What an age we live in: the meteoric evolution of the information superhighway has culminated in a Facebook-owned walled garden that retains its original features as a photo- and video-sharing platform, and so delivers substantive information as
pictures of text that cannot be copy-pasted or searched for.
The platform explicitly bans hyperlinking to ANY resource outside of Instagram, except from the bio section of user accounts, forcing purveyors of information to entice content consumers to follow the "link in bio," of which there can only be one.
Users can "save" posts to custom-named "collections" within the platform, but are intentionally prevented from exporting these collections, or indeed saving any post to their local machine in its original format, short of screenshotting in the mobile app, or using browser extensions or digging into devtools on desktop.
You can't sort comments by anything. Time, votes (sorry, "likes"), length -- nope, you're stuck with whatever inscrutable, undocumented order "the algorithm" has chosen to present to you, annealed out of some black-box ranking procedure based on various engagement metrics.
You can't create comment threads: all levels of replies to a comment pile up in the same indent level, forcing the reader to mentally build conversation threads by reading username tags and scrolling up and down while repeatedly clicking "view more replies." This undermines any hope of substantive discourse about whatever serious issue is addressed by the seven-panel meticulously designed infographic rife with unsupported claims, gross oversimplifications, and handwriting fonts.
Oh, and roughly every fifth post or story is a paid ad, just to remind you that you're the product. (Wherever the $7 billion and rising of quarterly revenue is going [1], their comment-system team evidently isn't getting much of it.)
Instagram becoming an "information powerhouse" is a slap to the face of information accuracy, accessibility, and credibility.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwi...
The platform explicitly bans hyperlinking to ANY resource outside of Instagram, except from the bio section of user accounts, forcing purveyors of information to entice content consumers to follow the "link in bio," of which there can only be one.
Users can "save" posts to custom-named "collections" within the platform, but are intentionally prevented from exporting these collections, or indeed saving any post to their local machine in its original format, short of screenshotting in the mobile app, or using browser extensions or digging into devtools on desktop.
You can't sort comments by anything. Time, votes (sorry, "likes"), length -- nope, you're stuck with whatever inscrutable, undocumented order "the algorithm" has chosen to present to you, annealed out of some black-box ranking procedure based on various engagement metrics.
You can't create comment threads: all levels of replies to a comment pile up in the same indent level, forcing the reader to mentally build conversation threads by reading username tags and scrolling up and down while repeatedly clicking "view more replies." This undermines any hope of substantive discourse about whatever serious issue is addressed by the seven-panel meticulously designed infographic rife with unsupported claims, gross oversimplifications, and handwriting fonts.
Oh, and roughly every fifth post or story is a paid ad, just to remind you that you're the product. (Wherever the $7 billion and rising of quarterly revenue is going [1], their comment-system team evidently isn't getting much of it.)
Instagram becoming an "information powerhouse" is a slap to the face of information accuracy, accessibility, and credibility.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/448157/instagram-worldwi...