[CydeWeys]

How many millions of people are posting on Instagram? How many billions of photos are on Instagram now?

Is it really so crazy to think that all of those billions of photos, you can find groupings of 12 that are similarly composed? How many unique photos are there to take really?

I'd be way more impressed if you could somehow come up with a set of a billion photos such that there are no compositional groupings across the set. Earth only has so many types of things on it to photograph.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I read one bit of utopian fiction where the propagation of digital production was limited to a nearby social circle. That way, people weren't constantly comparing their photographs with the best photographer in the world, or their musical compositions with the best musician in the world. People would specialize and create things, but for the benefit of their social circle, not the entire world. I wonder if something like that, but for Instagram, might be worth considering.

[kkarakk]

i don't think comparing your photo with the best photographer in the world is necessarily a bad thing, it shows you what you haven't learnt yet and how composition/lighting changes things.

if you translate that into FOMO somehow i think that's on your broken code/way of living rather than anything else.

[sk0g]

Sounds like Google+! I love the idea, I can be the dedicated (dark) bard for my group of friends. The realities of the situation are probably vastly different, but hey, I need hope.

[sigi45]

People are not creating that stuff for others, they are creating it for themselves.

I don't need a social circle which creates content for me.

I'm quite happy that evolution and the masses created tv shows like GoT or other professional high quality content.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

It's easy enough to create a private profile on Instagram and only post things for the benefit of your close friends. I have an account for exactly this purpose.

[Funes-]

While it is indeed true that humans share a large number of traits that naturally homogenize, to an extent, how we think and act, I'd bet it is ultimately Instagram's interconnectedness between users which favors this kind of content replication. Quantifying social validation by means of like, comment, and follower counts make other users' reactions predictable and, thus, exploitable; I think people who take this kind of hackneyed photos or videos are doing so because they have been proven to work--they already have feedback for that kind of aesthetic and narrative artifices, because they have already been posted by popular accounts and have gotten good results.

[bigDICK]

If you take photos to remember something then you can have a lot of unique photos. While everyone else is chasing the perfect photo you'll have something that is actually true to the memory.

[djohnston]

i am like this too. i have lots and lots of janky photos that aren't insta-worthy but fulfill their core purpose as little time machines

[classic959]

Wow, this comment just got me thinking. If I've got good at taking well composed photos, according to common photography techniques, might they have less of that time-machine, memory-jogging quality? I'd like to have both - maybe I need two sets for photos!

[Existenceblinks]

You take photo to forget. You let objects to save that memory for you so that you can forget. Sure you still remember some, and some pointers of images.

[gitgud]

Wise words bigDICK