[63]

This isn't my experience with Instagram at all. I only follow people I know personally, check in once or twice a day and see posts and stories from them and really nothing else. No sponsored posts, no reels, etc. Maybe some ads. I don't use the discover page and stop scrolling my feed once I get through all the new posts so maybe that's it.

[Mistletoe]

All mine has devolved to is trying to get me to watch absurd reels posts from half naked women trying to send me to an OnlyFans. Asking around to people I know they have experienced the same. I just stopped using it. It didn’t help that I realized every post on Instagram authentic or not is really just an ad. Even for people I know, it is an ad trying to sell me that their life is different than I know it is.

[saurik]

So, while I 100% agree with the original premise--that Instagram is filled with ads and content farms, with relatively few "real users" to be found--this specific complaint is actually "a you thing": Instagram's feed algorithm ranks content in ways that seems to give the wrong players power (such as by giving more weight to people who merely steal and aggregate content than the ones who produce it), but it isn't entirely incompetent.

I am, thereby, going to claim that, if you are getting nothing but half naked women on Instagram on your feed, it is because you actually "wanted" to see half naked women (...maybe "merely" subconsciously! as, while I am not entirely sure about Instagram, TikTok is apparently tracking implicit watch time more so than explicit actions, and maybe you stop for just a bit longer on such content as it catches your eye).

In contrast to your experience, I recently went through a devastating breakup, and my algorithmic Instagram feed seriously has no half naked women on it: it is, instead, nothing but an intense pile of captioned voices (like, an audio with text, but not video of that person) saying pseudo-motivational quotes about relationships ("if she had wanted to make time, she would have" sort of shit) with inspirational background music overlapped with videos of people "making stuff" (such as carpentry).

It is demoralizing to experience: I go into Instagram for whatever reason, start scrolling by accident, and then a half hour later I am at the bottom of a pit of emotions crying my eyes out while clutching a pillow and I am lucky if I escape even an hour after that :(... but, the algorithm does't care about my mental health: it only knows that if it shows me videos that cluster along these axes I apparently am willing to spend the rest of my life watching ads (which make up about 1/4th of the content on Instagram).

[AVTizzle]

My friend - apologies for your experience.

In my experience, you can clean up your feed of unwanted content pretty quickly. Just go to discover and long tap > "Not Interested" on the stuff that's of the genre you want to filter out of your life.

I do this every couple months with IG babes & thot accounts to keep my feed free of sexual imagery. Works a charm.

[Mistletoe]

Wow I did not know this exists.

[raydev]

How many people do you "know"? Because I follow about 50 people I know, and only around 20 of them post with any regularity, and Instagram injects "Suggested Posts" throughout my feed. I'd say it's majority "Suggested Posts" on most days. And then I'll stumble on a nice photo that a real friend posted, and it's from 3 days ago.

[iLoveOncall]

I am in the same situation as you but as soon as you have caught up with the posts from friends (which if you only have a few hundreds and check everyday goes very quickly), it's literally only sponsored posts.

I just checked right now, I scrolled through 10 posts of accounts that I follow, which took 30 seconds, before getting "You're all caught up" and having literally only spam posts.

And I don't even go on Instagram every day.

[63]

That's true, but I consider "you're all caught up" to mean "it's time to close the tab and do something else." Honestly it's really great of Instagram to provide a convenient stopping point like that instead of an infinite scroll.

[flawn]

I true that. That article seems like a big cap to me, younger generations including me still use it pretty avidly. Interesting that there is such a different perception on that