Instagram Is Over

<i>&quot;To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be.&quot;</i><p>That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This is called &quot;pulling a Myspace&quot;.

&gt; something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.<p>There seems to be a thing that some people hate &quot;fedoras&quot;. I think it&#x27;s to do with the &quot;Fedora guy&quot; meme. The hat Jerry Messing appears in is not a fedora; it&#x27;s a trilby.<p>A trilby is a hat with a quite narrow brim, and stiffened; it&#x27;s often woven and patterned. It can be made of just about anything (such as leather). You can&#x27;t really mess with the brim; it&#x27;s flipped up at the back and down at the front, and it stays that way.<p>A fedora is a soft felt hat with a wide brim. The hats worn by both the cops and the robbers in 30&#x27;s gangster movies are all fedoras. Felt hats are not woven; they&#x27;re felted, and that means they have to be made of wool or fur (I guess a panama fedora is an exception, but then I think a panama fedora is just a panama hat that is the same shape as a real fedora).<p>Where I come from, a trilby is associated with racecourse bookies and the criminal fraternity, as well as tacky seaside &quot;kiss-me-quick&quot; hats, made of something like cardboard. Fedoras, on the contrary, are stylish.<p>They&#x27;re also very functional. They shed rain like an umbrella, without dumping it down your neck. The only thing wrong with them is that they make a good aerofoil - you have to &quot;hold onto your hats&quot; if it&#x27;s windy.

I’m far from bullish on meta long-term, but reporting like this would have you believe that nobody uses Facebook, and that Instagram is soon to share its fate. Optimists that they are, tech reporters overweight growth to absurd extremes. Maybe reporting on youth trends brings out the insecurities in all of us—you’d rather not look clueless in front of your two cool friends in their early 20s than the 2 billion or so Facebook MAUs.<p>TikTok is a platform with huge growth potential. IG is perceptibly declining. But Facebook has proven itself fairly durable, mostly to people outside tech and media bubbles. It’d be wise to not call it over just yet.

On the topic of social media in decline, TikTok also appears to have peaked in content already.<p>Following people isn&#x27;t that interesting since most content creators that hit it big are One Hit Wonders. After they hit that big growth spike, they either follow the herd with the latest dance or trend, or they keep doing the same thing that made em famous with slight variations.<p>How long can you milk the same dance routine by switching out which celebrity does the silly little dance?<p>There were a few interesting educational channels for a while, but most people just don&#x27;t have that many interesting things to keep posting about at the rate which is expected of a platform like TikTok. Quality content takes time to produce.<p>TikTok really only has a few buckets of content types. Some examples include thirst traps from sex workers that are looking to promote their OnlyFans and cute animals doing cute things.<p>Instagram isn&#x27;t that different. I mostly use the app to see cute pictures of people&#x27;s pets and the occasional human picture.

I am surprised people expect these apps to remain popular for a long time. The internet has changed so much. I&#x27;ve watched social media apps come and go every few years and I personally think they are all short lived trends with maybe a few exceptions. They capture a young market first, who provide the value (photos, videos, memes) and then older generations start joining after the young market is captured. Then after five to 10 years, they age out, the fad is over. A new app captures the younger generation and the cycle repeats.<p>Some smaller social media networks have maybe kinda sorta survived more than one generation to some extent but it&#x27;s debatable. Twitter seems like it has the most staying power so far but the present situation is evolving rapidly.

“In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever”<p>This was so ridiculously judgmental that I couldn’t keep reading.

Instagram is doing just fine at the job it morphed into. A high end escort advertising board.<p>A 20yo guy cannot afford to spend $5K a day for a beautiful girl that has posted scantly clad pics exactly for this purpose. They are not the market. The market is middle age wealthy men and the women they pay for their &quot;time.&quot; Then the women they pay go back to Instagram to find things to buy for &quot;bragging rights&quot; which satisfies the advertisers.

Maybe I&#x27;m ignorant of what TikTok is but it seems to be mostly about video sharing and less about &quot;social networking&quot; with friends and family??<p>I also think TikTok has serious risks going forward re Chinese government. Already a lot of grumbling from lawmakers in US about banning it as CCP growing more belligerent in recent years whereas Facebook products aren&#x27;t at all influenced by it.

In a very broad sense, I&#x27;m glad to see things like this happening; I think a (relatively) high rate of turnover in social media is probably orders of magnitude better and safer than &quot;one app to rule them all, forever.&quot;<p>It additionally makes me bullish on federated deals like Activitypub&#x2F;Mastodon.<p>It&#x27;s funny that the above presently tend to be &quot;lefty-crunchy-hippie&quot; -- because, I think if <i>corporations</i> get it through their hiveminds that the above enables them to have their own &quot;official source of truth,&quot; thus preventing doofiness like blue check marks, this would all take off in a beneficial way.

