Videos? Instagram is a Terrible Place to Share Photos (Premium)

With Instagram pivoting to short-form video, influencers are freaking out and calling for the service to return to its roots in photo-sharing. That’s silly: Instagram has never been a great place to share photos. Ever.

You may have seen the news: Instagram is about to get even more terrible. It will shift from still photos to video, as noted. And it will push more recommended content at its users---vs. content from accounts to which we’ve subscribed---over the next year.

Members of the Kardashian clan, who I frankly couldn’t give a flying fig about, freaked out over the video news, and they reposted the following message: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”

It’s amusing to me that the Kardashians, the famous-for-being-famous family of influencers, are now so old that they can’t handle change. I jokingly compared on Twitter it to people my age complaining that MTV didn’t play music videos anymore. You may as well just shake your fists at the clouds, ladies.

There’s been a lot of back and forth over this topic. Instagram head Adam Mosseri quickly responded to the outcry but in an unexpected manner: after claiming that its pivot to video and other changes users were seeing was just experimental, Mosseri said that while Instagram would “continue to support photos,” he admitted that “more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.” In other words, he pulled a Microsoft: we hear your feedback, but we’re not changing.

Instagram was something that I came to slowly, and even in the years since I’ve adopted it as a way to share photos with the public, I’ve never really embraced it. And the reasons for both are the same: Instagram has never been, and is not today, a great place to share photos.

Instagram was initially known for two things: its weird and forced auto-cropping of photos into square shapes, no doubt to match its grid layouts, and its overly contrasty filters. Instagram photos were instantly recognizable as coming from that service, for better or worse. Over time, Instagram allowed users to post photos in their original aspect ratios, and one can, of course, ignore the filters. And so it was less offensive, I guess.

I only adopted Instagram when I changed how I use social media. Early on, I allowed anyone to friend me on Facebook, but that quickly became ponderous. And so I removed all the “friends” from Facebook, adjusted my sharing defaults, and have since used that service only to interact with family and friends, basically people I know in real life. And I was already using Twitter almost exclusively for work-related interactions, and it’s still where I spend the most time.

But I was interested in a way to share photos, generally, without regard to who would see them. That is, if there was some family event, I would post those pictures to Facebook. And I was very s...

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