On Instagram's Video Saturation

A day or two I opened the Instagram app and I scrolled down without seeing a single photo so I deleted the app from my phone. There was a time when instagram was a photo sharing network between friends, and friends of friends. Now it has become a video spamming platform for influencers we have never, and will never met. In essence it has become worthless, hence the uninstall.

I noticed that Threads was also saturated in video. If YouTube, FB, instagram and Threads have reels then we have four video sharing sites that share the same functionality. We have gone from having chats on Threads, and photo sharing on Instagram to a TikTok experience everywhere.

This makes the case for WhatsApp groups, Signal groups and others. This makes it rational to shift from having an open, international social web, to having personal chat rooms, like we used to have small web forums in the 90s and 2000s. It makes the case for sharing on Strava, and Whatsapp.

Facebook Deactivation

When I deactivated my FB account for years, I never missed having it. The community that was alive and thriving in 2007 until Zynga undermined conversations has been gone for years. I returned to FB for a few months because Twitter was bought and destroyed. The sense of community, even now, isn’t there. I see more toxic content, than healthy content. I didn’t like the toxic effect of that content on me.

It’s because FB shadow banned me, for complaining about the toxic, hate-spreading posts on FB that I quit. If I am the problem, for reporting dangerous behaviour, then the anti-social network is no longer worth my time.

Instagram Vacuum

You post a reel to Instagram, or FB, and you might have one or two reactions. The Return on Investment, as a normal individual, rather than an influencer is zero. I see hundreds of videos that have no value, and zero photos by friends, or very few. The cost of engagement is so high on Instagram that “rewards” are no longer there.

A reward, such as seeing photos by friends, conversations with friends. A sense of community.

The Photo Niche

Now that the Instagram photo niche is gone, we can move over to another app, like pixelfed. We can move back to sites and apps on a human scale. We can share directly between humans via Signal and Whatsapp.

FB and People’s Perceptions

If Faccebook, the sites it controls wanted to make money from us directly, rather than by proxy, it should have done so before Zynga and others destroyed the sense of community. These days, we use anti-social media, as I have nicknamed it, without gains.

Several times I have heard people speak about social media as luddites, rather than people who saw the entire timeline like I did. They think of social media as toxic, of screen time as something that has to be controlled.

They don’t realise that social media is unhealthy, not because of our habits, as people, but because of how they have been made toxic by the corporations that control them.

And Finally

Instagram was a photo sharing app. Twitter was an app for like-minded people to network, and collaborate on projects. FB was a network of networks of uni friends. Now, as social media companies are controlled by corporations, so their vision of their niches have been lost, and they have all become a waste of time.

That’s why we blog. We might as well invest our time in our own sites, developing our own thoughts.