Instagram used to be much better in the past years, BUT now with the talk of new updates like “moving the highlights into the grid” is getting ridiculous. Highlights are a lovely feature to have before your followers and maybe soon to be followers can look through them and have an idea what you post on your account and what your hobbies are, what your up to on days out and more. But as they talk about updated the profile and making a separate tab for highlights doesn’t seem good, as current followers and/or soon to be followers will see your posts first instead of your highlights and highlights chance won’t go to your highlights first and could maybe not engage with your account at all leading to Instagram being like a ghost town application. Instagram and its CEO won’t listen to people that don’t like the updates they are doing to the app and won’t add features that we are actually looking for and will actually use. Yes, it’s still good as you can still message, interact with current followers but it may be harder to get noticed but new potential followers, and brands/small businesses that are on Instagram will have a harder time getting new customer. Unfortunately, it’s what happens and all we (the users of Instagram) can do is complain about the updates - like the highlights - to hopefully get Instagram to change them back?

Instagram is a great app for many reasons. It allows you to catch up with your friends, family or celebrities, it gets rid of boredom and much more however it is also a not so good app. Now I definitely do not blame Instagram for this but the app has sort of become something on its own. It has become a place which makes people feel bad about themselves, an app which pressures people to be online constantly and sometimes it’s the opposite of what you want to be doing. This is not hate or anything but I think we all know that sometimes Instagram definitely does not make us feel good about ourselves. This is why if you do download the app I recommend taking breaks from it. These breaks can be as often or as occasional as you would like. All you have to do is when you feel stressed out and the app is making you feel worse or if the app is making you feel bad about yourself just delete it for a few days, weeks months or even years. For me, Instagram used to be a fun place where I could catch up with my friends and family but now 2 years later is the complete opposite, I have a lot things going on right now and Instagram was just making it worse so I deleted the app and I honestly don’t know if I will ever get it back. Once again this is not hate, just a warning and some advice. This is not always the case however, it depends who you follow and what type of person you are. Personally, I am someone who does not handle stress well and can easily crack under pressure therefore deleting the app has probably been best for me.

I think this app would be so much better if stories had another option to make custom privacy groups. The same as the new ‘close friends’ feature, but in addition you could make additional groups that you could select which stories were viewable by which people. For example, I’d have ‘close friends’ ‘just friends’ and then ‘everyone, including friends and work colleagues and family’. It would not notify them that they are part of this group like close friends does, but more would be a quicker toggle to manually hiding / unhiding your story from people. There’s often things I want to post as a regular story but have to go through and hide work colleagues from my story each time, if it’s something I don’t want them to see! This would be similar to custom privacy on Facebook - where you can post a photo and choose who can see it. This would be perfect for photos too - I’d love to be able to post photos on my instagram that some are for just friends that are not suitable for colleagues / acquaintances, and some are for everyone to see, etc. Surely the popularity of people making ‘private/ personal/ spam’ accounts alongside their main accounts shows that there is a demand for this, as they feel like they have content they don’t want their whole normal following to see. It’s inconvenient to have two accounts, and we should be able to toggle the privacy on our photos so that we have our own choice of who sees our content!! I feel like Instagram are way behind other social media on this front.

Please for the love of god add a feature able to remove reels from your app. I understand the corporate greed and all that (trying to have users addicted to your app) but I think it would all do some good if we were able to use this app and have the option to remove reels, especially considering it is such a negative place.The comments are just filled with slurs, r*pe threats, pdphilia jokes and more and it fosters such a damaging environment. Memes have circulated around it on how terrible instagram reel comment sections are and it’s true! It isn’t healthy to be exposed to that all the time, especially due to the addictive nature of short form content. It also is rotting my sleep schedule and this sort of fast enacting dopamine preys on my ADHD and I’m sure many alike have this experience. I would absolutely rate the app so much higher if we just had the option to remove reels but that seems highly unlikely, but I’d really love if so. Instagram should be its own app in where you can share what you’re doing and catch up with friends quickly, viewing their images and such. Where you can find small businesses through posts and indulge in posted art and music. It shouldn’t be a secondary TikTok and a worse one at that. It’s really sad to see another app take to short form content to glue their users to their screens. Please add a feature to remove it 🙏