You don't want the old Instagram

> But we don't forge personal connections by sharing or commenting on highly personal public-facing photos that are permanently displayed on a grid anymore. These days, intimacy is fostered through features like DMs, group chats, or ephemeral posts to Close Friends.

But why don't we forge connections this way anymore? Have individuals truly changed their preferences, or has Instagram redesigned and dark patterned its way to forcing a different behavior?

Instagram de-prioritizes your content if you don't share Reels, or Stories, or whatever feature they're pushing this week. This leads to a lack of engagement on the exact same kind of content users have been posting since the early days of instagram -- photos. So when the app punishes you for not posting video content in a specific way, of course users will eventually change behavior. Or, even more specifically, the most popular users eventually have the desired behavior because Instagram makes and breaks popularity -- if you refuse to adopt the new behavior, you'll drop in popularity, and if you embrace the new behavior, you'll gain popularity, because Instagram prioritizes your content. Because Instagram has been completely and utterly taken over by "influencers" who get off on increasing their follower and like counts.

These influencers have completely replaced genuine interaction, as far as I can tell. Because Instagram punishes users who just post simple photo content, and rewards users who attention whore in the video-format-of-the-week. In the early days, I posted crappy photos to Instagram of the stuff I did every day. So did my friends. We commented and liked each other's posts. That was it. Now, it feels like everyone is trying to get surfaced in discovery feeds, and shared via DMs to accumulate more followers. The content isn't interesting because it's screaming for attention like a petulant child. Content in the olden days didn't scream for attention -- it just showed up in your feed.

As far as I can tell, society didn't actually change. The algorithm showed up, evolved, and forced a new behavior on society. Importantly, that kind of showy attention screaming couldn't even exist in the old Instagram, one without DMs, with a chronological feed, with no discovery, with no promoted content. The algorithm gave it room to grow and it grew so much it took over the platform.

Of course Facebook wants it to focus on public content. Ads are jarring in a stream of your friends' photos but blend in to the stream of ads and product placement from popular accounts. There is also likely more money in general. Focusing on private content means that you can only really charge people subscription fees based on how much they want to see their friends' photos. With public content you can charge businesses based on how much value they can extract which can be much higher if they have something to sell.