Is Instagram Turning into Facebook?

Instagram is becoming more and more like Facebook. At first I thought it was a momentary glitch, but the steadily increasing number of slowdowns, speeding tickets, indiscretions, crashes, and miscellaneous draconian obfuscations is quickly becoming too heavy-handed to dismiss.

Considering the fact that Facebook now owns Instagram and had lost considerable market share to its previous rival, it only makes sense that the corporate executives behind Facebook would want to recuperate a share of the active users whom they lost to Instagram’s easy access and mobile compatibility. And what better way to eliminate one’s competition than by buying them out, slowly wrecking their most distinctive features, and merging them into one’s own company? In turn this would allow Facebook to reduce costs by cutting jobs, regain capital by selling redundant assets, and recapture preeminence as the leader in social networking among teens and young adults.

So Facebook is gradually making Instagram less distinctive and more derivative. Coincidentally Facebook itself is gradually adopting many of the most successful features of Instagram: filters for photos and videos, seamless borders, and mobile compatibility. All of these features make Facebook more competitive and more attractive to the average user. However the problem of what to do with all those loyal users of Instagram remains. And one solution, quite frankly, is to aggravate, stymy, and alienate them to such an extent that they desert in droves, return to previously used forms of social media (including and especially Facebook), and actively wish for the dissolution of Instagram.

Then, when it happens, there will be practically no one to mourn Instagram’s passing, and Facebook will be able to say with utmost insincerity that it’s merely meeting the demands of the market. Never mind that it manipulated the demands of the market by alienating consumers from a former competitor’s brand.

And this is where I find myself.

I’ve been a loyal user of Instagram since the end of 2014, and within less than two years I’ve amassed four thousand followers, the vast majority of whom I don’t know personally and have no contact with apart from Instagram. Many of these followers have become friends, have offered support in times of crisis, have encouraged my creative endeavors, and have made my experience on social media much more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise. Some of these people have even become a kind of family.

Needless to say, I don’t want to lose touch with these people, but I find myself grappling with the very real possibility of doing so in the near future due to an app whose declining state has resulted from the secretive decisions of corporate executives in business suites playing Russian roulette with the social lives of millions of people.

In light of this, there are no good options for the individual, myself included. I can transfer as many contacts as possible to Facebook, doing Facebook’s work for them and finding myself sucked back into the social quagmire of endlessly regurgitated nonsense, on which Facebook thrives. I can ask my followers to follow me on other platforms with which they may have no familiarity nor desire to engage. Or I can sit back, bury my head in the sand, and pretend that none of this will happen when most or all of it probably will. It’s only a matter of time.

The only consolation in this entire experience is that what the individual does is not what society has to do, and what society does is up to all of us.

Follow on Instagram

Subscribe on YouTube