I think competing photography apps won't be able to replicate the early Instagram experience because culture and society have moved on. When Instagram was founded, the DSLR hobby scene was booming...
I think competing photography apps won't be able to replicate the early Instagram experience because culture and society have moved on.
When Instagram was founded, the DSLR hobby scene was booming and smartphone cameras were rapidly improving, so there was an unprecedented boom in professional and amateur photography (like food photography) that needed an outlet for easy publishing and discovery. It was an exciting time. Platforms like Flickr and Smugmug were alright but didn't have good mobile social network experiences — also then an emerging experience.
That was the dawn of the Hipster Golden Era. Instagram took Flickr and made it into an accessible, hip social media format and was propelled forward by the Hipster Golden Era.
But now we're post-Hipster Golden Era. What was hipster is now the mainstream. The Brooklyn/SF "Airbnb" aesthetic is now the default. We've reached peak photography, peak sharing, peak content. We've seen mist rolling through dawn-lit hills a million times.
Everyone's seen everything already. Everyone has a near-DSLR quality camera in their pocket now. And helicopter photography was once a privilege for the very few: now millions of people have photography drones. So we've seen aerials of everything. Everything that could be photographed has been photographed in every imaginable way at every possible time of day.
No one is clamoring to see yet another misty mountainside, waterfall, brutalist building with striking shadows, or spread of delicious-looking dishes on a table.
You're absolutely right and this isn't exclusive to photography - the world has reached media market saturation to the point that we have more than we know how to process or could ever hope to...
You're absolutely right and this isn't exclusive to photography - the world has reached media market saturation to the point that we have more than we know how to process or could ever hope to consume over a hundred lifetimes. I used to love platforms like Netflix back in their earlier days where it was extremely convenient to just fire up the app and find a high-quality movie to watch in a couple of minutes, there's now so much garbage filler content on streaming services that it takes genuine effort to wade through the "muck" and find something worth spending your time on. My technique nowadays is to skip straight down to the award-winning films category (which doesn't always show up unfortunately) and find a nice 1970's-2010's era movie. I generally avoid TV shows unless it's something really well-regarded in the film scene.
More or less the same story with music, massively oversaturated market due to the rise of platforms like Spotify and the liberation of what used to be exclusive studio technology, now available as software to anyone and their dog for very low prices. Listeners tend to hit shuffle on a spotify playlist and aren't even aware of which artist or song they're listening to unless it's extremely popular, very few go out of their way to listen to lesser-known independent artists like we used to back in the days of physical media.
I think you're totally right. We're so extremely ripe for good recommendation tools and platforms to sift through things. They won't be platform native because the platforms aren't interested in...
I think you're totally right.
We're so extremely ripe for good recommendation tools and platforms to sift through things. They won't be platform native because the platforms aren't interested in us finding the best things quickly and efficiently, they're geared for us wasting time.
The niche is ripe for the taking. Everyone knows how poor reddit is at this, and even then it's leaps and bounds beyond others.
I'm extremely privileged to have online groups of friends who spend lots of time sharing things we enjoy and giving short reasons so others can somewhat easily gauge if it'll suit their tastes. The algorithms simply don't do the job and aren't designed to do the job.
Instagram is actively hostile to non-mobile photography. There is no native way to upload a photo directly from a computer to Instagram. You have to first upload it to your phone, or use some...
When Instagram was founded, the DSLR hobby scene was booming and smartphone cameras were rapidly improving, so there was an unprecedented boom in professional and amateur photography (like food photography) that needed an outlet for easy publishing and discovery. It was an exciting time. Platforms like Flickr and Smugmug were alright but didn't have good mobile social network experiences — also then an emerging experience.
Instagram is actively hostile to non-mobile photography. There is no native way to upload a photo directly from a computer to Instagram. You have to first upload it to your phone, or use some hacky workaround like installing an Android emulator on your PC. At least that's how it was last I checked. It's the reason I could never be bothered to actively use Instagram, and it's frankly astonishing that a service that deliberately works to make things harder for professional and serious amateur photographers became the go-to photo sharing site not just for shots of your lunch but also for pros.
This anti-UX design pisses me off so much that I really hope Instagram loses its position as the go-to place for photography. It also works really hard to keep you inside its walled garden. Most Instagram profiles I try to visit aren't even available without logging in, unlike a site like Flickr. Ughhhh. /rant over
Yeah the comments about how Instagram is dead because of the fading of serious photography as a hobby perplexed me. Instagram was always the least good place for sharing photography as an art...
