I hate Instagram. But I feel I can't leave...
You too?
In nearly every private conversation I’ve had with different designers and creatives over the last 6 months, the topic of hating social media, specifically Instagram, comes up. The doomscroll. The addictive nature of the apps. The difficulty of keeping up with the ever-changing whims of the algorithm. The pressure of having to post weekly, if not daily, to keep the accounts “healthy” and the engagement up, lest the algorithmic deities enact divine punishment upon your account for not being active.
Welcome to my latest essay:
Also, fair warning, this is a super long rant/essay, so feel free to read it in chunks.
The Mental-Health Problem
After I caught Covid, and subsequently long-covid, I didn’t post on Instagram in any serious way for over a year. And, when I was recovered and felt capable of returning, I just couldn’t find the spark in me anymore. In fact, I was trying to reduce my screen time on Instagram: I would spend hours just scrolling the explore page and it was hurting my mental health. The last thing I wanted to do was spend more time on Instagram making posts, posting stories.
Over the last few months, I’ve actually set up a proper app-blocker (Opal) that blocks my access to Instagram all day unless I ask it for permission to enter the app (and it only lets me do 15 minutes at a time maximum). It’s reduced my daily phone screen time from 5-6 hours (9 on bad days) to around 3, and I’ve been happier for it. I only unblock it to check DMs and post stories. But even DMs I can access on my desktop website version of Instagram without triggering the doomscroll.
And you might be like thinking, I don’t spend that much time on my phone, you have a problem. Maybe. But these apps are designed to be addictive and steal your time, attention, and data from you. There’s much more interesting things I can be doing with my time (like writing Substacks, doing art) than scrolling on social media and feeling the ambient crush of the world sink into me.
The Business Problem
So, where does this leave Instagram as a tool for my business? The truth is I deeply dislike making carousel posts now. It feels draining to think about how to condense detailed topics into 400 words maximum (and only like 50 on each slide). I feel like I’m only able to deliver awful surface-level content on there now, and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve been just loving writing long-form content on Substack.
Somehow, writing weekly essays of 1500-2000 words is MUCH easier to me than making a fancy graphic in Canva with 300 words on it once or twice a month. I really want to be able to provide thoughtful written pieces to my followers and community who care about green graphic design, and it feels incredibly cheap and dishonest to be basically gutting interesting ideas into a shell of themselves for Instagram.
I wanted to find a way to leave, and this is partially how I found my way to Substack, in an attempt to be able to leave a social media platform that made me only feel bad vibes when I went on it. But I was/am extremely nervous and scared to abandon it entirely.
My main fear is that through Instagram is how future students of the Green Graphic Design Course find me most often, and the course is one of my proudest business achievements. If I could devote 100% of my time to education for green design and the course because Substack created a way to introduce people to the course and further their green design learning, I would absolutely love that.
I’d happily drop client work if I could be a full-time writer, researcher, and educator for design (hell, I’m honestly a bit scared to admit that here on Substack as it feels like a huge deviation from what’s “socially acceptable” in the design community to admit… and it feels like a far-off goal that might not ever be achievable. Same with the idea of gently monetizing this Substack and providing bonus content, I am not ready for that yet, and nervous about the idea even though I’d love it more than anything to write even more here…).
But despite that, surely it would be easy to just stop doing what you don’t like, right? That’s what every design-business advice tells you lol. That or outsource, which quite bluntly, we cannot afford to do while paying someone fairly, so that’s off the table for us. I wanted to understand the issue a bit deeper though, why I felt such fear and dread at the idea of leaving a platform that I honestly hated.
The Research… ie. the TEA on EXACTLY why big Social Media Platforms SUCK.
When I don’t understand something, I research it. And so that’s what I began to do. I stumbled upon 3 important resources: the first, “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Orville, the second “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back” by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, and finally third, an article by Cory Doctorow, entitled “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or how, exactly, platforms die.”
