The Instagram Problem
Where am I supposed to brag about my vacation now?
Instagram has a problem.
I’m not talking about how its parent company, Meta, scientifically determined that their app is harmful to young users. Nor am I referring to its decelerating user growth, especially prevalent amongst the youngest age brackets.
Simply put: Instagram is now a terrible place to share photos. The app, which was originally created to capitalize on the growing popularity of photo-sharing on Foursquare, has seemingly disincentivized photo sharing as much as possible.
In hindsight, this complete pivot away from its original purpose should have been predictable.
In 2016, Instagram added Stories, which were a blatant copy of Snapchat’s most popular feature. This was an early indicator of how Facebook/Meta was going to handle their photo-based acquisition; rather than innovating or creating new ways to share and consume photos on social media, Instagram’s owners showed us a…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to I've Ben Thinking to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.