I hate modern social media so much.

[roadrunnertwice]

How about if I start "maximizing engagement" with my spoken sentences by just rearranging all the fucking words out of order and then throwing in a product name at the end like in a Wesley Willis song?

I think I'm going through mourning for Instagram right now. Well, that plus my anger about capitalism is a little higher than my normal baseline seethe.

The algorithmic timeline is finally starting to really get to me. For a while it was just annoying, but now the prevalence of six-day-old posts and bullshit from Mars is making me feel alienated and disconnected from the people I follow. And... the whole reason I used Instagram was to feel the opposite of THAT.

So... that's the end, isn't it? It won't ever improve (Facebook's business model requires alienation and dissatisfaction), so my remaining options are to stick around and get used to feeling like garbage, or leave.

Some friends suggested bailing to VSCO, and I'm taking a look at it. It's kind of confusing so far, and I'm a little concerned that it's more of a modernized Flickr (slow, immaculate, gallery-focused) than a successor to classic Instagram (gregarious photo journal-stream space).

Comments

[roadrunnertwice]

I guess it's worth remembering that I didn't always use Instagram, and for the first few years I actually didn't even use it to view photos — everyone I followed was mirroring their stuff to Twitter, and I always just saw it there. In fact, I feel like I remember posting something to the effect of "why does this app even have a feed, this is redundant."

But I did eventually come around to the value of a stream that's

• just photos,
• taken recently,
• by people I know,
• posted one-at-a-time.

That turned out to be a super relaxing sort of space, and I'll miss it. (Now that IG has thrown away the "recent" and "people I know" parts.)