(quick note from future yuvi: i promise none (or at least most) of my other blog posts will NOT be this serious LMAO)
So... this is my first blog post on my website... aaaaand potentially one of the first thing people will see when I decide to tell everyone that I’ve actually left Instagram. so... There’s a few things I should probably explain.
For everyone who doesn't know (found through neocities/nekoweb or smth) I’ve been consistently using Instagram as my main social media profile since 2018~. Just a few weeks ago i decided i would leave Instagram, and i guess today ill try outline why i did that, along with a few other things.
So yeah... as i mentioned, I’ve been using Instagram pretty actively since 2018. there’ve obviously been some on and off periods but I’ve been pretty active on the site over the last few years. I wont lie, using Instagram genuinely did a lot of good for me during the 2019 – 2021 period of my life since that's when I met some folks online who had become my main friend group for that part of my life. Some of those people might be reading right now, I wont delve into it too much but you guys genuinely do mean a lot to me and my life. You guys have honestly taught me a lot and helped me through a whole lot more, and i don't think id be the man i am today without you guys! So thank you for being one of the only good things to come out of Instagram for me 😭.
Okay, okay ill get to the damn point already. Onto why i actually left Instagram now...
First and foremost, Instagram is an app/website owned by Meta, and Meta’s fundamental goal is to make money and the reason they do just about anything. I’m not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with that, making money is awesome. However the means to which Meta comes to that end are flat-out fucked up when you lay it all on the table. The fact of the matter is that Instagram doesn't profit from you using the internet in a healthy way, they don’t profit from you simply viewing what your friends are up to and then putting your phone down. (Or at the very least, they don’t profit as much.) They only profit from you in much more shady and morally dubious ways. Instagram’s shareholders are one of the biggest reasons for this obsession to make money. They absolutely drill into them to make as much cash as they possibly can, and the fact is that the way to make more of it is to keep you on for as long as possible. The longer you're on the more data they can steal and ads they can serve. Liking a friends post and leaving isn't what makes them their cash, Your attention-span-killing addiction to doom scrolling posts and reels is. Because that's what raises their stock prices and keeps their old white dick-in-hand shareholders pleased.
One of the ways meta exploits you for money is via their magical ✨algorithm✨. Now, don't get me wrong, personally don't believe that algorithms themselves are inherently bad or anything. However, Instagram's algorithm clearly has been proven to suggest things to you for all the wrong reasons. Like I mentioned before, Instagram's goal (and thus, their silly little algo’s goal) is to completely milk as much moola from you as possible. The best way they have to get money out of you is to (completely un-consensually) harvest your data and serve you ads. The more ads you watch the more money they make, and the best way to make money is to exploit your silly little human brain into watching ‘silly little videos’ on reels for hours on end. So that's exactly what the algorithm does! Without any care or consideration for your mental health. In my expedience, while the algorithm can suggest cool stuff, it suggests either mindless or (usually negative) emotion-provoking content just the right amount of times to keep you on there as long as humanly fucking possible. For me personally, this has the silly little result of making me engage in my hobbies far less as well. Real fun.
The entire website being so focused on serving you ads instead of actually being a social media leaves the ‘social’ in that phrase in a very gray area now. Instagram barely feels like a ‘social’ media anymore. Think about it- what percentage of time that you spend on Instagram is spent being ‘social?’ we’re mostly just consuming random bs reels from people we don't know and (more likely than not) will never interact with... ever. I have trouble understanding what makes this ‘social’ anymore... is it the bot-filtered comment section? The mindless posts from people you don't and will never know or care about? The fucking AI slop that's posted often nowadays? There’s no person who cares about you on the other side of the reel. Its all just an algorithm that filters and curates things that’ll keep your brain’s dying attention span all to make a quick buck.
One of the best ways the algorithm finds to keep people on is to rile up their emotions. It doesn't matter what kind of emotional reaction it is, positive or negative. As long as they get something out of you, you’ll be more inclined to come back to it strictly because of that emotional effect. In general, positive emotion is significantly harder to induce and has a lesser effect on people then negative emotion, especially on social media. This simple human emotion is extremely easy for Instagram and their algorithms to exploit, have you ever seen a really brain-dead take on a social justice issue? Especially one straight at the top of the comment section for a post? Or a post about why wiping your ass is gay or something? People engage with these posts because it brings them anger. The algorithm isn’t stupid, it knows these posts make people mad or makes people hurt or is flat-out wrong, but it suggests them anyway. Then you end up a bunch of people with hurt feelings sending the posts around, commenting plenty of things, or just generally spending lots of time on that post. The algorithm doesn't do this for every single post you see obviously, but it does it enough for it to be effective and to avoid Instagram getting in trouble for it.
Another huge moral fuckery that Instagram has no problmo committing is completely disrespecting the privacy of its consumers. I’m not going to get into why online privacy is important here since it would take too long and this video does it way better then i could. But it doesn't take much investigating to find out just how much they take, go download a tracker blocker on your pc’s web browser and just see how much trackers it blocks just on the Instagram website alone. Odds are they probably have much more trackers and such on your phones as well. It may not seem like a big deal but ask yourself how comfortable you’d be with Meta putting cameras on you all day, every day. Because believe it or not, that's might be less then the amount of data that they’re able to collect from you from just using Instagram (and other big tech companies’ products) alone. How have we reached a point in our lives where all our personal data being collected about every single thing we do or like has become trivial? Where did the desire to protect our privacy, humility and need for basic fucking respect go? Is the bland, corporate and exploitive modern internet really worth all of that ‘convenience’ and blatant disrespect to you and your life?
Now I’m gonna get into a few quick-fire personal reasons (and one big one) that are more so just my own feelings and opinions about it. The first of these is that, personally, Instagram just isn't fun any more. I don't get any enjoyment from endlessly scrolling through reels for like 2 hours. I might find someone entertaining on occasion, but for the most part its just a mindless distraction. Its concerning just how often I get shocked by how long I’ve wasted my time on reels instead of my hobbies. On Instagram you don't really get your own ‘personal style’ or anything like that either. The only option you have is the basic, corporate black or white with the same layout and everything for your own page. You’re only allowed the tiny amount of customisation that Meta wants to give you. You’re not a person, you're a product for the advertisers.
Which brings me back to the biggest personal issue I have not just with Instagram, but the modern internet in general. These companies’ incessant need to milk as much money from people as humanly fucking possible is, I believe, the crux of the issue. Trackes, data collection, advertisement, borderline spying, purposefully facilitated addiction, censorship, parasocial relationships & sponsorships, anti-social social-media, mindless compliance, lack of personalisation. All of this horrible shit can be attributed to one single truth: your unhealthy internet usage makes them money, and if it makes them money then anything is on the table for them. No matter how unhealthy, manipulative or immoral. We as internet users have compromised and given up so much. Our privacy, or our own mental health or basic fucking respect because of something that was designed to manipulate us to release some short-term happiness chemical in our brains. This dystopian world we’ve allowed the internet to become, just how little of a concern we’ve allowed these blatantly morally fucked up practices devolve to, all of this just disgusts me. Makes me wonder why the world had to fall into this sad dystopian hole.
Instagram and the internet as we currently know it has never been good for us. All the good that has come out of modern social media has happened in spite of modern social media, not as a result of it. Instead all we have now is a pointless, addictive, and toxic algorithmic platform that does substantially more harm to people than good. To be frank, I’m completely fucking done with this. I'm done being a product for some company to sell, tired of wasting my time on some brain-dead anti-social app. I'm fucking done with Instagram.
Fuck you Meta.