Social media is almost like a perverse version of The Force from Star Wars in that it, “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” Unfortunately, it’s so pervasive and intrusive that it’s become supremely annoying and an opportunity for marketers to continue shoveling their shit into our faces. But most of the large platforms are slowly becoming sheer garbage as they determine ways for having more and more garbage posts that separate what many of us really want: true human interaction with meaning. Thus, between all the social media platforms, I’ve found that Instagram might be the platform that many of us are looking for.
Why Instagram?
Before we can answer this question, we have to talk about what the other social media platforms have been doing that’s wrong. So let’s start with Facebook.
Facebook has some of the worst feed posts around. Most of the posts really aren’t created by your friends but are short links that substitute for actual useful content based on a quick comment or like by your friend. Depending on your interaction with your friend, you may see some posts elevated much higher into your feed rather than seeing a chronological chain of events from your friends. The net result is that what you’re actually seeing is a subversive way of hijacking your wall by advertisers.
Part of what you can do to tune your feed is simply to continue hiding all non-direct posts from your friends. Doing so will prevent the most offensive links from showing up. But it’s an ongoing battle and your Wall will soon become a huge mess due to Facebook’s latest enslavement to advertisers where they force ads into your feed that are unblockable outside of you manually blocking them. The net result of these measures is that Facebook has slowly become absolute rubbish when seeing meaningful, interesting posts about your friends’ lives as the platform dwindles into a simple spy network for advertisers to glean information from you.
In order for you to even make any impact anymore to your friends, you pretty much have to direct message people privately. It’s a shame that Facebook has become nothing more than a glorified inbox/substitute for email because the rest of it is now devoted towards advertisers.
I actually prefer Twitter these days as one of my preferred social media platforms over Facebook because I feel more connected to larger communities with topics that I’m interested in compared to the silent disposition of fearing alienating myself for saying something offensive in Facebook. While Twitter is great at finding new people, the feed process, endless retweets, multiple levels of indirection and an absolute trash ad system make the platform somewhat rubbish.
If you’re a celebrity, Twitter is great because you can mouth off and/or have your assistants promote whatever craze you want. If you’re the average user, Twitter is a huge mystery at best because of the flood of information that becomes overbearing. If you’re a marketer, you’re either in heaven or hell depending on how you’re attempting to get your message out. But no matter how you cut the cheese, it’s still a fart of a mess with this platform.
For me, Twitter is a few notches underneath Instagram as the information in Twitter is mostly useless. The best information has to be dug up and with so many voices shouting into this electronic void, you can only focus on trends that Twitter’s algorithms deem important for you. And while the really big stories will show up faster than anything else around on the net, the most critical stories that are personal to you won’t.
Sadly, the most useful feature of Twitter is the highly underutilized and hidden lists feature. This is the only method to make sense of anything within Twitter since Twitter is more like a shouting match between every asshole on this planet. After a while you just feel unimportant even if you make the most profound statement. All that eventually becomes lost in the vacuum of unimportant voices and your efforts are only for more data mining for marketers.
The ad platform for Twitter is by far one of the worst I’ve seen. Considering that this entity has the capability of knowing how to categorize your followers and glean information on your tweets, the ads remain highly irrelevant. Why do I constantly see stuff for baby food, diapers and vodka? I have never posted a single tweet that relates to any of those things. I’m clearly interested in fantasy, games, Game of Thrones and tech by what I post. Yet I never see anything remotely useful to those topics. Unfortunately, I find it more amusing to spend inordinate amounts of time blocking every single ad account I see on my mobile devices but like the worst case of diarrhea, these ads endless fall from the asshole territory of marketing bowel syndrome.
I’ve toyed around with Pinterest a bit and while they are by far the most visual, I just never found a good use for it. Their site is one of the most annoying since to view anything via the web, you need an account. As most of the images appearing on Google’s image search are now largely derived from Pinterest, clicking on the ones that go to the site result in the absolutely annoying “Sign Up” popup modal. Hey, I know how to manually block that too!
Sure, Pinterest has a niche but I can’t see something like this lasting for the long run. The only thing relevant that they’ve done is create a new type of layout. The bookmarklet thing is a one off. Other than that, you can accomplish the same thing with other similar systems.
Linkedin (and other shitty recruiting sites)
When Linkedin first came out, I was really impressed. I wanted to reconnect with old coworkers just to see what they were up to. I enjoyed posting my current status, my projects, etc. Then the site befell the curse of all career sites: the recruiters invaded. Recruiters are the roaches of the employment side of the net; no matter how many new job sites that come about saying that they’ve got a new premise, the recruiters manage to ruin it and get their little commissions.
Honestly, I thought about pulling my Linkedin profile down permanently just so that people could not find me anymore. The only people who still try to contact me on the site are recruiters. It’s the only place where a good looking woman will try to seek me out, but never for the good reasons. I don’t bother updating Linkined anymore as I don’t wish for recruiters or anyone to know what I’m doing. I hate being harassed. When I used to keep my profile updated, recruiters would call my company posing as someone I ought to know. It was a clear invasion of privacy.
So if I can’t keep my profile updated and feel safe, why bother even letting a service like this have any information on me at all? It’s not like over the years old comrades would frequently contact me inviting me over for a cool new job where I get paid in fair wages. It’s just another job board at this stage.