At least that's how it was last I checked. It's the reason I could never be bothered to actively use Instagram, and it's frankly astonishing that a service that deliberately works to make things harder for professional and serious amateur photographers became the go-to photo sharing site not just for shots of your lunch but also for pros.
Yeah the comments about how Instagram is dead because of the fading of serious photography as a hobby perplexed me. Instagram was always the least good place for sharing photography as an art form. It was very much a social site and the photos were more like a fun way to tell your friends what you're up to right now. Once they turned it into influencer shit it stopped being a way to socialize. First people sort of scaled back to mostly using it for major life announcements and now they're kind of dropping off it entirely because nobody is going to see your stuff unless you aggressively self-promote.
You can now, didn't used to be able to, but I did it earlier today. Can't upload to stories, only posts. In general, Instagram as a place to post photography is incredibly frustrating in all cases...
There is no native way to upload a photo directly from a computer to Instagram.
You can now, didn't used to be able to, but I did it earlier today. Can't upload to stories, only posts.
In general, Instagram as a place to post photography is incredibly frustrating in all cases though. There are way too many medium and large format photographers posting their photos on it because it's the only viable photo social network out there, and their giant, ripe for super high resolution photos are only seen in a small thumbnail on a phone.
I trialed Pixelfed a few years ago and it seemed like a great Instagram replacement. It’s open source and federated. For such a young project (at the time) it ran surprisingly well, and I can only...
I trialed Pixelfed a few years ago and it seemed like a great Instagram replacement. It’s open source and federated. For such a young project (at the time) it ran surprisingly well, and I can only assume it has matured considerably since then.
It has the same network effect problem though. I liked Instagram because it was a fun way to keep in touch with my friends. If the people aren't there the service is pointless. The Fediverse, in...
It has the same network effect problem though. I liked Instagram because it was a fun way to keep in touch with my friends. If the people aren't there the service is pointless. The Fediverse, in general, needs to worry a lot less about engineering and technical features and a lot more about just getting normies to use it. It is, most definitely, not just a case of "if you build it they will come."
Yeah, I quickly realized that I didn't care about photos unless they were posted by my friends (which weren't on the service, of course), and I didn't care to share photos from my life with...
Yeah, I quickly realized that I didn't care about photos unless they were posted by my friends (which weren't on the service, of course), and I didn't care to share photos from my life with strangers. The network effect is the biggest hill that the fediverse has to climb, and I don't know if it'll ever surmount that.
And here I am, never used Instagram, never used Twitter. Not even as a lurker or on my girlfriend's profile. Instagram to me is a frame for pictures people shove in my face, and Twitter is...
And here I am, never used Instagram, never used Twitter. Not even as a lurker or on my girlfriend's profile. Instagram to me is a frame for pictures people shove in my face, and Twitter is something I read about on news sites. And I'm not 80 years old. AMA.
It's pretty nice up here. Although technically speaking I have an Instagram and Facebook, they are devoid of posts, likes, etc, and both are linked to an extra email address I don't use and are...
It's pretty nice up here.
Although technically speaking I have an Instagram and Facebook, they are devoid of posts, likes, etc, and both are linked to an extra email address I don't use and are under my dog's name.
I'd rather not have them and didn't for a very long time, but sadly they're practically a requirement to buy used/vintage car parts these days as Craigslist is all but dead and eBay is full of people that think everything is worth its weight in gold. So I buy car parts, they're shipped to my dog, and he gets belly rubs when they arrive because the joke around the house is that my dog goes online and buys me stuff.
hahaha, sounds like a win-win kind of situation! I used to order online under the pseudonym Tom Bombadil. One day I came home and my partner was very upset about getting a package with our adress...
hahaha, sounds like a win-win kind of situation!
I used to order online under the pseudonym Tom Bombadil.
One day I came home and my partner was very upset about getting a package with our adress and the word "Bomb" on it. (as in Bombadil)
I have since changed my online ordering pseudonym.
Well, I do like to ride horses, I'm pretty good at it, so... touché? :P I'm also neither on Facebook nor TikTok, by the way. The idea of an app to look at pictures all day long didn't seem like a...
Well, I do like to ride horses, I'm pretty good at it, so... touché? :P
I'm also neither on Facebook nor TikTok, by the way.
The idea of an app to look at pictures all day long didn't seem like a good proposition at the time. I don't wanna see anyone's lunch, I don't even like pictures all that much. Later on, I understand that Instagram came to host a lot of text and video as well, but I already had Reddit and other websites for that.
