Reverse Engineer. Blogger.
With this update, you no longer have to choose the single best photo or video from an experience you want to remember. Now, you can combine up to 10 photos and videos in one post and swipe through to see them all.
Fantastic update and finally one that is different than most, if not all, other platforms.
Josh Ginter re: my Instagram pressure post:
I tried to fix this by unfollowing just about everyone I know personally and following as many talented photographers as I could find. The result of that decision: enormous inspiration to get out of the house and travel, but also to a confidence-shattering reflection on my own photos. Now, instead of posting what I thought was one of my best photos, I opt to hold back because it doesn’t measure up.
His example of how his neighbor’s photo of their morning coffee garners more likes than his carefully curated vacation photo is also another type of pressure or anxiety that can come from using networks like Instagram. It is why I hate “likes”. I’ve always hated likes. When I post to Instagram I turn off commenting (same for my blog). If I could turn off likes too I would. “Likes” create a false sense of value. I’m still struggling with whether or not I want to be pulling the “likes” and “shares” back to my blog from Twitter and Facebook like I have been using the Indieweb Backfeed. I have it on right now but I’m considering turning it off. I may also turn off POSSE soon but I fear my audience will shrink substantially. This is a topic for another post.
If I could turn off commenting on Facebook I would. It isn’t because I don’t want to read people’s comments, on the contrary, I want quality comments (like the one I’m linking to from Josh right now or the one from Chris Aldrich on this same topic). Open network discussion hasn’t fostered quality discourse.
One other note about Instagram and “likes”; their feed algorithm is wreaking havoc with people’s expectations when posting to the service. People that used to get 10,000 likes per photo are now getting very disparate results. One will get a few thousand, the next 10 thousand, some nearly zero. The algorithm is choosing which photos get popped into people’s feed. Some photos are never seen by your followers. So if you were valuing your work based on “likes” you no longer can. And if you think this isn’t a problem imagine someone that makes their living based on having 7M Instagram followers that suddenly cannot guarantee their sponsors any metric at all.
I think this is why I like Instagram Stories so much. When I post to stories I see exactly who viewed each post (good) and if someone wants to reply their reply comes to me privately (also good). The drawback, however, is that the discourse that happens in private isn’t of any value to the public. I’m not sure how to fix that without reintroducing the issues we see on Facebook and Instagram.
While in some sense I do miss the beautiful Instagram feeds of yore when it was mostly professionals, it’s more interesting now with friends who use it to capture small snippets of their lives.
It seems he has had the opposite experience to the one I mentioned in my previous post; that it started out with unprofessional, filtered, photographs and has now become a network full of professionally edited photos and videos. Interesting.
Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, within a piece by Kurt Wagner for Recode regarding Instagram:
“It became a place where people kept raising the bar on themselves in terms of the quality of what they had to achieve to post,” explained Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, who has been working to fix this problem since joining Instagram from Twitter in early 2016. “We didn’t want that.”
I can say I’ve felt this pressure. Amazing photographers are on Instagram and the more of them I follow the less I want to post – thinking I cannot compete.
Instagram was to be a place where anyone with a smartphone could post images that looked good because you could easily apply a filter to make your photo more appealing.
M.G. Siegler covering the yet-to-be-launched Instagram in September 2010:
More specifically, Instagram is a iPhone photo-sharing application that allows you to apply interesting filters to your photos to make them really pop. The app will be launching in the coming weeks, but as a longtime Burbn user, I’ve had the opportunity to try it out over the past few weeks. And I’m happy to report that it’s very good.
Burbn being the name of the app prior to Instagram.
I remember when people used to be called out as frauds for posting photos to Instagram that were taken with a DSLR. These days you see edited professional masterpieces.
Take a look at this video, for example, from itchban. This is a single video that was created using Adobe Premier to cut the video in half; the top is a time lapse, the bottom is slow motion. It creates a stunning effect. I really like it. But 90% of Instagram users could never pull that off – even though itchban very nicely shared this technique through their Instagram Story.
Instagram has been a tear lately. They are putting out new, and very substantial, updates very regularly. And it seems they’ve managed to decrease the pressure to create masterpieces and increase the amount of Story activity. Which, according to the above linked piece, it appears was their goal. I do fear, though, that posting photos from a smartphone to Instagram is waning rather quickly. I’m seeing so many Stories posted (which I like) but I’m seeing far less activity in the photo area.
It will be interesting to see where Instagram goes next and whether or not photo posting will still be important going forward.
This year all of my posts, replies, and retweets on Twitter will be coming from this blog and not using the Twitter app (#OwnYourData). That probably means doing it at the end of the day. I’m hoping that will make them more considered (something we may all want to be in the coming years).
I have most notifications off (and have for years). And I plan on keeping it that way.
But, I’m not doing so well on what he’s talking about in the quoted bit above. POSSE, as the indiewebbers call it, is posting on my site here and then syndicating it elsewhere. My blog posts are syndicated to Twitter the way I’d like but not Facebook or Instagram (the other two networks I use the most). And I also find myself lazily posting directly to Twitter rather than through my site because the apps are so easy to use. I wish I did better.
Here is what I would need to do to pull this off personally:
I wouldn’t have to do all of these to be happy, but I’d at least like to push the content to those networks. Maybe I’ll start there.
I’ve been following Thomasz Furmanek on Instagram for a few years already (right around the time I got my first kayak, the Oru Kayak, which is the same one Furmanek uses).
I liked this bit in his photographic interview with Daily Mail:
The kayak enables me to travel to remote places and show people these places from a different perspective than they are used to.
I think this is one of the reasons people enjoy my photos too. I have people come up to me and say “I love your photos, please keep sharing them”. And I think it is because they are seeing places they go to and have seen (parks, recreational areas, rivers) but from a completely different angle. I will keep taking them and sharing them because I love doing it.
Regarding Furmanek’s photos, though… he’s cheating. Norway is just stunning from any angle.
Ian Spalter, Head of Design at Instagram, on Medium:
The evolution of the community has been inspiring, and we hope that we’ve captured some of the life, creativity, and optimism people bring to Instagram every day. Our hope is that people will see this app icon as a new creative spark — something to have fun with and make their own. We’re excited for where this will take us.
The knee-jerk critiques were flying all over the place yesterday; both online and off. Obviously Ian and his team have had a lot more time with this new icon, and app design, than we have and we should allow it some time to sink in before forming any firm convictions.
My first reaction was that I loved the app design (though I feel some of its personality has been stripped like most iOS 7+ apps) and that the icon will need more time to settle in.
The one piece of context all of us on the outside are missing is what Instagram’s vision for the future is. They likely have an idea for where they’d like their community, application(s), and platform to be in the next 3 to 5 years and I’m sure this re-branding exercise plays into that. So give Instagram a year or so and then see how this new icon sits.
Either way, well done to the team at Instagram for putting something out in the world.