Instagram followed a similar trajectory for me. For a while, as a photography hobbyist, it was a far more "active" social community for photography enthusiasts than whatever came before (Flickr, Smugmug, photo.net, various niche forums). I made photography friends thru it that I met in person even when traveling overseas. This lasted maybe 2 years.
Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form.
It is now fully an influencer economy of people making a full-time job out of posting thirst traps / status envy / travelp*rn / whatever you wanna call it. It is a complete inundation of spend spend spend.
> Then all the "normies" got on it and my feed started to just be casual snaps by people I knew in real life... which rapidly lead to its final form
Most people who use social media want to see photos and updates from their friends they know in real life. This is the core value proposition.
If seeing casual photos from your real life friends you call “normies” is disappointing to you, Instagram is probably not what you want. Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
However, you likely could get the experience you want by maintaining two separate accounts. One for your friends and one for photography. The app makes it easy to switch between the two.
> Keeping in touch with friends is the primary use case of the platform.
I think unfortunately for IG in particular, it evolved for a segment of people into a status flexing game more than genuinely keeping in touch.
> it evolved for a segment of people
Every social media platform has a lot of different segments of people using it for different reasons.
If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.
I’m not a heavy Instagram user but I’ve found it trivially easy to tailor my feed to the content I want to see (friends and family). That’s why I don’t find much interest in the pearl clutching about how some people post on the platform. I’m not there to judge and moralize about others.
>If one of your follows is posting content you don’t like, it’s so easy to unfollow them. If you feel obligated to follow for social reasons, Instagram even has convenient features to hide their posts so you can maintain the follow without seeing their content.
Let's ignore the things that upset us even more easily, while maintaining the required social appearances even harder!
Ah, such progress!
Speechless, except obscenely.
You can say porn. It's an adult website
10 years ago Instagram was great. I would see 10 posts from friends, 1 ad, and 0 posts from people I didn't know.
I gave up about 4 years ago as I was seeing 1 post from a friend, 3 ads, and then lots of random stranger posts.
My friends gave up too.
I have tons of private groups chats and share stuff with people I care about there.
You might like Foto https://fotoapp.co/
Foto is good, provided you want a community exclusively made up of other photographers. If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.
The worst thing about Instagram today for photographers and artists, is that to succeed, you have to effectively become an influencer and share reels of yourself and your process.
> If you want greater reach for your work, Instagram unfortunately is still the only option.
Wasn't people wanting reach what supposedly ruined Instagram in the first place? Seems like wanting it both ways if you want reach for yourself, but not for "influencers"
There was a time on Instagram when artists could grow their reach organically, on the merit of their work alone, but I don’t think that’s possible today without engaging in reels and positioning yourself as an influencer, which most artists I would imagine find abhorrent.
That feature has been monetized, you now have to pay to spam other users with sponsored content or something like that.
I mean I want to enjoy some wine, doesn’t mean I’m a hypocrite for disliking alcoholics and drunk driving.
It’s OK to believe both 1) social media can be a useful service for connecting with friends and interesting people, and 2) social media has feedback mechanisms that reward unpleasant and abusive behavior.
+1 for Foto. I was also using Instagram through a photography lens and fell off when it got totally unsuitable for that. Foto is pretty good so far.
Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.
For anyone who doesnt know: unlike in Facebook you can switch off/pause random strangers posts in your feed by going to "content preferences" in your settings. Of course being Meta this reenables every 30 days, but makes for a way cleaner feed in between.
I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.
> I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.
I agree with this 100%, on top of what you said remember that Instagram launched in 2010 as an iOS exclusive during a time where Apple was not particularly focused on camera quality, ignoring Android where there were numerous devices with substantially better cameras. IIRC someone was even selling one with an optical system in the ballpark of a low-end mirrorless. They also limited image resolution to 640 pixels square until 2015.