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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, but thanks to IG and similar sites I hear about celebrity things and other pop-culture stuff way more than before. Case in point: This post.

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The nightly news and mainstream newspapers used to be full of tabloid spillover; people suing, assaults on paparazzi, paparazzi being charged, updates on court cases. This has all pretty much evaporated. Pop culture itself certainly is "way more than before".

The place I do find more pop-culture stuff like this is in the clickbait ads that are everywhere now, but that's just an entirely new thing.

Didn’t watch and nightly news, read only the economy and political section of newspapers. I don’t see click bait ads because that shit is blocked.

What was your expectation when joining a network known for pretty selfies? Science graphs?

Initially IG was all hipster photos; remember when the arty filters were their primary USP? I remember using it as a kind of second Facebook, where the people I followed were all FB friends and we only posted photos instead of text posts and status updates.

I don't think it was until 2015 or so that it started getting huge in terms of user base size, and that's when the deluge of low-grade comedy, "IG Models", awful memes, spammers etc. descended upon the site, changing its culture to what we see now.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant that before IG, the subs I frequent on reddit or other people would not link to articles about celebs. Now thanks to instagram, they do. Like this post did.

wait what? i seldom hear about instagram. to be honest i am surprised every time it gets mentioned (same thing for snapchat). i thinking you have to be doing particular things or be part of certain spheres to occasionally run into instagram stories.

now, not the same about twitter. twitter is in the news, articles and everywhere. if anything instagram isn't as pervasive as twitter or facebook imo.

Yeah, very good point. Seeing mainstream news anchors and sports commentators literally just reading twitter out loud is striking.

I've seen articles where the bulk of the source is twitter "clippings".

That doesn't happen with Facebook or Instagram.

Don't click. I didn't click.

Exactly. "Instagram is full of selfies." "Yes, why are you on Instagram if you hate that kind of thing?"

It spills over into real life now, if you haven't seen "influencers" out doing photoshoots you're lucky. I was at a museum in Boston and couldn't see some things because an influencer would spend 5-10 minutes setting up the perfect shot (I never once saw her actually looking at the stuff in the museum).

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