On Instagram

By Ela

Posted: 20^th June 2025.

Around mid-May 2025, I found myself getting into a bad habit of “doomscrolling” on Instagram. I quit the service for a over a month. Here’s a summary of the experience.

I have had a difficult relationship with social media. I’ve tried just about all of it at some point, but have generally ended up deleting my accounts because it only serves as a method to distract and depress. As of around mid-May 2025, I found myself getting into a bad habit of “doomscrolling” on Instagram. I have no idea what I was looking for. On most days, probably nothing. Instead I was allowing a very cleverly crafted bit of software to feed into the part of the brain that wants instant gratification and dopamine. Nothing of value was coming from this; it only served to make me more worried about the world and to aggravate my RSI. Something had to give, so I quit. I wrote a small page for my friends letting them know what was going on, uninstalled the app and then thought “what now”? We’ll come back to this in a bit. First we should look at some of what pushed me to consider this as something to try.

The Why

Distractions

It’s very easy to get sucked into social media. The Fediverse[^fediverse-mentioned’] is a lot better for this, being non-algorithmic, but all social makes is very easy to become engrossed in. Instagram (the only “major” platform I use) is particularly bad for this in my experience. The endless servings of “reels” makes it very easy for the distractible parts of the brain to latch on to and keep you in this skinner box style system that gives you just enough reward to keep you from the actual task you need to be doing; in my case this is usually reading and writing as I’m foolish enough to engage in perusing a PhD. Seth from Berm Peak covers it in great detail his video “Why I Pulled Back From Social Media (And You Should Too)”, available on YouTube and Nebula.

Health

Instagram is bad for your health. It’s bad in two ways. It’s bad for your mental health and it’s bad for your physical health. On the mental health front, it’s training you to seek short term rewards through skinner box dopamine cycles. It’s also a cesspit of nasty ideas and poor engagement. I once saw the “stories” feature described as a “bully pulpit” (I can’t find the reference, sorry!) due to the fact one person can shout a lot and you have to go seeking for dissenting opinions or debate in a hidden away comments box. The only action that’s easy is to “like” the post. I don’t read the news with any particular regularity or intent. I avoid it as it depresses me and yet Instagram still found a way to push it on me. I’m not going to go into ownership of the platform here, but it also makes me uncomfortable (as does the ownership of WhatsApp).

On the physical side, you’re swiping away, potentially for hours. It’s a great way to get or aggravate RSI. Trust me, I know. I’m trying some light weight lifting in an attempt to exercise my arm and hand muscles a bit as that’s supposed to reduce the impacts of RSI.

Crap Connections

You know what sucks? Pinging posts back and forth. It feels super vapid and pointless. A surface level of friendship. You know what’s nice? Having a nice chat in a messaging app about actual things (like The Power Broker)¹ or even meeting up in person. I met up with my friend Javier for a meal one Wednesday during this time and it was one of the most engaging discussions I’ve had in a long time.

Not to spoil the conclusion, but this was a huge nudge and has caused me to think long and hard about my relationship with the platform.

A Tangent - The iPod

I love my iPod. I have a first generation, flash modded iPod Mini in silver. It’s nothing special, but it’s my iPod. In July 2024, I stumbled across the video “The REAL Reason Algorithms are Bad For Art (iPod Week 2)” by Brandon Shaw of Digging the Greats. It’s a great watch, along with his entire iPod series, however the synopsis of this video can be summarised as algorithms on platform apps such as Spotify, Instagram, YouTube and others can subtly or not so subtly dictate the work that creators will put out. In Shaw’s video, the argument mostly focuses on how music artists (musicians, singers, songwriters, etc.) are being pushed into creating work that is most likely to be pushed to audiences by algorithms rather than creating something they truly, deeply want to due to the poor remittance that an all you can eat, flat fee subscription model creates. In other words, they are being pushed to create “content”, not art.

I quit using Apple Music that September, for two reasons. Firstly, I am not getting a great value for money. Even on the student plan (which I was on), I wasn’t getting £5.99 worth of value. I added, on average, an album to my collection every few months. It’s not that I don’t enjoy music, I am not someone who has a huge collection and I’m slowly finding what I truly enjoy. Even buying an album every two months, I’m still coming out on top. Also I own the files. They’re on my laptop. I like Jazz and some international[^genre-terms] music and a lot of artists work ends up tied up in estates and licensing hell. I’ve had music I love just disappear from my Apple Music library. Good luck doing that when it’s an mp3 on my iPod.

Secondly I’m supporting a service that is providing an utter joke of a payment to the artists I love. I’m a Vulfpeck fan. The funk-jazz-soul sound of the group really gets its way into my brain in ways that a lot of music doesn’t.² Back in 2014 they funded a free admission tour by asking their audience to stream their silent album Sleepify while they slept. Spotify attempted to not pay them, although they eventually caved, paying out nearly $20,000.³ It showed just how exploitative Spotify could be - if the artists don’t conform to what they want, they’ll try to without any and all money from them while paying them a pathetic $0.003 a play. Even if Bandcamp takes 15% of a $0.99 purchase, you’d need to pay a track over 280 times to break even for the artist. Spotify (and streaming music in general) is an exploitative model that can use their dominance, massive libraries and algorithms to spread listeners across so many artists, artists can barely scrape anything out the system.

So why this tangent? Think about it - if music platforms are exploiting algorithms to the detriment of their customers and creators, what else is exploiting customers and creators? It’s no secret just how embedded these recommendation algorithms now are in social media apps. They’re trained to keep you there, not to inform you, not to give you what you want. They’re there to keep you looking so that you spend more time on that platform, where you can be shown more adverts, more products to buy through the app and more of your personal data to be sold to the highest bidder. The iPod doesn’t, nae can not do that. It’s an offline device, even more so if you choose to flash it with Rockbox or another alternative firmware. I miss when computers were like that.

Where Next?

Am I going to return to Instagram? The short answer is no. I’ve very much enjoyed not having this thing always calling to me to come and look. Long stints of focus have become easier and I’m finding more gratification from reading and other activities that are much more worth my time.

This is not to say I won’t be losing out on some things. Let’s discuss those quickly. ### Art and Comics A few artists and comics I enjoy are primarily published through Instagram. Thankfully most comic artists now publish on Webtoons or another platform that supports RSS feeds. While I used to enjoy the L-Birds by NoArtHere they thankfully publish on Webtoon. For those curious, I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader of choice.

I do miss out on some other art published by these artists, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I can always pop on their profiles once in a while through the web. ### Talking to People I much prefer chatting to people via Signal or WhatsApp. Signal is preferable. It’s got a lot of features that WhatsApp and Instagram lack (time limited messaging, verifiable end to end encryption that is auditable). Plus you don’t end up batting reels back and fourth, instead having nice chat. ### Stories I won’t get to see as many things that my friends are doing via stories, however I’ve found that chatting more means that you end up finding out these things anyway and often can have much more of an interesting chat about things. I will sadly be missing out on more of Pipin’s antics! ## What to do with the account? I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with my account just yet. I’ll probably keep it around for a little bit, however I’m very likely going to end it. I see little value in it’s continued existence and the fewer social media services I can be a part of the better.

Citations and Footnotes

Sorry to everyone who I’ve been pushing that on recently… ↩
I’m still waiting on that Woody Goss Signature Cowbell. ↩
Vulfpeck’s Half Joke Silent Album Made Some Serious Cash ↩

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