When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.
When Facebook bought Instagram that slowly changed. Algorithms and popularity contests became more important than sharing between friends and so the sense of community was lost and we were posting for strangers rather than friends.
Replacing Instagram with Eyeem and a blog makes sense. When Instagram was new, before it was bought by Facebook it was a network of people who liked to take pictures sharing with friends and family. As it grew and as more people used it people followed less discerningly and so it became more of a popularity contest than a photo-sharing website.
Today Instagram shows an advert every four images and whilst this may not sound like much it is.
The Issue For a while Facebook was the network to keep in contact with university friends after we all graduated and then it was the network to keep in contact with colleagues. Eventually it became the network where people shared news without engaging with others. It has become a network where you scroll through dozens of irrelevant posts in the hope of finding something personal, and failing.
Instagram used to be the network where we could share images with friends and see what they were sharing.
Instagram is still a healthy social network. It still finds an engaged group of users who want to share their adventures, meals, friendships and more with other users. Some of them love sharing selfies and others share beautiful landscapes. This keeps the network vibrant and young. Twitter on the other hand has neutralised peoples’ passion and engagement with the site. They wanted to become google reader, they wanted mass following of key accounts, they wanted to neutralise the social, conversational aspect and they have succeeded in their goal so effectively that now an IFTTT rule reduces the need to visit twitter.