Twitter always felt like a shouting match, it's not a good place for either relaxed or in-depth conversation. And, like Instagram, it is very much intertwined with celebrity culture, something I have very little interest in.
Also, when social media in general became mainstream it suddenly became way too serious and politicized (but not in a good way). You are always too exposed, people are mostly trying to top each other, looking at everything you say through a microscope to hate and accuse.
To put it simply, people are just way too mean. Just thinking about it as I write made me a little anxious. It doesn't help that you're there with your real identity, surrounded by friends, family, even professional contacts, and a bunch of people you don't know. Universes collide. It's way too much of everything all the time. I'm already overwhelmed by my real-life interactions, I don't need an internet facsimile to fuel my insecurities.
Finally, it's not like there's a lack of good content outside Instagram and Twitter. With YouTube, videogames, books, podcasts, video streaming services, Reddit, Tildes, Hacker News, and RSS feeds, I already have way more than I can manage.
I'm similar to @lou in this regard, so I'll give my perspective. I found my way here through Reddit, but I've since deleted that account. As for why I avoid social media: I don't have a...
I'm similar to @lou in this regard, so I'll give my perspective. I found my way here through Reddit, but I've since deleted that account.
As for why I avoid social media: I don't have a superiority complex, but I do have a fair amount of social anxiety. Frankly, the idea of using Instagram and Twitter just seems stressful, so I don't use them. The only real exception is Facebook -- I still rely on messenger to communicate with some people, especially now that I'm abroad. Still, I kinda hate how my timeline is essentially just people wishing me a happy birthday once per year.
In contrast, Tildes is much slower paced, much more agreeable, and correspondingly, much less stressful.
Instagram walks back its changes Article is a bit long, and also features an interview with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, but the above are the major takeaways.
Instagram will walk back some recent changes to the product following a week of mounting criticism, the company said today. A test version of the app that opened to full-screen photos and videos will be phased out over the next one to two weeks, and Instagram will also reduce the number of recommended posts in the app as it works to improve its algorithms.
The company also plans to show users fewer recommendations. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that recommended posts and accounts in feeds currently account for about 15 percent of what you see when you browse Facebook, and an even higher percentage on Instagram. By the end of 2023, that figure will be around 30 percent, Zuckerberg said.
But Instagram will temporarily reduce the amount of recommended posts and accounts as it works to improve its personalization tools. (Mosseri wouldn’t say by how much, exactly.)
Mosseri made clear that the retreat Instagram announced today is not permanent. Threats to the company’s dominance continue to mount: TikTok is the most downloaded app in the world, the most popular website, and the most watched video company. Meanwhile, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature has blown a $10 billion hole in Meta’s core advertising business, and on Wednesday Meta reported its first-ever quarterly revenue decline. Zuckerberg has assumed a war footing, and promised that many more changes are on the way.
One thing in the company’s favor: in the most recent quarter, the amount of time people spent watching Reels grew 30 percent, Zuckerberg said on an earnings call. That suggests that user demand for short-form video — including, yes, short-form video recommended by algorithms — is real, and deserves a prominent place in Facebook and Instagram.
The challenge is figuring out how to integrate those videos into an increasingly crowded Instagram app, where friends, family, celebrities, creators, and various e-commerce projects are all fighting a daily war for attention. It’s a tall order for Instagram, an app that historically prided itself on simplicity and craftsmanship.
Article is a bit long, and also features an interview with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, but the above are the major takeaways.
There's also https://glass.photo/ which is somewhere between Instagram and Flickr (leaning towards Flickr). It is subscription based ($29.99/year). I love the idea but I'm not a photographer....
There's also https://glass.photo/ which is somewhere between Instagram and Flickr (leaning towards Flickr). It is subscription based ($29.99/year). I love the idea but I'm not a photographer. Also, pricing is steep imo.
Yeah glass is really cool. $30 is not that steep, IMO, if you think of it like a magazine subscription to be inspired by cool photography. BUT, that's not really something I'm in the market for. I...
Yeah glass is really cool. $30 is not that steep, IMO, if you think of it like a magazine subscription to be inspired by cool photography. BUT, that's not really something I'm in the market for. I think they're probably happy with their niche though. It's less of a general purpose social media and more like a hobbyist social club. I hope they find some success with it.
I think competing photography apps won't be able to replicate the early Instagram experience because culture and society have moved on.
