Instagram 12+

I’m waiting for the day instagram let’s you redo the order of photos after you post them. I have recently become self aware of how not aesthetic my feed is. I crave the color coordination on my page but I don’t want to delete all of my posts. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way because I see people post about it too. I love notes, it’s cool to see other people’s thoughts and songs they’ve been listening to. The same can’t be said for post notes. They are terrible and have taken over my recommendations. I don’t want to see what my mutuals like. I want to see what I like. All I see is what this girl I hardly know but can’t bring myself to unfollow because we will be in more classes next semester likes. She only writes notes on Kpop videos which is okay but not my cup of tea. Anyway, it’s all I see no one else I have uses it so all I see is what she likes. And no matter how many times I put “not interested” it comes up again and again. Things like notes should be optional, like whether you want to have it on your feed or not because some people use them inappropriately. Reels. Reels are insanely inappropriate. I see things like bad stuff happening to animals which is weird because I’ve never interacted with anything like that!! So why am I seeing it?? That really irritates me. Anyway that’s all. Instagrams fine but don’t really introduce it to kids or middle schoolers. 8th grade is fine but it’s kinda a pointless media.

I used to love Instagram as a way to keep in touch with my family and friends. Especially during this time of being apart. However, now with the unbelievable amount of ads it is nearly impossible to see what I want to see (my family and friends) and due to the new - “you’re all done” feature I constantly miss posts and here is why: If I open my feed and look at some posts from friends, I can see there are several I haven’t scrolled to look at yet, I then click over to open a message, when I look back at Instagram those posts are gone and I cannot see them again unless I can possibly remember who posted something and to individually look at each of their pages. I HATE that feature that is now in Instagram. To me the benefit of the posts is I can always just scroll down to review them. Now each post is pretty much a story, see it once and it’s gone forever and now I have ENDLESS ads. Once you have viewed your new posts you can’t see them again all you see are ads. Don’t get me wrong, I do like SOME ads, they are personalized and helpful. But I’d rather they show up only in my stories than on my feed. I’m probably going to delete Instagram as soon as I can find a different way to see friends and family’s posts and not miss any because of the inundation of ads that is here. Intagram used to be about connecting, now it is just advertising.

Instagram used to let me see content of accounts that I actually follow, but lately it’s been flooding my feed with random popular accounts that are “related” to my interests but I don’t follow. Some of them don’t even post content relating to my interests. Just completely random. It’s very frustrating that I have to go to the accounts I follow to be up to date with their posts instead of seeing it in my feed in the order they were posted. I understand that it’s handy to have similar content suggested, but what about newer accounts that aren’t quite popular yet that may have content I enjoy? Those get drowned out if they don’t have a billion likes and views. It’s been causing me to use the app less frequently altogether as a result.

I only use Instagram for art. I use the appropriate hashtags, make reels, etc. it doesn’t seem to matter because my content only reaches a small fraction of my followers and practically no one outside my following (it shows in the analytics). Yet when I post the same content on other platforms, they get much more views and reactions than on Instagram. I’ve become more active on other apps because I don’t see the point in using a platform that doesn’t “platform” my posts.

I want to see the people I follow, and I want to be able to discover new and upcoming accounts with similar content. I don’t know why they’ve changed the way the feed works, but I cannot stand it.