It&#x27;s because these apps are longer social in the original sense of social media. Most of my family&#x27;s sharing of what would have been Instagram or Facebook posts are now in a WhatsApp group I admin. Sure I would have loved to get everyone onto Signal instead but the end result has been much better experience for us.

They moved on from Facebook being over to Instagram being over lol.<p>Instagram isn&#x27;t over. It&#x27;s still the most popular social media app on both App Store and Google Play in the US.<p>For the past couple of years you always see articles popping up about Facebook being dead, then you look at the actual data and people are using Facebook more than ever.<p>Look at the last report from Meta, more people on a daily and monthly basis are using Facebook and Instagram than ever both.<p>Nearly 3b people use their apps on the daily basis. It going to take on hell of a long time before they become over.

Social products all have a lifetime value and it’s incredibly short. The same thing will also happen to TikTok one day. I suspect we will learn in the coming decades that social media companies are very profitable in the short term, but not so in the long term, say 20 years, unless the keep introducing new viral social products.

Eldest son (17) and all his mates use it - very rarely do they post publicly, it&#x27;s purely for messaging. I&#x27;ve never been sure why, there&#x27;s plenty enough alternatives, but that&#x27;s how it is for him and his cohort.

As an avid photographer I thought Instagram would be a good place to share my work but was amazed to find just how photo-hostile it is: I loathe the forced 4:5 portrait aspect ratio and I die inside every time it ignores the embedded ICC profile and my colors get warped slightly after I post.<p>I loathe reels and the recommended posts but their recent addition a mode for only viewing people you follow has more or less solved the other problems; I just wish they&#x27;d put a bit more of effort into the basic functionality.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Ujltn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Ujltn</a>

Instagram used to be about seeing what my friends were up to; now it’s all my friends resharing made-for-IG takes and re-re-re-re-re-sharing group photos I’ve already seen seven times.<p>I want an “OC Only” toggle.<p>Edit: And the above was referring only to Stories. I haven’t looked at the feed regularly in over a year.

I hope not. I use it as a way to save my moments with my family, in the expectation that It will survive some good years, and therefore my kids can then watch the pics, videos, comments and get a better picture (pun intended) of the context of the photos. Much better than have it in a disk (if its survive) or printed.

&gt; Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.<p>A &quot;youth-culture consultant&quot; trying to predict the future? How scientific<p>Since this whole article is just one big hot take, here&#x27;s another hot take: eponymous social media as a whole is on the way out. The only stuff anyone can put on eponymous social media is personal brand stuff (think LinkedIn), never anything actually genuine<p>It&#x27;s impossible for people to have real engagements under eponymous social media because anything they can say could be turned against them<p>IG is predominantly just marketing, whether it&#x27;s people showing off (like LinkedIn), pages trying to build a following with e.g. pet videos so they can make money from ads, annoying influencer &quot;content&quot;, or actual overt ads

I think the key to a massively successful new social network will be a fallback API of just email&#x2F;text.<p>Why not let your shiny new social network UI parse any dumb input into a fancy thread format? Zero adoption friction. Federation baked in.<p>Example: You run a mastodon-like service that can receive email. When it gets an email, it publishes a twirt with the contents. Truncates as needed.<p>If it&#x27;s a new email address, spin up new user with email username. No password needed, cause it came from the email address you own.<p>Conversely, in the fancy interface, you can @soandso@gmail.com and it will email them for you. Doesn&#x27;t matter if they&#x27;ve &quot;joined twartordon.&quot; So it has a dumb-simple user growth model baked in.<p>I&#x27;ve been promoting this idea for years in the man-yells-at-clouds format, but folks don&#x27;t seem to get why it&#x27;s so powerful...

I stopped posting photos on Instagram. It takes a lot of effort to compose a good shot, process the RAWs and upload them. The interaction rate has gone down considerably. A decade ago, people genuinely commented on photos and provided feedbacks. Like counts has gone down as well. It feels discouraging to post photos with such less of a interaction and feedback. I don&#x27;t care about the likes, but the platform that originally built to share photos no longer values them. Photos are replaced with stories, reels and ads. The influencers are pushing all sort of crap that gets boosted by the algorithm.

