Instagram is Hot Garbage
It has now been almost a year since I’ve gone the private dealer route, and since that time I’ve decided to no longer use Instagram to promote the work that I am doing or that my artists are making. This is not the first time I’ve left the platform. I first signed up for Instagram in 2014, back before it had been infected with the infinite scrolling feature. At that time it was a more manageable and enjoyable platform where you’d go on and scroll to see your friends’ posts for a few minutes before hitting the end of the feed, where you would be notified that you were all caught up and to check back again later. Imagine that. Fast forward over a decade later and the app is a never-ending bombardment of short-form videos, irrelevant follows, advertisements, and AI slop.
I first left the platform in 2020, only to log back on two years later to announce the opening of my business and to begin building an account for my fledgling gallery. Abakus Projects was, and still is, a one-person operation. The amount of time that it took to create content for the gallery’s Instagram was always overwhelming, especially if I had to create new images for a post, and writing has always taken me a long time. When Instagram rolled out a feature detailing the number of followers my posts would reach, the results were always disappointingly underwhelming. My carefully-crafted content was reaching only a tiny fraction of the audience I’d spent time trying to build.
Aside from this disappointment, there were a multitude of other reasons for my aversion to using the app, including the data gathering, the censorship of artwork, the use of user content to train AI models, the removal of the accounts of slain journalists from the platform, and the proven negative effects on users’ mental health, particularly to young people. Out of principal, I owe it to myself to not have to rely on a platform whose owner called its earliest users “dumb fucks” for willingly handing him their personal info.
From here on out, I’ll be using newsletter on my website to reach my audience.
