Instagram Succeeds Where Facebook Fails (Premium)

Instagram is everything that Facebook isn’t, and vice versa. And that’s a good thing.

Facebook is one of those services that has pretty much always been wildly divisive and controversial. From its contested start—the Winklevoss continue to maintain that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from them—to allegations that fake news delivered through the service influenced the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook always seems to find a way to come up on the wrong side of things.

But I have different issues with Facebook.

For years, I’ve maintained that Facebook was a crucial, 21st-century solution to a problem that many of us share. We have friends and family that we care about, but we don’t have any easy way to keep up with their lives. This is especially true for those who are geographically far away.

When we had our first child in the late 1990s in Phoenix, and most of our family, and many of our friends, were all back in the Boston area, we had to erect a website that they could visit so they could watch our baby grow up. The problems with this approach were many, the biggest was that it was a one-way street: My wife and I couldn’t use this site to keep up with our friends and family.

Facebook solves that problem, and then some. It allows us to catch up with people we haven’t seen or heard from in years. Friends from grade school or high school. College buddies we’ve lost track of. Family who has moved far away. Whatever.

But Facebook has also introduced all kinds of problems. And these are problems that all of us are probably all too well familiar with. The endless political rants and food photos. The implicit bragging that accompanies any cute picture of a kid, a dream vacation, or any other accomplishment. Over time, the allure of Facebook got darker, more disturbing. We weren’t just afraid of missing out, we were actively hating the very people that we joined the service to experience, virtually.

Over the years, I approached social media in my own way.

I continue to use Twitter as a public forum for work and what I consider to be humor, much of which is work-related. The “public” part is important here: You don’t have to know me to follow me or interact with me on Twitter. It’s out there for anyone to join in. (That said, Twitter has its own problem—noise—and if you are there only to be noise, I will simply block you, no questions asked. Life is too short to deal with the stupidity that can happen on Twitter.)

After a brief and disastrous turn in which I allowed anyone to friend me on Facebook, I ruthlessly culled my friends list until it contained only those people I actually know. And in the several years since then, I’ve used Facebook for private purposes. Family events and photos, for the most part. You won’t see a lot in the way of editorializing there, though I have promoted the occasional cause.

The issues with Facebook caused me, over time, to add a third service to my list of social media interactions. Instagram, which is ironically owned by Facebook, is everything that Facebook is not. Or, put another way, nothing that Facebook is. I’ve grown to really enjoy it. And I enjoy using Instagram much more than I enjoy using Facebook, which is also ironic since I treat Instagram like I do Twitter: Anyone can follow me. On Facebook, it is my friends and family that are the noise. Ouch.

To me, Instagram is a place to enjoy great photography, mostly. So the people (and companies) I follow there bear no relation to those on Twitter (work related, mostly) or Facebook (friends and family). It has thus carved out a unique position in my life.

Best of all, Instagram is the first place I go if I want to post a photo or set of photos. Those photos that make sense for Facebook can be posted there, from Instagram, which is nice. (Or to Twitter, which happens sometimes too.) But Instagram is first. I still use Facebook for photos that are more private. But most of my photos are now posted directly on Instagram first.

So what makes Instagram “better” than Facebook?

Sadly, this question is easy to answer because the underlying cause is so fragile, and is so temporary. Instagram has fewer users than Facebook, many fewer, and those users tend to be less noisy than the pontificating jerks on Facebook. The service is more visual, so the focus is on imagery, not on uninformed opinions.

For now.

See, the soft underbelly of Instagram is that others are figuring out what I figured out a few years back. Instagram is a kinder, gentler version of Facebook. Instagram is where you want to be. And I’m already starting to see an increase in the number of annoying or crazy comments to my posts. I can already see it starting to fall apart.

Please. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t join Instagram. And dear God, please don’t follow me. I like it just the way it is.