All three gave me unique perspectives (and comfort) on my feelings around Instagram and helped lay down in a clearer picture both why the platform made me feel bad and why I was also deeply scared to leave it. And I wanted to break down some of this insane shit here. There are actually specific reasons to what’s going on with Instagram and social media platforms and why the experience is frustrating and un-enjoyable.
The “Enshittification” of Instagram
One of Cory Doctorow’s key thesis ideas is that social media platforms are destined to undergo what he calls “enshittification”. This is basically the process these advertising-based platforms undergo to push their profits to the max, at the expense of both users and businesses.
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. -The “Enshittification” of Tiktok
Cory Doctorow makes the case that for Facebook the enshittification process went like this: first, they wanted users, so they encouraged everyone you knew— friends and family—to join and stay connected with each other. Facebook showed you only the feed of people you were friends with. By doing this, users are entrenched after a short period of time: to leave means missing out on the connections with your loved ones. To leave means convincing them all to leave with you too.
Next, it was time to advertise: Facebook started to show you posts on your feed from companies you didn’t follow: mostly news/media companies but also businesses. Soon, these businesses became dependent on Facebook’s algorithm to drive traffic to their own websites. And the final step was to monetize: Facebook suddenly prioritized both business/media posts unless you paid to “boost your reach”. Paying for the ads was the only way to have any kind of reach, no matter who you were on the platform.
I feel that this process isn’t too dissimilar from Instagram: at first it showed us everyone we followed in our feed and it was awesome! You could have really cool interactions with people and really grow organically. Then, the recommended posts and sponsored posts came in. And now, not only do you barely see the people you follow in your feed, you have to basically pay for advertising in order to get any significant reach. Also, side mini rant, but I tried to monetize the course advertising once on Instagram and it blocked my ad from running because climate crisis messaging was inappropriate for advertising lol.
Inside “Chokepoint Capitalism”, another problematic framework of the algorithm for creatives was discussed:
“[Youtube’s] algorithm shapes creativity: ‘The topics discussed in videos, genres engaged with, video lengths, titles utilized, video thumbnail design, and organization of speech.” -Chokepoint Capitalism
I can’t help but feel this applies directly to Instagram as well. The content that performs the best isn’t the kind of content I would create independently: reels and carousels are shaping our creative process: the types of media we create, the topics we talk about, and even how we talk about those topics. I certainly can’t talk about why I hate Instagram or why X company is greenwashed in 300 words on a carousel or 1 minute video.
But you CAN quickly and effectively pass along misinformation like “Did you know a cotton bag is actually 1000x more bad for the environment than a plastic one? OMG!” (Yeah, only if you don’t count every important life-cycle analysis metric that actually matters. Once you do that the cotton bag reigns supreme after closer to 10 uses). And of course, it would take more than 300 words to debunk that myth as well! And my debunk wouldn’t trend as fast or intensely as the misinformation making it feel like I’m screaming uselessly into the void.
It doesn’t end there though:
“Creators are encouraged to pursue a quantity-over-quality approach if they want to achieve success. This, combined with a lack of clarity around what content exactly YouTube will promote and what might be demonetized, leads to an extremely precarious and stressful working life for creators.” - Zoë Glatt (from Chokepoint Capitalism)
Once again, I feel this is extremely transferable to Instagram. I totally relate to this: it is stressful, and it feels extremely precarious. I’m sure most of you can also relate to this—you never know if a post you upload will perform well or if it will flop, often the things you work the hardest on can perform the worst, and vice versa.
As small businesses on Instagram, we basically know our posts won’t be shown to our own followers unless we a. pay for advertising or b. make a high-performing post. But we’re also left entirely in a lurch for how to even make a “high-performing” post. The algorithm is entirely opaque to us, no matter what Mosseri occasionally reveals on his Instagram stories (more on that later).
