I have friends who post to instagram and I follow some small businesses there so I can't leave but the signal-to-noise ratio (posts by people I actually follow vs. suggested/sponsored posts) on my feed feels SO bad. This is what I saw this morning:
- post
- sponsored
- post
- post
- post
- sponsored
- because you watched a reel
- post
- post
- suggested reels
- post
- sponsored
- post
- suggested for you
- post
- sponsored
- post
- suggested for you (reel)
- post
- sponsored
- post
- post
- suggested for you
- sponsored
- post
- post
- post
- sponsored
- post
- suggested for you (reel)
- post
- sponsored
- post
- You're all caught up! (Everything below is suggested)
In 33 items, you can't go three posts without then seeing something you never asked for. Out of that, 19 (58%) are actual posts, while 14 (42%) are shit trash, divided among 8 sponsored ads (24%) and 6 suggested posts (18%). Nearly HALF is stuff I don't want to see and a QUARTER is ads. And I think this is on a good day, because I'll often see SO much more suggested shit. kill kill die die
There's a trend, especially among businesses, to simply repost posts as stories, because they know that the feed is a shitpile and new stories from people you follow are highlighted at the top. But this doesn't stop Instagram! You can tap on the right side of the screen to go to the next story, and sometimes the "next" story isn't from someone you even follow. Case in point, I see:
- story
- sponsored
- two stories
- sponsored
- two stories
- sponsored
- two stories
- sponsored
- two stories
- two sponsored
- two stories
- sponsored
- two stories
- sponsored
- story
- sponsored
- story
- sponsored
- story
- sponsored
- story
- sponsored
- story
- sponsored
- story
- two sponsored
- two stories
- sponsored
- two stories
Out of 39 peoples' stories, 16 (41%) of them are now ads! Particularly egregious is serving me TWO ADS in a row between stories, which happened twice, and there's never more than two consecutive followees' stories. Absolute dumpster crap of a social medium where a quarter to more than a third of your content is ads
Twitter seems about the same. I can't really use either because this shit is too exhausting/overwhelming, and neither currently allows alternative apps.