I was a very early Instagram user and would even defend it over the years as "influencers" became a thing. “I don’t see it as a problem… if you don’t like those people then don’t follow them.”

Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is over, it’s because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.

I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:

After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.

This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.

> Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.

No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.

It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).

I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.

The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.

I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok, Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates" many of us would have stayed.

Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".

The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.

It's not so much dead as resembling a mangy, depressed tiger stuck in a cage at a discount-tier circus

I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that the most effective way to capture user attention is to give them an algo feed of addictive slop.

Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.