Mailwatch(ed) Forum

I’ve joined Instagram. I’ve found my two young god-daughters on there, and one other person I know, but beyond that, I don’t really understand it. I get that it’s about posting images, but I’m at something of a loss to understand why, other than that, it is apparently one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

Anybody understand why ?

It's possibly for people who are in need of mental chewing gum - aren't we all? - but who would rather scroll through images as opposed to actually read stuff.

Me. I only follow **** photographers, and never use the messaging part.

I've never been tempted to look at Instagram, but it sounds like you've answered your own question Abers. If, as you say, it's about posting images, then it will be enjoyed by people who like posting and viewing images.

I know of a YouTube channel that, I think, grew out of Instagram - Salvage Rebuilds UK. Take broken motor cars and work miracles with them, sometimes giving the cars to good causes.

Pictures, and just for the sake of them, doesn't really explain why Pinterest isn't infinitely more attractive to users.

The content is far more collated and better - ahem, curated - and is an intuitively successful way of delivering jump-off points to content which I find genuinely captivating. The "ten best" listicles are a tiresome interlude, but I do enjoy a travel blog or three and content delving in to obscure guitars and tenor saxes.

That is not immediately apparent to me, at least, with Instagram. I might be missing something.

I find the noise (adverts, posts from people I don't [want to] follow) to signal (posts from people I follow) ratio on Instagram makes it unusable. And the vast majority of the interesting content is repeated on other social media, anyway.

I think, to some extent historically, Instagram wasn't ever really envisioned as a social network per se, being originally a camera app that then added sharing, before becoming a full SMN when Facebook took over*. It had a userbase of people that took interesting (FSVO) pictures and just proceeded by inertia (it helped that at the time Twitter was still seen as pretty nerdy and Facebook itself was going through one of its regular downturns over some nonsense) and a somewhat more fluffy image than the other two big guns.

Less historically, it's always had a big following of young women, which tends to attract more young women, as well as, well, people who like to look at young women. Reels was friendlier than YouTube in use, the commenters tended a lot less depraved, and content could sail a bit closer to the wind. There's a reason that the SMN that nicked that (TikTok) does better than the multitudes of photo-based social sites that tried to catch the other waves

Pinterest has some image problems (irretrievably tied to hobby/hippy) and doesn't offer much in the way of unique content you couldn't dig out with a targeted image search. The retail side is quite broken, there's a lot of dropship tat and "I've bought a CNC [maker device], please pay for it" bits and bobs. It's still useful for what you say, K, I just would never have it as a port of call


*I have an Instagram account going back to the old, old days, so much so that my handle on there is a truncated version of my Twitter handle, because it had the "Login Using X" as an option, as well as cross-posting to other networks. Possibly including Bebo and MySpace