[wcunning]

I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway...

My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community for the same thing that has a disturbing tendency to flame out and generally mock newbies.

What I take away from this is that Instagram, like all metaphorical tools, is what you make of it. If you only follow beautiful people, you may only get shallow content. If you follow interesting people who share interesting things, you'll get interesting content.

[dantondwa]

I agree with you. Instagram is the only social media I still use, and it's mainly because it's so non-toxic. I mostly see stuff related to my hobbies, some comic stripes, some friends I care about. It's by definition a bubble, but it's one that is actually chosen by me. Mainly, its pleasantness comes from the sensation of not being inundated by contents, by the lack of importance that comments have, etc. I bet it's possible to have a different experience, if I followed influencers and whatnot it would be much worst. However, for how I use it, I don't mind it and I actually get to know interesting things.

[bryanthompson]

Same here. I only follow woodworkers and immediately unfollow anyone who gets outside the line of what i want in my feed. It has allowed me to find interesting niches in the hobby and connect with people with 10x the skill who like teaching and talking about technique, but it takes a pretty brutal type of curating to keep the influencers & garbage out.

[wcunning]

This comment is surely too late, but I feel like it's worth preserving. I think the woodworking community is more prone to that than the metalworking community. I hate to say it, but I think it's a question of barrier to entry. It's hard to be dilettante in metalworking when it requires a huge investment and moving tens of thousands of pounds of equipment.

[hiven]

Completely agree. I do however think the way the instagram app works you are guided down a path littered with product sales pages, advertising and general mundane materialism. I think at its core this culture is good for their business model.

[asdff]

Somehow I've grown blind to the ads on instagram. I know they are there, if I actively look for them I will find them, but if I close my eyes cannot picture the contents of any ad I've seen lately on on Instagram.

When I scroll through the feed it's like I've subconsciously trained myself to immediately scroll past and ignore sponsored posts, and immediately click past sponsored stories. I can't be the only one in this boat.

[stochastic_monk]

Without hawking other items, they’re mostly just making instagram money. I’m not saying it’s good, but the it’s the expected behavior for this incentive structure.

[AJ007]

Adjacently related, I follow a lot of artists on Twitter. A recurring complaint, including for myself when I previously used Instagram was non-permissioned and uncredited reposting of artist’s content. As an artist it is a problem for obvious reasons, for a user if I like the work I want to know exactly who did it and why.

Of course this can and does happen on twitter, but I think two thinks make the results more favorable. The first is the poster can get called out on what they did. Secondly, Twitter’s less reliance on algorithmic feeds mean the content theft is less “rewarded.”

The whole Tumblr fiasco upset a lot of artists and pretty much terminated the use of any artists whose work triggered the nudity detection filter, which was easy to do. Twitter gets complaints about compression, especially with videos and pixel art. All of the extra tweets that come with the art has forced me to unfollow a lot of artists whose work I like. Instagram has the issue I just described. All of those billions of dollars invested in consumer content sharing apps and this is the current state of things.

[yowlingcat]

This is a great point. It's not one I would have figured out myself until I actually went and made an interest specific Instagram. It turns out that having absolutely zero ties to people I know in real life makes that account way more pleasant, as it is directly and solely related to my aesthetic and artistic interests.

[JohnJamesRambo]

I want to use Instagram as you describe but only if I could remove the like button. Its existence makes it feel like I’m pandering for likes about anything I post so I just uninstall the app. I want to share things with people with nothing expected in return.

[asdff]

Snapchat fills that role for me. Just fleeting moments or interesting things from the day to day. The impermanence is refreshing.

With pictures posted on social media, I came to realize that I had a certain audience in mind with each post. If I posted a picture of me hiking, I want my hiking friends to see it. So instead of dragging everyone else through my life, I just text my hiking pics to my hiking friends and get a lot more genuine and direct communication as a result.

[mistermann]

Exactly....the problem is not Instagram, the problem is what our culture has become. Our technology has helped accelerate that, but it isn't the root cause.

[TeMPOraL]

Indeed. Instagram was (is) just a place where people congregate on-line, with particular focus on the visual aspect. It's marketing that infected it, just like it does everything in our lives. If Instagram is to be blamed, it can only be blamed for not fighting back. Unfortunately, it's in their interest for this infection to take hold.

[jcurbo]

Same here, except with astronomy/astrophotography and outdoors stuff. I like Instagram in that way and don't follow any big celebrities or big influencers, so never see any #ad sort of stuff.

[HNLurker2]

What's your ig account so i can see what you follow? (presumebly not being privatE)

[andrepd]

That's good for you. It's great that you found interesting people in Instagram, but that doesn't change the fact that for 95% of users Instagram is as the GP described: a cesspool of shallowness, materialism, false appearances, and a great harm to the mental health of our youth (and not only youth).

[moksly]

Do you have anything to back that up? Most people I know who use Instagram use it for hobbies or a local version of Etsy.

I don’t know a single person who follows these useless Reality TV personalities. I mean, they obviously have a lot of followers, but there is a billion people on Instagram and the highest amount of followers is still in the millions. That’s hardly 95%.