When Instagram was founded, the DSLR hobby scene was booming and smartphone cameras were rapidly improving, so there was an unprecedented boom in professional and amateur photography (like food photography) that needed an outlet for easy publishing and discovery. It was an exciting time. Platforms like Flickr and Smugmug were alright but didn't have good mobile social network experiences — also then an emerging experience.
That was the dawn of the Hipster Golden Era. Instagram took Flickr and made it into an accessible, hip social media format and was propelled forward by the Hipster Golden Era.
But now we're post-Hipster Golden Era. What was hipster is now the mainstream. The Brooklyn/SF "Airbnb" aesthetic is now the default. We've reached peak photography, peak sharing, peak content. We've seen mist rolling through dawn-lit hills a million times.
Everyone's seen everything already. Everyone has a near-DSLR quality camera in their pocket now. And helicopter photography was once a privilege for the very few: now millions of people have photography drones. So we've seen aerials of everything. Everything that could be photographed has been photographed in every imaginable way at every possible time of day.
No one is clamoring to see yet another misty mountainside, waterfall, brutalist building with striking shadows, or spread of delicious-looking dishes on a table.
“Everything that can be invented has been invented” (1899)
“X creative thing is hard and I haven’t been able to capture people’s attention yet, thus no one can.”
You're absolutely right and this isn't exclusive to photography - the world has reached media market saturation to the point that we have more than we know how to process or could ever hope to consume over a hundred lifetimes. I used to love platforms like Netflix back in their earlier days where it was extremely convenient to just fire up the app and find a high-quality movie to watch in a couple of minutes, there's now so much garbage filler content on streaming services that it takes genuine effort to wade through the "muck" and find something worth spending your time on. My technique nowadays is to skip straight down to the award-winning films category (which doesn't always show up unfortunately) and find a nice 1970's-2010's era movie. I generally avoid TV shows unless it's something really well-regarded in the film scene.
More or less the same story with music, massively oversaturated market due to the rise of platforms like Spotify and the liberation of what used to be exclusive studio technology, now available as software to anyone and their dog for very low prices. Listeners tend to hit shuffle on a spotify playlist and aren't even aware of which artist or song they're listening to unless it's extremely popular, very few go out of their way to listen to lesser-known independent artists like we used to back in the days of physical media.
I think you're totally right.
We're so extremely ripe for good recommendation tools and platforms to sift through things. They won't be platform native because the platforms aren't interested in us finding the best things quickly and efficiently, they're geared for us wasting time.
The niche is ripe for the taking. Everyone knows how poor reddit is at this, and even then it's leaps and bounds beyond others.
I'm extremely privileged to have online groups of friends who spend lots of time sharing things we enjoy and giving short reasons so others can somewhat easily gauge if it'll suit their tastes. The algorithms simply don't do the job and aren't designed to do the job.
Instagram is actively hostile to non-mobile photography. There is no native way to upload a photo directly from a computer to Instagram. You have to first upload it to your phone, or use some hacky workaround like installing an Android emulator on your PC. At least that's how it was last I checked. It's the reason I could never be bothered to actively use Instagram, and it's frankly astonishing that a service that deliberately works to make things harder for professional and serious amateur photographers became the go-to photo sharing site not just for shots of your lunch but also for pros.
This anti-UX design pisses me off so much that I really hope Instagram loses its position as the go-to place for photography. It also works really hard to keep you inside its walled garden. Most Instagram profiles I try to visit aren't even available without logging in, unlike a site like Flickr. Ughhhh. /rant over
Yeah the comments about how Instagram is dead because of the fading of serious photography as a hobby perplexed me. Instagram was always the least good place for sharing photography as an art form. It was very much a social site and the photos were more like a fun way to tell your friends what you're up to right now. Once they turned it into influencer shit it stopped being a way to socialize. First people sort of scaled back to mostly using it for major life announcements and now they're kind of dropping off it entirely because nobody is going to see your stuff unless you aggressively self-promote.
You can now, didn't used to be able to, but I did it earlier today. Can't upload to stories, only posts.
In general, Instagram as a place to post photography is incredibly frustrating in all cases though. There are way too many medium and large format photographers posting their photos on it because it's the only viable photo social network out there, and their giant, ripe for super high resolution photos are only seen in a small thumbnail on a phone.
I trialed Pixelfed a few years ago and it seemed like a great Instagram replacement. It’s open source and federated. For such a young project (at the time) it ran surprisingly well, and I can only assume it has matured considerably since then.
