The Instagram Problem

Where am I supposed to brag about my vacation now?

Jun 07, 2022

∙ Paid

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.

A screenshot from Instagram's Wikipedia page with the following titles: 3 Impact on people 3.1 Mental health 3.2 Satisfaction with appearance 3.3 False self-presentation 3.4 Body image 3.5 Loneliness 3.6 Social exclusion 3.7 Wellbeing 3.8 Life satisfaction 3.9 Alcohol and drug use 3.10 Fear of missing out 3.11 Eating disorders 3.12 Sharenting risks 3.13 Suicide and self-harm 3.14 Activism 4 Impact on businesses 5 User characteristics and behavior 5.1 Users 5.2 User behavior 6 Reception 6.1 Awards 6.2 Mental health 6.3 Culture 6.4 Security 6.5 Content ownership 6.6 Facebook acquisition as a violation of US antitrust law 6.7 Algorithmic advertisement with a rape threat 6.8 Human exploitation — These are real tabs on Instagram’s Wikipedia page. And this cuts off before the “censorship” section…

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…

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