I don’t regularly have instagram on my phone, I usually only download it to do someting specific, like post, or reply to a message, or something like that. But I swear every time I have downloaded it, it gets more and more toxic. The biggest thing that bothers me is just how polarizing all the posts are. Maybe I was just in an echo chamber when I was younger, but now it just seems like every post has some absolute war going on in the comments. And it really doesn’t seem to matter what the post is about. It could be something wildly controversial like the election, or it can just be someone showing how they made their meal and they’ll be someone in there to make a comment about it.
I just saw a video about some dude training his cat to poop in the toilet. And you can bet those comments were as polarized as posts about abortion rights. It’s just mind boggling, how can all this stuff be so important, its exhausting. And its true that no ones making me engage with it, but its so ever present in these posts its hard not to see. Especially becuase now people can stitch other videos, respond to comments in videos, and moderate their comment sections. I think the addition of reels also made my experience worse too, especially becuase now you can read comments while the videos are playing, theres no need anymore to click into the comment section as a seperate page. And they have the fancy little feature how at the end of the video they show one of the top comments, which defintely seems to be correlated with how popular the comment is, either by likes, or by controversy. Which means even just watching a video, without having to click on it, you get subjected to the comments.
And one of the other points about this is that almost every post I see is polarizing, no matter what post you click on you have to have an opinion on seed oils, red dye, round up, wether household pipes can support insoluble cat shit, wether or not the girl in the post is posing or “resting,” wether someones eating habits are disordered, wether someones body is natty or not, or you just open a fun silly post to someone saying “this is so cute, im gonna kill myself now!”
Bro I swear its just so exhasuting. And what I was saying about everyone having to have an opinion on everthing is something that leads me into a topic I want to post something else about, just the ever growing amount of information available online. You simply can’t read it all. Which kind of makes this blog post a part of the issue, in the sense that theres no way this blog post will be read by more than like 10 people at most, and its probably not saying anything revolutionary. So I’m just contributing to the clutter that seems to be making the internet a more and more complicated place to navigate.
Anyway, my point is just, in my perspective, through my life, social media has become more and more polarized. I dont know if its just because I’m older and more aware? But it really feels like it cant just be that alone, theres a marked difference in the volatility of social media these days.