Set your profile to private and stop giving a shit about engagement. If you're selling something, great, make a themed profile and increase your follower count with as many #hashtags as you can cram into that comment section. If you're using it socially, post about your life and chill out on measures of popularity.<p>I do strongly agree with the idea that we need a better way to reach out to our friends. Posting a photo and getting likes isn't staying in touch. It's fine for acquaintances, but you should talk to the people you care about, not just check up on their recent posts.
I don't care about how many likes or how many followers I get. I use Instagram to share my photography which is my hobby. I only follow my friends and people whose posts I genuinely want to see. Through Instagram I've been able to connect with other likeminded photographers that inspire me with their work and support me in mine. I also find it a great way to keep up with old friends that never used Facebook in the same way.<p>If your happiness is dependent on the attention you receive on these social media apps, there are likely deeper problems that you should address beyond simply deleting the app and telling everyone else who uses it to do the same.<p>There's a certain irony to all of these posts that have been cropping up lately on how "I deleted (insert social media service here) and it made me happier". Many of these posts cite the cessation of the race for validation as the reason for their increase in happiness. If you weren't expecting the same validation that you got from the service you just left, would you have really made the post? Couldn't you have simply just quit and be done with it? Deleting Instagram may temporarily improve your mental health, but it isn't a cure for a deeper underlying problem.
I feel this way about social media in general.<p>I completely deleted all of my social media profiles about three years ago. A few weeks back, I created an entirely new twitter account because I've been giving more software talks lately and I've noticed that I'm the only speaker without a twitter handle.<p>But I find myself falling into the engagement trap constantly, since I still have a tiny following. In trying to think "what should I tweet that will get likes?", I'm already conditioning myself to pursue engagement.<p>The thought of getting my twitter following back to what it was only a few years ago seems really daunting, and I'm already put off by the thought a few weeks in.
> People are reduced to a single identity<p>You can have multiple accounts and the Instagram UI makes it easy to switch. You can click the name of the account and a drop down appears. You then click the account you want to use and it immediately switches you without any hassles.<p>Most people I know (18-28 demographic) have several accounts.<p>I own a reptile and my main account is reptile posting along with some nature photos taken from the odd times I go on hikes. This account is my "nature photography" account. It's the one I use to enjoy the gamification part of Instagram. I enjoy hunting for likes and adjust the photos I post there based on reception.<p>The second account is a sh*tposting account that is private and is filled with inside jokes. This account is only followed by close friends.<p>My third account is my family account. It's filled with family photos and my mom and aunts follow it. This account is also private.<p>My fourth account is my developer / workplace account and has no photos. It is temporary because it is registered using the corporate email account and when I change jobs, I create it again from scratch.
My dopamine response system has apparently never bought into the idea that likes actually determine my value in any way. I seem just use them to see what specific friends or colleagues are interested in and invite them for a specific activity. Vegetarian? Invite them for pizza not a BBQ. Outdoorsy? See if they want to go skiing or hiking some time. Based on what I see and hear I feel pretty lucky.
Counterpoint: IG allows you to curate an online photo album about yourself and either broadcast it to the world or distribute it to a permissioned list, and this has significant value for many people.<p>It also has intrinsic negative value for many, in the way outlined by the author (and also described by the seminal Wait but Why post [0]). People see their friends posting snapshots of their nominally awesome lives and feel pressure to keep up, and basically everyone makes each other more miserable by generating FOMO in others, etc.<p>I'm not saying that this <i>sehnsucht</i>-generation isn't real, or that it doesn't mess some people up -- it is and it does. But if we're judging IG on its overall merits the downside has to be weighed against the fact that IG helps people learn about each other through a pretty elegant interface -- right?<p>Also, the author seems to be eliding the differences between a) best practices for building and monetizing an IG following as an influencer with a public-facing account and b) the general stress of 'keeping up with' your college classmates:<p>> We can talk about free or paid apps, ads or donations, we can talk about tipping and buy me a coffee, or patreon subscriptions. We can talk about all of that, or we can get to the heart of what really matters. Things that are easy to do, aren't always the best things for us.<p>By my reading, in this passage he is conflating the measures IG influencers take to help themselves make money on Instagram with the stress and angst that IG users who are not trying to make a living off of IG posts feel with respect to keeping up with their high school classmates and whatnot. Seems like a pretty clear category-mistake to me.<p>[0]: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...</a>
I see the reasoning, but I don't think it's necessarily true. Look at someone like Joe Rogan, who has millions of followers but a fairly eclectic mix of content and no one thing that defines what he does (interviewer, commentator, hiker, traveler, hunter, MMA enthusiast, fitness and "nutrition" advocate, etc).<p>Come to think of it, most of the famous people I follow post random content as well, like musician Ola Englund posting funny videos of his kids or UFC fighter Derrick Lewis posting almost nothing UFC or fighting related. If anything, the unexpected content makes a person MORE worth following because it's not just generic self-promotion the whole time.<p>It's a mixed bag, and the author definitely has some warrant for concern, but I think it's overblown.
There's something really unsettling about the way this article casually drops a Ted Kaczynski reference without, you know, even doing so much as alluding to the messed-up things that he did. There are probably better examples of people to use, right?
If you are "working on your personal brand" or whatever... sure. I just post pictures of stuff I do, and my friends see it. The end. I don't care at all about "getting engagements"
Did anyone notice the website for this post? The author of this post seems to have created the site too:<p>-- <a href="https://streaking.app/about" rel="nofollow">https://streaking.app/about</a><p>-- <a href="https://streaking.app/@sean" rel="nofollow">https://streaking.app/@sean</a><p>This idea of tracking streaks is good; is there a meta-service/platform for monitoring "streaks" of "anything"?
> deleting accounts and ostracizing yourself socially<p>I read this as the former implying the latter, and was reminded of a tweet by Mike Monteiro that was something like[1]:<p>> I’ve seen excuses from people who say they want to leave Facebook but can’t that would make heroin addicts blush<p>[1]: He was part of DeactiDay, so the account and tweet are no longer available.
When I click this link I am "turned against myself" by what seems like an automatic history.back(). Is this a metaphor? (edit: A half hour later and it is still doing this for me despite other people seemingly commenting on the content of an article. I am using iOS 10.)
If the author is reading HN, please add something like this:<p><pre><code> p { line-height: 25px; }
</code></pre>
The text is hard to read from being so bunched together.