The narcissism network

Every now and then I get a message from one of my contacts asking me if I’m ever ‘fully’ returning to Instagram. You see, my Instagram account, while still active, is in a sort of passive mode. Back when Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), I decided to stop uploading photos, not wanting to put anything creative on something that was now owned by Facebook, the tech company I despise the most. My first reaction at the time was to just shut down my account, but what about the network of contacts and acquaintances I had built there when Instagram was good and fun? So I decided to still hang around and check their photos, and sometimes like and leave comments. There are also a few people I know I can only contact through Instagram, so that’s the way we exchange messages.

Back to the question I was mentioning at the beginning — the answer is probably When Instagram will be removed from Facebook and returned to its former glory, i.e., it’s pretty unlikely, unless someone in power really decides to break down tech giants like Facebook.

But apart from my personal preferences and my hate for Facebook, it is undeniable how profoundly and for the worse Facebook has changed Instagram over the years. Of course, people who have become ‘important’ thanks to Instagram will not agree, but everything Facebook has brought to Instagram has contributed to transform a fun network for casual photo sharing into a machine for self promotion and ego-boosting.

When I open Instagram today, what I see is a destroyed timeline that is so riddled with advertisements, promoted accounts, suggested accounts and similar extraneous content, that I actually struggle to scroll and find photos from people I actually follow. What is important to me — this content, submitted by friends and acquaintances and people I’m interested in — is presented by the app as if it were an afterthought.

But it’s not just a matter of a distorted shape or form of the product, it’s also a matter of how the content itself, even from people I like and follow, has shifted. Very few people still use Instagram in the way that it was back in 2010, and those who do are all early adopters. Now Instagram is an opportunity for self promotion, both in the sense of Here’s something I made (a product, a design idea, a typeface, etc.), and in the sense of a narcissistic cult of personality, and that’s where you’ll find accounts made entirely of selfies and announcements of upcoming live videos. I appreciate the former type of self promotion; the latter, er, insta-grows old.

The ‘Instagram story’ format, while open to many different purposes, is again very often used for self promotion, self-affirmation, and navel-gazing. And don’t get me started on Instagram Reels. I don’t know about you, but in my case all Reels suggested by the algorithm involve young women who are either dancing, working out, showing off their new clothes, or engaging in suggesting activities. (I really can’t explain this. It’s certainly not based on my Instagram browsing activity, which is generally very limited and always focused on people I follow — a completely different demographic.)

There are days when I think Flickr should double down on social photo sharing for its mobile experience and try to recapture the fun and immediacy of both Instagram and Flickr’s heyday, but I understand this is easier said than done. I’m also wondering if Instagram’s transformation at the hands of Facebook has perhaps poisoned the well for good, so that it’s now more difficult to create a social network where people just share stuff for the fun of it, without thinking about other purposes, without egocentrism and the “what’s in it for me?” mentality.