It has the same network effect problem though. I liked Instagram because it was a fun way to keep in touch with my friends. If the people aren't there the service is pointless. The Fediverse, in general, needs to worry a lot less about engineering and technical features and a lot more about just getting normies to use it. It is, most definitely, not just a case of "if you build it they will come."
Yeah, I quickly realized that I didn't care about photos unless they were posted by my friends (which weren't on the service, of course), and I didn't care to share photos from my life with strangers. The network effect is the biggest hill that the fediverse has to climb, and I don't know if it'll ever surmount that.
Pixelfed is quite nice. That kind of site doesn't really appeal to me so I didn't stick around for long, but it seemed like an excellent project.
And here I am, never used Instagram, never used Twitter. Not even as a lurker or on my girlfriend's profile. Instagram to me is a frame for pictures people shove in my face, and Twitter is something I read about on news sites. And I'm not 80 years old. AMA.
How's the view from your high horse? 😜
It's pretty nice up here.
Although technically speaking I have an Instagram and Facebook, they are devoid of posts, likes, etc, and both are linked to an extra email address I don't use and are under my dog's name.
I'd rather not have them and didn't for a very long time, but sadly they're practically a requirement to buy used/vintage car parts these days as Craigslist is all but dead and eBay is full of people that think everything is worth its weight in gold. So I buy car parts, they're shipped to my dog, and he gets belly rubs when they arrive because the joke around the house is that my dog goes online and buys me stuff.
hahaha, sounds like a win-win kind of situation!
I used to order online under the pseudonym Tom Bombadil.
One day I came home and my partner was very upset about getting a package with our adress and the word "Bomb" on it. (as in Bombadil)
I have since changed my online ordering pseudonym.
Well, I do like to ride horses, I'm pretty good at it, so... touché? :P
I'm also neither on Facebook nor TikTok, by the way.
The idea of an app to look at pictures all day long didn't seem like a good proposition at the time. I don't wanna see anyone's lunch, I don't even like pictures all that much. Later on, I understand that Instagram came to host a lot of text and video as well, but I already had Reddit and other websites for that.
Twitter always felt like a shouting match, it's not a good place for either relaxed or in-depth conversation. And, like Instagram, it is very much intertwined with celebrity culture, something I have very little interest in.
Also, when social media in general became mainstream it suddenly became way too serious and politicized (but not in a good way). You are always too exposed, people are mostly trying to top each other, looking at everything you say through a microscope to hate and accuse.
To put it simply, people are just way too mean. Just thinking about it as I write made me a little anxious. It doesn't help that you're there with your real identity, surrounded by friends, family, even professional contacts, and a bunch of people you don't know. Universes collide. It's way too much of everything all the time. I'm already overwhelmed by my real-life interactions, I don't need an internet facsimile to fuel my insecurities.
Finally, it's not like there's a lack of good content outside Instagram and Twitter. With YouTube, videogames, books, podcasts, video streaming services, Reddit, Tildes, Hacker News, and RSS feeds, I already have way more than I can manage.
So how did you find your way here, anyway?
I'm similar to @lou in this regard, so I'll give my perspective. I found my way here through Reddit, but I've since deleted that account.
As for why I avoid social media: I don't have a superiority complex, but I do have a fair amount of social anxiety. Frankly, the idea of using Instagram and Twitter just seems stressful, so I don't use them. The only real exception is Facebook -- I still rely on messenger to communicate with some people, especially now that I'm abroad. Still, I kinda hate how my timeline is essentially just people wishing me a happy birthday once per year.
In contrast, Tildes is much slower paced, much more agreeable, and correspondingly, much less stressful.
I think almost no-one came here straight from Instagram or Twitter. It's probably 99.99% from Reddit.
Did you mean "almost nobody"?
(I honestly can't remember where I heard of Tildes.)
Yeah I tried to fix it, I think I got mixed up with the double negation :P
Instagram walks back its changes
Article is a bit long, and also features an interview with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, but the above are the major takeaways.
There's also https://glass.photo/ which is somewhere between Instagram and Flickr (leaning towards Flickr). It is subscription based ($29.99/year). I love the idea but I'm not a photographer. Also, pricing is steep imo.
Yeah glass is really cool. $30 is not that steep, IMO, if you think of it like a magazine subscription to be inspired by cool photography. BUT, that's not really something I'm in the market for. I think they're probably happy with their niche though. It's less of a general purpose social media and more like a hobbyist social club. I hope they find some success with it.