<i>&quot;To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced.&quot;</i><p>I have two Instagram accounts: one that <i>only</i> follows friends and family. Another that follows brands, influencers, and such. It completely fixed my Instagram experience. I can choose the (low volume) social network of friends, or endless scrolling and discovery. Never do they intermix. The friends-only feed is so low traffic, I never get sucked into sponsored or suggested posts. Highly recommend.

When the percentage of ads (sponsored posts&#x2F;stories) is higher than the content you want to see, it becomes a pain to actually use the app, and you slowly use it less and less until you stop using it alltogether.

This is one of the biggest jibes I have ever read, given that Meta&#x27;s MAU is the highest of all time (2.9b, if I remember correctly)<p>Instagram it&#x27;s not over, and I bet will win the battle against TikTok

I don&#x27;t know if IG is dead, but that Reels nonsense was an absolute fiasco. They kept showing me reels that were nonsensical and were only designed to lead engagement stats from questions of &quot;what is the person trying to do here&quot;. Not to mention, the comments on many of these useless vids were always in Turkish. I don&#x27;t speak Turkish, I&#x27;ve never been to Turkey, yet comments on videos were always in Turkish.

My anecdata is that all IG is really used for anymore is messaging due to inertia and cross-posting content from other platforms. Very little original user generated content.<p>Fundamentally, these old apps that are built on the &quot;create an account and manually follow users&quot; model cannot compete with TikTok right now, and I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ll be able to change to be competitive with TikTok in the future.

Instagram as a social network sucks but I like sharing my photos with people who are already my friends (private account), and seeing their photos too.

Instagram is &quot;transitional&quot; technology. It peaked at a time when traditional social networks had started their slow decline, and things like Snapchat and TikTok were gaining some popularity. These days it&#x27;s a bit too open for traditional users, and a bit too boring for the average TikTok user. It will always fill a niche, but it will inevitably shrink by at least an order of magnitude.

Honestly I never understood the appeal.<p>A social network that forces you to wedge your content in images and short videos, while on Facebook you could share YouTube videos, music, interesting links, write-ups, you name it. How can anyone in their right mind prefer something as limiting as Instagram? Even its instant messenger is limited compared to Facebook&#x27;s.

The Atlantic is more over than IG

When Facebook bought it, they prioritized growth over the product itself. This kills the product.

Today I did an experiment.<p>I opened up Facebook (the desktop version), scrolled down 40 times, and categorized every post I saw in my timeline. The result was roughly 30% ads, 30% &quot;suggested&quot; posts of random memes, 30% updates to pages I&#x27;m subscribed to by necessity (local clubs and such), and <i>only</i> 10% &quot;real&quot; content published by friends. An that last 10% was mostly people sharing or commenting on random pages I don&#x27;t care about, not anything about their life.<p>So Facebook, which is still marketed a <i>social</i> network and a way to stay in touch with friends, is now to me 90% irrelevant (or mostly irrelevant) garbage. I&#x27;m only using it as a mailing list for the few communities I&#x27;m still subscribed to, and despite having close to 200 &quot;friends&quot; I have not interacted with any of them through Facebook in years, save for the occasional birthday wish. Maybe I would if my timeline had some of their content, but either it&#x27;s being pushed at the bottom of the algorithm or maybe like me they just don&#x27;t bother posting anything at all anymore.<p>It wasn&#x27;t always like this. I&#x27;m old enough to remember Facebook&#x27;s rise but young enough to have joined it when it was &quot;hype&quot;, in my final years of high school. It looked nothing like today, your home feed was a constant buzzing of people sharing updates about their life and interacting organically. Yes, there were privacy concerns already, but it also tremendously helped me broaden my social circle and feel part of a community. It was very effective at the &quot;social&quot; part of &quot;social network&quot;.<p>But then came the engagement maximization algorithms, the ads, the brands, the sponsored content, the atrocious UI updates...and slowly but surely people started leaving, because it was becoming harder and harder to parse signal from noise. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a generational rift element too (teenagers pretty much ignored Facebook after their parents started to join), but even people who grew up with it are leaving because it&#x27;s a fundamentally different platform than it was back in 2010.<p>Seems like Instagram is taking a similar route. Makes you wonder if it&#x27;s the fate of every social network to eventually decrepit and die.

There are 3 reasons why Tiktok succeeded and Instagram struggles.<p>1) The focus of the Social Network is normal people, doing anything it might be interesting to others. Which is pretty much the contrary of Instagram which focus on Celebrities and &quot;Friends&quot;.<p>2) Tiktok has an amazing fine-tuned Algorithm. Its like even a mirror of your subconscious, it tries very much to play anything you desire to see.<p>3) Instagram, Youtube and Twitter are full of ads. It just breaks the user experience. Youtube experience sucks too because they show Videos with higher probability of views which in turn are tipically big youtubers playing sponsored content.