And when I say “other shitty recruiting sites” I want to say that there’s many others that feature somewhat similar things. For instance, I got invited to this AngelList site. It was another Linkedin wannabe. I had zero desire of releasing more information about me beyond the bare minimal. But their bare minimal standards was full profiles. I don’t get it. Why does a site that supposedly should be relevant to getting angel funding have anything to do with your resume? It’s because it’s just another data mining scam. You won’t meet those big wig angel funds if you’re a regular guy. So why bother?
Youtube
If I knew that Youtube would’ve grown to its current heights, I would’ve tried creating a channel with tons of useful information. But those days are long over and getting into Youtube as someone wishing to make a professional career in video making is close to impossible at this stage for an up and comer. And if you’re not an up and comer with good video equipment and content, then there’s no point even starting.
But there’s other reasons why I wouldn’t do Youtube. First, the community (or internet aidz as I like to label them) is garbage. I don’t call comments “community”. It’s more like a forum for just putting whatever you feel like as long as you trigger someone. The comments are the laziest, shittiest thing I’ve seen for a company that boast these supposedly huge numbers with all this revenue. Obviously, once again Youtube is nothing more than a slightly more interactive version of TV.
Next, you have the controversial copyright claims bullshit. The situation with Youtube is such a huge fucking mess because Google wants everything to be automated. Putting up any videos is a risky venture if you intend to monetize since trolls and copyright trolls can get you taken down.
Lastly, I don’t really call Youtube a social endeavor. Just having users and a place to bitch really isn’t social in my book. It’s more like an Orwellian 2 minute hate. Is that social or anti-social? I don’t feel connected to anyone on Youtube. I’ve never really made a single friend off of Youtube and I doubt I ever will. It’s just another extension of Google’s dehumanizing automation plan.
Reddit is kinda like Youtube without the frustration and videos. I find the information on Reddit to be somewhat useful and the long threads commonly humorous (as well as blasphemous but hey I love that shit). But I still don’t have a sense of connection beyond being part of a group of voices. To individuals though, there’s really nothing there beyond cold text. I suppose the real benefit of Reddit is the overall lack of ads. Ads make everything less social.
Snapchat
I know what you’re going to say. “You’re too old Keith! You don’t get it!” That’s absolutely true. I don’t get Snapchat. I’ve posted maybe 2-3 images at most from my memory. I don’t get the whole story thing and pretty much if you lack an active lifestyle, Snapchat does little for you. Yeah, you can do video but so can a lot of things. I’ve found that Snapchat is more like a battery drain and a spot for stupid dog faces.
The only thing I’ve ever heard Snapchat being used for is dickpix. Really? Has the world sunk so low that you require a shitty platform to send an image of your tiny wiener? And the people sending these images are kids. So that means stupid parents are spending tons of money for their kids’ little crappy phones and probably have no idea what kids are doing on them. Parents, this is why you need to learn abstention.
All this leads down to Instagram. I’m sure there are other platforms but I’ve listed the major ones from the top of my head. Yet when I analyzed what I want from a social media platform, Instagram to me offers the highest quality of all of them. Let me enumerate all the reasons:
- Forces higher quality posts – You don’t want to take a crappy picture using Instagram since pictures are permanently saved. The filters give you the chance for improving the quality of your posts. And these days most phone cameras offer pretty decent digital imaging. For myself, I’ve never posted anything that looked terrible.
- Limited number of posts – Instead of posting a lot of garbage posts with cheap one liners, irrelevant links and whatever stream of consciousness you’re impelled that you believe the world ought to know, you probably cut down on how often you post with the best of the best.
- Digestable posts – Having less posts means that you can consume more information overall. Unlike Twitter, I don’t have to backtrack that much to find all the most useful information. The information is instantly recognizable and I can judge immediately how relevant a post can be by providing a like.
- Video, stories, stupid doggy faces and friends are all included – Maybe not all my friends from Facebook are on Instagram but I get to see mostly relevant information. There’s not a lot of ads on Instagram (at the moment anyway) but I can do virtually all the most relevant actions of the best social media platforms out there in the most relevant formats. It’s not extremely textual (where I am a very textual type) but you also cut down on the crap to focus on the core information.
- Posts are cleanly separated from activities – I think Twitter and Facebook are horrible to look at because you can’t see the main posts. Comments are reduced to only a few so again you’re focusing on the posts. There is an activity feed section too (I believe) but it’s separate from the main feed. It doesn’t clutter up the truly important parts of the application. That’s huge.
- It does the most important things very well – Facebook is trying to be this do everything platform. You have pages, groups, charity, messaging, etc. It’s just a huge mess where the lines aren’t clear. Posts are disorganized and you have to dig to find things. Twitter is overwhelming in terms of how much information you get. Both add too much clutter with all the integrations to the point where you just want to shut them off. Instagram mostly focuses on pictures and you get just enough of a taste to satisfy you. It handles both celebrities and your friends well in addition to people you may want to know. It’s a very happy medium where I never feel offended and I never feel afraid to post what I want because the things I choose to post will be thought out.
So there you have it. Instagram is the clear winner for you.