Instagram and Facebook have addicted users for the last 20 years, making sure to monetize us through advertisers every step of the way. Now, they’re revisiting your old posts, your special moments, and your big life updates, and using it to create billion-dollar AI tools. Zuckerberg’s braggadocious claim about Meta’s very large dataset comes shortly after The New York Times sued OpenAI over intellectual property. But Meta is pulling an old trick out of its playbook: extracting as much value out of Instagram and Facebook users as humanly possible, and totally owning your online self.
I am sorry to ask this, and I hope you’ll see it as the curiosity it is.
Is instagram that necessary? I mean, not in the “Dont you have alternatives?” way, but rather in the “Do you need something LIKE instagram?”/“Do you really need to know so much about your friends?” sort of way. I don’t have instagram, and when friends want to hang out or do something or talk, they just call me on my phone. That’s pretty much the only way I know about the stuff thats happening.
Anything else I just don’t really have the interest to know or find out. I can’t see the utility in keeping in such enmeshed, deep contact with people via Instagram. The people I really talk to everyday are on whatsapp and that’s usually where we talk.
For some time now I’ve been wondering if something was wrong with me socially, and your comment put that thought back in my head.
I am abroad and have lots of friends that won’t download WhatsApp, so I use Instagram to contact them. Also, a couple of family friends have reached out to me with news or something. It does have a niche for me as a messaging app like Facebook, even if the only reason I use it is simply because other people won’t not use it.