Next time you&#x27;re on a bus, or other public area, peek at what people are doing on their phones. I&#x27;d bet it will be Facebook or Instagram like 99% of the time. Maybe WhatsApp outside of the US, and possibly Youtube. These are the apps people are on almost all the time. They have absolutely massive user bases and are integral parts of most adult humans&#x27; lives. The idea these apps are &quot;dying&quot; is out of touch with reality.

Instagram, like many social networks, is what you make of it and who your friends are.<p>Pick friends and who you follow well and it&#x27;s a great experience. Pictures and video are equally supported, discovery is good, search is the best of any social network IMO.<p>And pro-tip: if your discovery is too full of stuff you don&#x27;t want, click stuff you don&#x27;t want and click &quot;not interested&quot;. It&#x27;ll then remove similar posts from your discovery page in the future.

Instagram was over when all the “kids” were on Snapchat, except it wasn’t.<p>Maybe it is, but it will be a death by 500 million cuts, not a max exodus. There is no clear successor.

Author points to data showing 300m active users in 2013, 2b active users now, yet claims that Instagram is over. What is the replacement? Where is the decline?

On more than a few occasions now I have loaded up my infrequently checked instagram accounts and been presented with something awful. They were always attention seeking reels from random accounts I don&#x27;t follow; showing people being hurt or accident footage. I swipe up on the app and kill it pretty much straight away, then I consider deleting my instagram accounts once again.

And there’s no use relevant&#x2F;usable alternative on the horizon. Except a few utopian (or shall I say purist) ones.<p>I guess one reason could be - even if someone wants to give it a shot they pretty much know that one of these behemoths will copy and drive them out, or buy them out but for that they need to have audience which is locked in vast corporate silos.

Instagram isn&#x27;t over, but it is becoming passé, which is not a positive sign for an app built around making people look cool.

There are different segments on Instagram. Perhaps the &quot;lifestyle blogger&quot; or &quot;influencer&quot; has lost it&#x27;s popularity. However, other audiences are still following different interests on Instagram. There are still thousands of artists (maybe millions) posting their art and illustrations, and still popular on Instagram.

I wonder if there’s a market for small app, limited in scope, knock off of the original Instagram. $1&#x2F;month.

Instagram was really nice until a few years ago. I could keep up visually with family and friends, and didn&#x27;t have all advertorial, news and political garbage get in the way. Still good for talking to people, but a lot of that is moving to messenger apps not from Meta.

Figures.<p>It recently passed the mom test. My 70-something mom signing up for something is a strong signal it has peaked.

An increase in ads seems to be desparation. It&#x27;s an easy throttle when a company needs cash but there&#x27;s a tipping point.<p>Protip: interact with a couple ads you like and you&#x27;ll see mostly those instead of rando

I never installed Instagram, but as I remember, it&#x27;s an app to apply nice filters to photos you took with your phone. Do I confuse it with some other app or am I just getting old?

Walking through the mall yesterday, I was shocked to see 5+ adults watch FB Reels &#x2F; IG &#x2F; TikTok. I think FB might be right about video being the future.

the login wall is what killed it for me. try this link in a private window:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instagram.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;ClCFeRSjOXo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instagram.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;ClCFeRSjOXo</a><p>if you hit refresh 5 times, even slowly, you get blocked until you login. I shouldn&#x27;t have to login just to view a post.

&quot;cool people are bored of some media consumption format&quot;<p>What will be the next one?<p>A: hand drawn postcards

I think it&#x27;s more accurate to say The Atlantic is over before Instagram is.<p>We&#x27;ve been using Instagram more than any of the other social networks. Not making a TikTok account. YouTube lost me forever with their invasive ad push. Facebook lost me with its over the top moderation and irrelevant &amp; useless ads. My Twitter account was suspended for a SNL quote.<p>Instagram currently has <i>relevant</i> and generally well done ads, if anything. The videos are also captivating and addictive and currently not littered with ads. I think that if they put ads in the Reels, they&#x27;d drive away a lot of traffic. Right now you almost don&#x27;t notice some of the ads, and the ones you do notice are generally well done. That&#x27;s a big difference right there, in my opinion.<p>Instagram has a lot of fun educational content &amp; accounts. TikTok seems to lack that - it&#x27;s a pool of misinformation more than education in my experience.<p>Definitely going to disagree with The Atlantic here.

So what does the new generation use these days if not instagram?

Instagram is the new Tumblr