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Comment by Crash0v3rid3 | Hacker News Reader

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Crash0v3rid3

Instagram, a place where I used to share pictures with my close friends and family.

Now, useless ads and inappropriate posts from random kids I have zero interest in seeing.

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I don’t understand, are you following random kids you have no interest in seeing?

Have you ever scrolled past the tiny “view older posts” link?

Yeah, that’s where I end up in a sea of wildlife photography.

I think that’s only when you have a new account and you don’t follow many people?

I follow a bunch of wildlife photographers.

No, I don’t follow these people. Once I view all the new content from the people I follow, Instagram starts showing me posts from people I’ve never seen before.

Are you using the app or browser? I just use Safari on iOS and I only follow my two kids and I just go back years of posts and there’s nothing from strangers on there.

I’m using the app on iOS if that makes a difference…

It does! The native apps show a plethora of ads while the web app shows nothing. Crazy interesting but I imagine most users use the app.

Can’t it be because of ad-blocking ?

You might be using one of those tabs that I never go to. The leftmost tab with the home icon only shows posts from people you follow (and ads).

That’s not true. It forces reels on you now (maybe feature flagged?), all kinds of random people you don’t follow. Instagram has become a hot mess.

How long has it been since you updated the app? It used to work that way, but they changed it. It was a really disappointing shift. If you have a pending update from ~last year, don't update until you have to. I only get a few new posts from friends each day, so it's three scrolls and bam, random accounts and content ads. To see old posts from your friends, you have to click a button that says "See archived posts" after the last new post by a friend, but before the inserted ads and strangers.

Imagine the people who you follow only post stories from now on. For me there is no new content on the start page. It's just Ads. Nothing else, from the very first post

Kind of like reddit or YouTube when you're not singed in. The amount of garbage takes your breath away. Neither is not great anyway but then you find it can be worse.

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