I find this aspect particularly crushing in the sustainable space. On Instagram, I’m constantly bombarded with misinformation around sustainability, both in the design space and in general. It makes it feel like a very frustrating place to be in because it is very depressing to see harmful sustainable information circulating so successfully. I’m not equipped to debunk it all in Instagram’s formats, nor would it matter much even if I did because it wouldn’t be sent to my followers. This bleeds into the next point that was quite cathartic to read about in Orville’s “How To Do Nothing”: how Instagram and social media at large has intentionally created an uncomfortable space to exist in.
Misinformation and Hysteria Keeps Us Coming Back
Jenny Orville identifies some of the mental health struggles that can plague us on social media, as intentionally designed by the platforms themselves to drive engagement:
“…one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time they check back ever more diligently. The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.
Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.” -How To Do Nothing
This is one of the areas I’ve been struggling with, especially for how I post about environmental education/research for sustainable design on Instagram. Outrageous or overly simplified/positive ideas (like yet another ocean garbage plastic catcher designed by a teenager that will break within months due to the volume of microplastics, just like the last 10 overhyped inventions for this task) are what gain traction.
I can’t ethically or honourably pretend even those “positive” solutions are worth posting, because in my mind, that’s almost as bad as posting misinformation minimizing how serious the climate crisis is. My research or nuanced points simply don’t drive engagement. I know that, generally, at least in the community I build (and definitely here!) my followers do seek out that kind of content as preferable, but what does it matter if none of my followers even get to see it when it doesn’t pass Instagram’s initial engagement test to show to them.
“It is not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger… We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back to where we are needed.” -How To Do Nothing
A quiet, contemplative approach is what I’m trying to achieve here on Substack, in a way I was never able to do on Instagram. I want to be able to have space to reflect on trends, news, and research and actually provide interesting nuance, investigation, and build a space where we can have thoughtful conversations about these kinds of topics.
I don’t want to spend my time trying to reduce interesting ideas into like “bite-sized” sticky ideas that will either outrage people or encourage mindless sharing in the hopes of bending the algorithm for ultimate gains in followers. This doesn’t even get into the fact that 3% engagement is apparently a “good” engagement rate on Instagram nowadays… AWFUL! We are all dying on this hill for 3% engagement rate on thousands of followers?! But this is the problem: if it’s so awful, why aren’t we all leaving…
So, Why Can’t We Leave?
On Instagram, we don’t have “Freedom of Exit”. This is often what people talk about when they say you don’t “own your following” and you need to “start your email list”. This is generally true, although it’s more complicated than people make it out to be. To truly own your email list you need to be able to have an actively updated data-base that’s saved directly on your computer and isn’t wrapped up in the servers of whatever platform you’re using to send emails. This is true of Substack, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, any of them. These platforms are as likely to suddenly fuck up, experience downtime, or disappear same as Instagram or Facebook is.
Freedom of exit—the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought and preserving the data you created. -The “Enshittification” of Tiktok
But it is important to note that these email providers DO allow you to download and import your data elsewhere. Substack allows you to download your follower’s information and port it to a different platform if you want (hell, they even encourage you to do so if you truly feel Substack isn’t a good fit). We can’t download and input our Instagram followers anywhere else. They’re locked in Instagram and we have no way to contact them elsewhere.
This is what entrenches users and businesses to stay on platforms undergoing enshittification, as discussed earlier. They’re designed intentionally to keep you there, even though the platforms suck because of sunk cost fallacy: the time you spent building that audience can’t be gained back or transferred if you move platforms. The only option is to leave it behind with a pleaded ask that people follow you in your new destination. It doesn’t matter how much Meta makes the platform awful or ineffective for you, personally or professionally, you can’t leave because they make it near impossible to.
The reasons why I am enjoying Substack so much are threefold: (1) it doesn’t rely on advertising it relies on subscriptions, so—ideally—will not be subject to the same enshittification process as the other social media platforms, (2) it allows me to write long-form content to my community and read other people’s amazing Substacks and (3) I can leave and transfer my following elsewhere if I want. Also, Substack is extremely transparent with how to succeed on the platform and offers MANY excellent guides about how exactly to set up your content, how to write good content, and how their recommendation process works. I don’t feel in the dark at all about how Substack functions as a platform.
