A depressing picture of the Instagram situation

Katie Notopoulos, at BuzzFeed:

Our feeds have grown stale and are littered with ads and celebrities and influencers: people who are still posting actively, professionally, obligatorily. And Stories has made the stakes for posting photos to the feed way higher.

Sometimes you stumble upon an article and you instantly wish you had written it. Everything Notopoulos says is true: Stories ruined the Instagram experience — not that this new experience is bad, but this is not the Instagram we grew to like.

When I ask some of my friends why they are not on Twitter, most of them say something like: “I would not know what to say, what to share. And if I knew what to share, it probably would not be good enough for me to bother anyway.” I feel the main Instagram feed is the same now, thanks to Stories leaving the feed to perfectly crafted posts. When you publish something on the main feed, you can’t help but wonder if this is good enough, if this pretty picture you just shared is worth the attention of your followers.

Instagram used to be fun and casual, where everybody seemed able to share something cool once in a while, where pictures of food where the only thing to avoid if you wanted to be a cool kid. But that was before. Instagram newsfeed has slowly morphed into an intimidating effort, and the app itself into a pile of never-ending Stories threatening to blow out your phone’s speaker in public.

The surprising part of this observation on Instagram, like Gruber pointed at, is that the disappearance of the chronological timeline is not even mentioned by Notopoulos (nor is the map feature which I loved). Surprising in the sense that you would expect, after seeing the title of the article, that this would be one of the main gripes she has with Instagram.

A word on the persistant, repetitive display of ads every five posts, I have a question: How many new brands of hipster wallets can there be out there anyway?