There are many, many, many problems with Instagram — most of which can be traced back to one Mark Zuckerberg. When Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 for a cool $1 billion, the photo-sharing app I knew, loved and used quite frequently slowly ceased to exist.
The first nail in the coffin came in 2016 when Instagram decided to remove the chronological feed, which would display photos starting with the most recently uploaded, and replaced it with an algorithm-based feed that shows posts it thinks you would be most interested in. You know, totally killing the whole “Insta” part of Instagram. (Despite the immediate public backlash to the algorithm change in 2016, Instagram has only just begun to re-introduce chronological feeds, and as TechCrunch notes, it’s not because they want to appease their users, but because they likely want to prevent future legal troubles.)
In 2018, Instagram added a shopping tab to the explore page, and the app soon became Zuck and Facebook’s next advertising platform, aggressively interspersing ads between every 4-5 posts on the main feed, and in between every three Instagram stories. Despite the algorithm-based feed supposedly serving me the accounts I’d like the most, I very rarely see photos from the actual human friends and family members I follow and interact with, and instead, my top posts are almost always from brands or celebs trying to sell me something. By 2020, Instagram had swapped its Activity tab on the main navigation bar for the Shop tab, solidifying it as an e-commerce app.
Point is, Zuckerberg, ruined a simple, joyous app where people went to share photos of their dogs and what they were eating and I’m still mad about it. But good news, Zuck is going to rectify all these horrible decisions with … NFTs!
Yes, Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn Instagram into an NFT marketplace in the “near term,” according to Engadget. While speaking at the South by Southwest conference, Zuckerberg said his company was working on bringing NFTs to Instagram, where users would be able to mint non-fungible tokens on the social media platform, but didn’t disclose exactly how it would shake out.
“I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today. But over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”
Though I have read a lot about and have even reported on the digital collectibles, I still don’t quite understand why I would want to own an NFT. I do know, however, that I don’t want weird-ass pictures of apes clogging up my Instagram feed. I just want to see my hot friends’ posts in reverse chronological order, Mark. Is that too much to ask?
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