I would agree that Facebook is practically dead but Instagram defeated by TikTok? In very young teens' maybe, that is not really my social bubble but Instagram is far more prevalent everywhere else. Speaking as a someone from Central Europe.
Instagram is not dying. There is no other app in the world with the same reach and installation percentage among young people. Instagram is losing at usage time sure, but I would wager that 95% of young people in first world countries have an Instagram profile and this is not. Its almost a necessity.
I don't think usage of instagram is much different here in western europe and the results regarding teen suicide are not the same seemingly. So I'm not sure of what to think.
Open to being proven wrong about instagram usage in the us vs europe. I haven't really looked into it. But it seems all teens and preteens here are hooked on it.
I can understand this for sure! In my experience Facebook degraded and a lot of people that just posted pictures with small updates moved to Instagram. Again, anecdotally, I have a pocket of friends in Prague and they mostly used Instagram. But now Instagram is moving the same way with a clutter of suggested posts or 'reels' - or whatever their version is.
I'm curious to know what this looks like for slightly older people. I can see the down side to Instagram: the way it can amplify an obsession with the way things appear from curated snapshots of someone else's seemingly perfect life. And it definitely has less nuanced communication of certain types of ideas - it's not a place to discuss the merits of social policy. But as someone who is slightly older than this 14-24 generation, who finds enriching food-for-thought elsewhere and who isn't obsessed with how other people's lives look, I find Instagram to be the most uplifting of the major networks. It's often more light-hearted than Facebook, and most accounts I follow are purely posting pictures of new products in fields that interest me, pictures of friends doing fun things with their kids, etc. There's much less political flaming, dumb memes, etc. than I unavoidably see elsewhere. I deleted Facebook and LinkedIn from my phone because Facebook just made me feel angry and LinkedIn is just spam and self-congratulation. Instagram is the only major social network still on my phone.
For people who are mature enough to self-regulate and not get addicted to scrolling up and updating their feed, and for people who can avoid an unhealthy level of envying how other's lives appear to be, it seems like a pretty good way to stay up to date with people and hobbies.
In my country Instagram is nightmaringly popular. I hate it, but I'm forced to use it, because more and more businesses have their Instagram account as their webpage with prices, contacts, etc. It seems ridiculous. UX is so terrible. It's not indexed by Google. I can understand when some girl publishes her selfies, probably Instagram is good for that, but not for business web presence.
I use Instagram daily. I love it. And so do my friends. Ads are also very on point and small business oriented. No scams. Instagram has super cool retro computing and countless vaporwave aesthetic channels that frankly are unique to IG. It’s incredible. I have curated my own feed using the save feature. Never used FB but IG seems to be better than Tiktok mentally and otherwise.
Personally I think Instagram (The core product, not stories or reels) is to today what Facebook and MySpace where back in the day.
Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.
Meta (pun intended) answer: Everything is dying, slowly or fast, from the moment of inception. Instagram included.
But observing my surrounding, it seem that Insta is the sh*t currently, with money, influencers and generally nice pictures, while facebook is for parents to post pictures of their kids.
Iceland is trying to reduce its dependence on oil exports, which is a good thing, by directing efforts towards Tourism. But looks like this is also affecting nature in its own way. It is like we can't really interact with nature without destroying it in some way or the other.
Instagram does affect people a lot and the same people deny it. I am not on Instagram, never got onto it as I realized the impact FB was having in my life when it was the most popular medium. Uninstalled the FB app as well, I do access it through the browser occasionally, necessary evil and all that. But of course, instagramers (don't know if this is even a word) think they are inspiring people. What do I know ¯\_(?)_/¯
I hope Instagram goes through their new change of not showing the number of likes to viewers. Would be interesting to see whether that has any modification of societal behavior of people hooked onto it.
At the risk of generalizing from anecdotal evidence - Instagram seems to be the worst by far for this kind of thing.
All images, little content and no good way to really communicate. The heavy users I’ve known just endlessly scroll through images of attractive ‘influencers’, dogs, makeup ads, or just photos posted by friends (mostly using it to show off as mentioned in the article).
While Facebook will have discussion and links to interesting articles depending on your network, Instagram doesn’t seem to have much of that.
I have a bias though because out of all the social apps I find it to be incredibly banal and boring.
In my German circles, that spot has been covered by whatsapp for a long while now. It never has been instagram or anything else really. For me it went from studivz (long defunct German "facebook" for university students, didn't last long), via facebook (for a short while, and due to lack of alternatives) straight to whatsapp, and has stayed there ever since, with the exception of some photography interested people sharing larger sets of photos on flickr at times, and some dating/sexting happening on snap (but most of that still was/is on whatsapp). Instagram was always understood as a place where you go if you want to see celebs, influencers and the "wannabes".
Granted, I am a bit older, a millennial (as much as it hurts me to admit) and an older one at that, but I regularly take the tram in my city at times when all the teenagers are going to school or coming from school, and you can see a damn lot of whatsapp on all those phone screens, a lot of tiktok, and a good amount of discord.
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