But I haven’t left Instagram yet for the reasons above. I’m scared to leave when I feel I could be still missing out on potential audience reach, even though it seems every day that passes, that reach is harder and more unobtainable to receive despite having new followers incoming. It matters because in the economic downtown, work for us has been slower. And during my almost full year with long-covid, my business took a pretty serious hit financially as well, as I wasn’t able to take on the same amount of work as usual. As a freelancer, I was prepared and have emergency funds for situations exactly like that, but of course, lean times can’t go on in perpetuity.
The course is an important income stream for us, even with its low pricing, and I can’t risk cutting off a potentially valuable stream of accessibility to students easily. Many of the ethical marketing decisions we made to create the course (lifetime access, evergreen openings, fair and equitable pricing model, etc.) did hurt our sales overall, and while I’ll never back down from the accessible education model I chose for the course, I do know if we had marketed the course more “normally” in enrollment cycles, it would have driven higher sales overall. But this isn’t what I want to do. I want to be able to find a way to have an accessible, fair education model for our Green Design course while also being able to make a modest income to be able to save for my partner and I’s future.
The Future of Instagram, According to Zucc Himself
Instagram is currently undergoing changes and won’t be staying the same, even in this current, shitty state. On July 27, 2022, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, went on stories (likely in response to backlash from the Kardashians and general public complaining that Instagram was no longer a photo sharing app as photos were being de-prioritized in favour of reels), and admitted that Instagram had “overfocused” on video in the last year and “re-affirmed” that photo sharing was still important to the platform. Many users took this as a sign that Instagram was going to switch their focus and restore itself to some of the former glory days. That reels would now be the de-prioritized ones, and photos would have their reign again.
One day later though, it was Meta’s quarterly earnings call and Mark Zuckerberg, who ultimately is the one making the decisions, not Mosseri, had something else to say about it. The transcript for the call is available here, but I’ll be pulling the sections relating to the future of Instagram through 2023.
In regards to the feeds, Zuckerberg stated that AI-based feed recommendations are going to grow and drive most of what we see on our Instagram feeds:
One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram, even if you don't follow those creators.
He further goes on to say that:
Right now, about 15% of content in a person’s Facebook feed and a little more than that of their Instagram feed is recommended by our AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don’t follow. We expect these numbers to more than double by the end of next year. As our AI finds additional content that people find interesting, that increases engagement and the quality of our feeds. Since we’re already efficient at monetizing most of these formats, this should increase our business opportunity over that period as well.
Functionally, this means that our feeds, as awful as they are, are likely only 15-20% AI recommended, and are only going to get worse with 30%+ being the goal for our feeds by the end of 2023. Functionally, this means that our reach and viability as users of Instagram is only going to get worse.
Zucc also talks about reels, and says nearly the opposite of Mosseri:
Reels engagement is also growing quickly. I shared last quarter that Reels already made up 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram. This quarter we saw a more than 30% increase in the time that people spent engaging with Reels across Facebook and Instagram. AI advances are driving a lot of these improvements.
One near term challenge is the growth of short-form video. Reels doesn't yet monetize at the same rate as feed or stories, so in the near term, the faster that Reels grows, the more revenue that actually displaces from higher-monetizing surfaces. Now in theory, we could mitigate this short term headwind by pushing less hard on growing Reels, but that would be worse for our products and business longer term since we're confident that Reels will grow engagement overall and quality will eventually monetize closer to feed. Our work on ads monetization efficiency for Reels is actually making faster progress than we'd expected. We've now crossed $1B annual revenue run rate for Reels ads, and Reels also has a higher revenue run rate than Stories did at identical times post launch. So the bottom line is I think we're on track here, and we just need to push through this one.
Zuckerberg actually states that pushing less hard on Reels is the wrong approach and that they will be pushed harder to force ad monetization more intensely on the platform to increase engagement and profits.
