their selfies are. It's all about image rather than content.

I agree with all your points regarding Facebook, and they are among the reasons why I eventually tore myself away from that horrible site. With Instagram now being owned by Facebook, I suppose it's no surprise that it's being transformed into 'Facebook-lite'. It was predicted that this would happen. I detest algorithms. While I've been pretty unimpressed with most of the changes that have been made to LiveJournal over the years, I hugely value the fact that our friends-pages continue to display in chronological order and we see everything our friends post, not just what some mysterious algorithm chooses to let us see.

[coercedbynutmeg]

I have heard, though not confirmed, that the LJ App will display posts in something other than chronological order, but it might be a setting that can be disabled. I never use the app and just go through the mobile site if I'm not at my computer.

[rock_dinosaur]

I've seen a few people complaining about the LJ app, but I installed it on my phone to see what the problem was, and it seemed to work perfectly well to me. It may have been displaying posts in non-chronological order, but if that was the case, I didn't notice. But I hardly ever use my mobile phone. I would be reluctant to use any social media site that uses algorithms to jumble up the post-order or prevent me from seeing what I want to see.

[arethinn]

I've seen a lot of people complaining about this, yeah. I don't actually use my Instagram account the way it's intended; I only even signed up for one earlier this year because I finally got fed up enough with it nagging me to log in to an account I didn't have and having to pull page-element-blocking tricks to scroll down people's individual feeds (or whatever you call it on Instagram). So I don't actually see the problems you're referring to, myself, but yeah.

[rock_dinosaur]

You've reminded me of another thing that irritated me about Instagram: those pop-up messages that kept appearing on my screen when I wasn't logged-in, telling me that person A had followed person B's account. Who gives a flying fuck! This was another of Facebook's annoying features that's now been imposed on Instagram. I'm referring to Instagram in the past tense here as it locked me out of my account for the umpteenth time a few days ago. I couldn't be bothered going through the rigmarole of trying to log back again again and I just deleted it altogether. I suspect I won't be alone in doing so if other people are as fed-up as I was with being subjected to nothing but adverts, and their friends' posts being treated almost as an afterthought.