Why I don't like Instagram
I would love an Instagram that gives me content I genuinely want to see, or content that helps me in my life. I want a social media network that helps me improve myself, rather than just find out about other people. And even if I am finding out about other people, that’s fine. But what Instagram actually does is give you one useful piece of content followed by ten random pieces of “brain rot”—content designed to keep you hooked but that does nothing to actually improve your life.
The weird part is that we use Instagram specifically for that. We open the app to get that brain rot content, consciously or subconsciously. We are spending hours of our life on it because that brain rot is somehow very relatable and interesting to us, and it really should not be the case.
It is incredibly hard to stay off Instagram, Facebook, or any reel-based tool. I would happily pay for a service that just gives me updates about my social network and some useful insights, perhaps allowing me to set a limit on the number of posts I can see or the amount of time I can spend before the app simply deactivates. But that is not how Instagram works. It wants you to spend hours and hours on the app. That is fundamentally misaligned with how I want the app to work for me.
Twitter, at least, allows you to buy a subscription. Apart from other things, that lets you remove ads, and when you can remove ads, you remove the inflow of other people’s agendas influencing your goals. That is a great upside.
Ultimately, social media is about Incentive Structures. These platforms are incentivized to maximize user retention and time spent. They will make changes solely so that you spend more time. They are not incentivized to make sure you save your time or grow in life; that responsibility is shifted entirely onto you as the user. A simple mental model is to not participate or transact with entities that have a fundamentally different incentive than your own. Meta—whether it be Facebook or Instagram—turns out to be the biggest such party. None of them are incentivized to improve your life.
If they have to win against our approach of staying away, they have to make the platform so good and so addictive that you simply cannot put it down. And that is exactly what they are doing. Everything is a game Life Is A Game. Since they cannot do anything illegal and still want to retain you, the best thing they can do is give you content that triggers the exact part of your brain that wants to keep coming back. The randomization, the slot-machine dopamine rush that you get in casinos—that is exactly what you get on the platform. And that is just one mechanism by which they hack your brain.
Ideally, one would just uninstall Instagram, delete these social media feeds, and focus on their life. But they make it harder by adding a social angle: if you want to stay updated on what is happening with your friends, you need to stay on the platform. They have added messaging features, so people who are active on the platform chat with each other. If you want to talk to them, you risk getting sucked into the black hole of reels and infinite content.
The responsibility shifts entirely to the user: you have to stick to your goal of just messaging, while the platform tries its absolute best to distract you and suck you into a mind-numbing barrage of brain rot. It is a very weird setting. The battle on both sides is strange—the user should never have to fight this, and the platform shouldn’t be doing it either, but they both do it because it’s the most optimized state they can achieve.
It is wrong because, although government laws prohibit outright adult or NSFW content, platforms like Instagram (and even Netflix) start reward-hacking. Their north star metric is capturing user time, and to do that, they fall back on the oldest tactic on the planet: sex. They want to deliver as much dopamine as possible without crossing into legal issues. They don’t explicitly cross the line into nudity, but they linger so close to it that it’s essentially softcore pornographic content. It is so pervasive that it has just become the accepted norm.
Honestly, it is not a fair fight. It is a fight of humans against algorithms. Why even bother fighting a losing battle? That is the state of things, and that is why I personally want to stay away from Instagram. Even though I uninstall the app, I still catch myself opening it in the browser for a few minutes, which sometimes turns into a few hours on the weekend. That is just how addicting the platform truly is.