My last two hours of Instagram

If you have children, you probably know the struggle of leaving a playground. As soon as I tell my kids it's time to go home the bargaining starts: "Daddy, can we go on the slide just one more time, pleeeeeease"? And, of course, I give in. They go to the slide a few more times (it's never just one more) and eventually we go home.

I also wanted to go on the slide one last time.

My last ride would be two hours of Instagram, one hour of stories, one hour of reels.

Doomscrolling for two hours didn't seem much different than a regular Tuesday evening after my wife and kids had gone to bed. Still, I've been postponing this exercise for the last two weeks as I was planning to measure everything during this time: how many Reels and Stories I'd see, from whom, how many ads, etc.

Tackling Instagram with an almost anthropological approach didn't seem fun at all, so I postponed it... until now.

I wouldn't skip any Story, I'd watch every Reel until the end.

Stories

From the 70 Stories I watched, 22 of them were ads (31%), including a very annoying 2 min ad for a product designed to clean washing machines. None of the ads were meaningful to me. On a normal day I would have skipped them, but today that was against my self imposed rules.

Another 29 Stories (41%) were from former work or college colleagues, people I haven't seen in more than 10 years and that I don't really care about. Most of them were having fun on vacations, but there was also the occasional repost of a religious or far-right reel.

The only Story I enjoyed watching in this group was from my college roommate. I haven't seen him in a long time, and for a moment, social media actually did what it was originally supposed to do: connect me with someone who's far away.

I spent almost 10 minutes watching the 13 Stories (19%) from a journalist I follow. He posts cuts of his show on Instagram stories. Since I listen to his radio programme every morning, I was just redundantly re-listening the same things I had heard earlier that day. I could very much have skipped these Stories but, again, that was against my self imposed rules.

The last 6 Stories (9%) were from close friends or family, including a motivational post from my sister in law; my brother celebrating the 30th anniversary of the company he works for; my neighbour on holidays and my close friend's newborn baby, which I saw twice, posted by both him and his wife.

Absolutely bored by the content I was seeing, with my rules preventing me from getting the dopamine rush of quickly skipping through the boring Stories, I reduced the experiment time. Most of what I seeing wasn't really something I wanted to watch. It was just there. So after 30 minutes, I decided I'd had enough of Stories and moved on to Reels.

Reels

Reels are a completely different beast. Highly addictive, tailored to my specific tastes and demographic, I could spend hours watching them. However, as with the Stories, I limited the watch time to 30 min, more driven by tiredness (it's 11PM as I write this) than boredom.

I found it harder to put the reels in specific buckets like I did with the stories, but I could clearly see some patterns on what the algorithm was showing me. I'm a 37 years old man living abroad, and I'd describe my political view as centre-left. Every reel I watched seemed to tick one of these boxes. Reaction videos to absurd right-wing congressman speeches, videos about millennials going through career crisis, funny videos about cultural differences, every single reel I watched was carefully curated by the algorithm to keep me there.

That's very creepy and very genius at the same time.

Is social media actually social?

What I realise now is that, for me, social media is no longer social. I'm older now, and I don't care about most of the people I started following over the past 15 years. I could clean up the people I follow, but I'd feel anxious about doing that. What if I meet some of these people again, how would I explain that I no longer follow them on Instagram? I know it doesn't make sense, but what I feel and what I think I should feel don't always go hand in hand.

With 30% of the Stories I watched being ads, and reels being served by this incredibly intelligent algorithm designed to know exactly what to show me to keep me there, Instagram stopped making sense to me. It's no longer about connecting me with people I care about and are far away from me. It's simply about hooking me up with cheap dopamine to sell me shit I don't need.

I had my last ride on the slide and it wasn't even fun.

It's time to leave the playground.