On New Year’s Eve in 2021, Taylor Bracher’s friend bailed on their skiing trip because she said her dog was sick. Later that evening, Bracher’s friend posted a slew of Instagram Stories of her skiing with other people all day long. So Bracher deleted the Instagram app from her phone.”I didn’t know if it would be forever, but I knew I was sick of the negative emotions the platform was facilitating: FOMO, consumerism, empty connection, all of it,” Bracher told Mashable. Later that evening, she started a group chat with her friends who also decided to delete the app for similar reasons. It’s a place for them to send photos of dogs, babies, nature, food, and anything else they’d typically post on Instagram. They call it “Instaholics Anonymous.””The beauty of deleting Instagram has been that — poof! — all of the drama and negative emotions I experienced in the app went away. In an instant it wasn’t my problem anymore,” Bracher said.
I didn’t know if it would be forever, but I knew I was sick of the negative emotions the platform was facilitating: FOMO, consumerism, empty connection, all of it.
Hating Instagram is basically integral to the platform’s existence at this point. According to a September 2022 Instagram report leaked to The Wall Street Journal, Instagram engagement is declining, with Reels, in particular, seeing a significant drop-off in user engagement. Furthermore, just 10 percent of the most popular creators in 2023 use Instagram as their main platform, according to data from Higher Visibility, an SEO agency. There’s been a seemingly perpetual, although futile, effort to replace the app with another platform that we might, for some unbelievable reason, enjoy more — apps like BeReal, Glass, Grainery, and even Tumblr and LinkedIn. And for good
Mashable https://mashable.com/article/instagram-tips-to-change-how-you-use-it