It’s also notable, that just earlier in this year, Mosseri effectively backtracked his own position on reels being “overfocused” in an “update”:
“To the degree that there is more video on Instagram over time, it’s going to be because that’s what’s driving overall engagement more. But photos are always going to be an important part of what we do.” -Adam Mosseri
The July 2022 quarterly report also brought to light that Meta was reporting their first ever revenue loss.
Meta reported its first ever revenue decline in its decade as a public company, losing 1% in revenue and 36% in profit year-over-year. In addition to these financial hits, Meta is also suffering from the same reduced demand in digital advertising affecting peers including Google, Twitter, and Snap. Meta affirmed on Wednesday that it expects the weak demand for advertising to continue in the current quarter. -Gizmodo
Meta is desperate to make up their lost revenue and turn the fates back around, and that doesn’t mean making the platform better for its users. And Mosseri’s change of heart illustrates closely that he’s not actually the one pulling the strings of how Instagram functions: Zuckerberg is—and Mosseri will fall in line with his decisions.
Another important aspect of Zuckerberg, Mosseri, and the fates of Instagram is that last summer, Instagram was developing an entire re-design of the app to have full-screen video that would functionally make it visually more like TikTok. The beta test of this new layout met with criticism, forcing Meta to “temporarily pause” the redesign project to evaluate it. But in no way does this mean Instagram won’t be redesigned in the near future. TikTok has far surpassed Instagram as the most downloaded app, and there is a functional arms-race between the platforms for social media dominance.
In response to the backlash against the new feed design Mosseri stated:
“For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn’t great,” he said. “So there I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup, and figure out how we want to move forward.”
Fundamentally, this doesn’t mean that Instagram will get easier for us to use, if anything, it’s the small breather before everything significantly changes to show us Zuck’s goal of 30% AI recommended content and even more monetization from reels. Meta has identified the problem: it’s not that users don’t want recommended content or shouldn’t have recommended content. It’s that their system for recommended content (while bringing in engagement increases in its current state) “isn’t good enough yet”; likely this means more of what we’re not enjoying as it’s up against Meta’s bottom line. The platform performing the best that Meta is seeking to emulate is TikTok and entirely video content.
I am confident in my thinking that we will see a full Instagram redesign some time in the next year, simply due to Zuckerberg’s thinking around reels, the need to keep up to TikTok and the driving force to reverse their market losses.
To me, this just makes it very clear that Instagram isn’t for us: the creatives; the small businesses, anymore. And it’s only to get worse to be on the platform and succeed.
So, where do we go from that?
Honestly, there’s no easy answer. Simply by design, not everyone is going to be able to just leave Instagram. I hope to be able to leave it behind soon, and save myself from most of these incoming changes.
It’s my ultimate goal that one day I’ll be able to lightly create a paid tier for this Substack and be able to write even more here. But I think this is still a bit far off for me right now. For now, I’m just hoping that I can build a great free community here with my weekly content on sustainable design!
Thank you for being here and supporting my work! Returning to “normal” work after long covid and finding this platform to be able to publish long-form content to has brought a lot of joy and made my work days seem a bit brighter as I can see before me a happier, healthier path towards continuing to share about what I’m passionate about online, and a viable path towards building a community here as well, not just on Instagram.
✺ Emma
Post Essay Thoughts
If you read through all of this and are like “Wow, I want to know more"!” (lol), I highly recommend you check out the books and articles I mentioned, but also this YouTube video that discusses the prevalence of misinformation on Meta.
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Thanks once again for being here in any capacity!
This issue is great Emma, I and I think many others agree. Honestly I'm just waiting for an alternative app to pop up made by some gen z person who cares about ethics
Enjoyed reading this, I’ve lost any love for Instagram as the one platform that did feel a fit for me. I don’t really know how to get started with Substack but it’s got a fair amount of appeal as I too like writing long form and the community aspect. Good luck for your goals on here 😊 your course is great so I hope that more designers find it!