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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

A personal anecdote:

I use Instagram for my hobby/business (coin & paper money collecting & dealing). I have mercilessly curated my feed to be ONLY people who post content purely related to the numismatic world. No real-life friends, no travel posts from random semi-friends, no selfies, none of that garbage. If someone starts posting it, I unfollow them.

And for the ads -- I click on ads related to cat toys and pet food, just to let the algorithm know to feed me more of it.

SO: My instagram feed is 100% hobby-related posts & cats. I think I may be victorious (for the time being....).

PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.

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What I hate is that even if you curate it that meticulously (gid forbid you click on the wrong thing and mess it all up), you still get fed so many random ads and "people you could follow". Just a completely whack user unfriendly platform in my experience.

And the worst part is that if your curated feed isn't overly active (because Instagram is degrading their experience too), you get yet more suggestions and ads to fill the gaps. Plus the badgering to make reels, no matter how many times you ask it to stop suggesting that.

It's desperate behaviour from Meta.

I appreciate mercilessly curating your feed. But man even having to do that is such a huge waste of time and life energy.

It's way too big of a task for any one person to do individually (like trying to block ads online), and then you have the problem that people collaboratively moderating a stream together wouldn't have the same opinions on what content they actually want to see.

It's basically a hopeless problem.

I actually had a similar nicely curated Facebook around my personal interests.

Then Facebook decided to throw that all out the window and now I have a wall of pure garbage. Just random low quality memes and content.

At some point, wouldn't it be better to build your own RSS bridge for posts from Instagram accounts you want to follow? At least you'd get to exercise some programming skills that way, instead of running around in Meta's dark pattern labyrinths.

The Algorithm owes no loyalty to your efforts. I think many of us have watched well-curated social feeds revert to noise when an algorithm got tweaked or irrecoverably fixated on some irrelevant interaction we once made. These things are not built to let you have the control you’ve found. It’s an happy accident when that happens.

Enjoy your victory while it lasts, I guess.

> PS: Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.

I have a 6 figure instagram id and have never opened the explore tab.

But I also stopped using instagram when I realized the ads are more interesting than the people in my feed. Maybe early instagram folk just aren’t the target market anymore.

Sometimes I miss my quirky candid real life photography app.

edit: to clarify for the downvoters — professionally interesting people (influencers) bore me and my friends highlight reels … are kinda boring too because they all end up looking the same since they’re all trying to promote an idealized version of their lives instead of just being themselves. The ads were great, but I don’t need an app for ads. So like the commenter above, I curated heavily – by never checking the app.

> Sometimes I miss my quirky candid real life photography app.

I miss the same too. BeReal is has the closest experience for candid photography. Unfortunately is not that widely used in my group

> SO: My instagram feed is 100% hobby-related posts & cats. I think I may be victorious (for the time being....).

Eventually they'll figure out how to keep you from doing that.

They already have on Facebook. I can keep my Insta stream within certain bounds but Facebook always serves me fresh nonsense no matter how tightly I try to control it.

This reminds me of a tweet about a guy complaining about Instagram models in bikinis on his feed. Unaware of how recommendation algorithms work... Related image that I love - https://ifunny.co/picture/thank-you-for-ruining-my-life-i-m-...

My dad on family dinner last week :D

> Stay AWAY from the "Explore" tab. That is an endless dopamine well of misery.

I actually preferred that, as until recently there were no ads in the posts you saw (top level of course).

I made a point to not like or comment on anything, and seemed a decent diversion for a few minutes.

My explore tab has bird photography, cool art, and cycling. Its actually quite pleasant

I actually found some coin videos through my explore page

I've trained my Insta account to mostly show me animal videos, baseball highlights and funny memes. It's great.

Congrats you invented a worse version of Google Plus.

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