Why Instagram is self-destructing

Rene Ritchie

🚀 Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!

Timelines vs algorithms. Chronology vs. discovery. FIGHT!

Everyone is super hopping mad that the people they care about, the friends, the family, the creators, the celebrities, the ones that they chose specifically to follow, that you chose to see, the ones that used to appear so orderly-like on your screens for you to scroll through, every day and every night, are being disrupted, *corrupted*, replaced, rejected — Injected! — whatever you want to call it — by what the machine, the network, the platforms thinks you would really rather see

Of course, I’m talking about Twitter, which took the simple, beautiful, reverse-chronological timeline that I and maybe many of you signed up for, and turned it into this mess of recommended tweets by… who knows who and who cares!

Kidding, totally kidding. We all know I’m actually talking about YouTube, which de-emphasized the clean, clear, crisp subscriber feed, populated by every video published by every creator we all chose to smash the button for… going back… forever… basically, and now has all of us just clicking on whatever shows up on our home page, whether we smashed a button ever or not!

Still kidding! TikTok. Sorry! I swear! I’m obviously talking about Instagram, where they’ve taken the immaculate, photo-centric feed of our internet youth and Frankensteined it up with so many, so thirsty, video recs that the Queens of the Jenner-Kardashian Empire are now calling for it to burn hotter than… King’s Landing in the very worst season.

And yeah, if you’re sensing a pattern here, that’s because there absolutely is one.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.