Our toxic relationship with a platform that definitely should know better.
Ask yourself this question next time you walk out of your house, camera in hand, for a bit of street photography:
Why are you going out shooting today?
It's a simple enough question, but it's elusively tricky to answer honestly.
What makes this question so confronting, is that you may not have actually thought about your 'why'.
Instead, there is a good chance that you're probably doing it out of fear.
Consider this; if you're going to the local mall, you are probably doing so because you either need to buy something specific, or you simply want to walk around for a few hours of shop therapy.
In fact, it's probably a bit of both, and it's usually an all around pleasant experience.
When it comes to photography, especially for us photographers who often like to share our work on social media platforms, the answer is a bit less obvious.
Yes, the weather might be nice, so we might decide to go for a walk and also take our camera along for the journey.
Or, we have recently purchased some new gear and want to test it out.
Or perhaps we've come across an interesting composition, or read about a new technique, and are itching to see if we can replicate it ourselves.
Whatever the reason, any excuse to go out for a walk with a camera is the correct one.
It's healthy, and it's great for your mind and creativity.
As you can probably tell, I am a little biased in that regard!
However, there is one crucial and toxic reason why you should never go out shooting, and that is if you're doing it mainly for social media. Namely, you need more 'bangers' for the 'gram.
I realise that this might be a bit of a sensitive topic, and some of you may not completely agree, and that's ok.
However, if the main reason why you're walking out that front door, is because you're stressed about not having any awesome images to appease the algorithm gods this week, then you're already in an abusive relationship with the platform.
Sure, go out and take some bangers if you like, but do so out of love for photography, and with the intention of learning something new by the experience. Choosing to post your results on social media should always be the last option.
Choosing not to post should always be your default setting.
As some of you may already know, Instagram is once again in the process of making more changes to its algorithm, and to the app itself.
One of the biggest changes rolling out later this season, is to finally grace us with an option to sort our home page either chronologically (yay), by favourites, or by a few other variables which they are still in the process of testing.
While that's all well and good, the problem with the implementation of such changes is that they have a ripple effect across the entire platform. Not the least of which being the fact that this time it has seriously messed up how many people see your latest posts.
The latest algorithm change has essentially broken the reach of many posts, an issue that has been going on for almost a month, and with no end in sight.
This has led to strange behaviour such as posts that are days and weeks old suddenly flooding the main page, and latest posts only reaching one tenth of the number of people they used to reach only a week ago.
This has rendered hashtag reach obsolete, since the whole point of using hashtags is for the latest posts to appear at the top of each hashtag page. If many users are not actually seeing the latest posts from each hashtag they follow, those posts quickly get buried lower and lower down, until they become irrelevant and invisible.
I won't get into the how and why of this issue as that isn't really the point of this article.
What I do want to say, however, is that whenever a faceless corporation such as Instagram decide to make changes to the way its users interact with the platform, it's rarely for our benefit, and almost always for the benefit of those who are making a financial profit.
The point I'm trying to make is that as users of social media platforms that are governed by ever-changing algorithms, we deserve better.
We are already dealing with more than enough stressful events going on in our lives and around the world. The last thing we want is to have to stress about yet another factor that is out of our control, but can have a drastic effect on our mental health.
Many of us use photography as a way to deal with these stresses, We have spent days and weeks preparing our posts so we can share them with our followers. Having to pointlessly worry about whether we have somehow offended the algorithm with our latest post, is akin to being in a toxic relationship with a partner who is constantly triggered by something new, and we always end up at the receiving end of their latest outburst.
For a company that apparently prides itself on being all about looking after the mental health of its users, Instagram's current lack of transparency about what is actually happening with its algorithm is the worst form of ghosting imaginable.
Do better, Instagram, and start listening to you users, or your latest $230B loss will be the least of your problems.
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Happy shooting!
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