QUIT INSTAGRAM!!!
yesterday (or maybe the day before i lose track of time way too easily) i finally retired my ig account that i've maintained for at least 5 years. for a while it was definitively my biggest "art platform" peaking with 500-ish followers before i called it quits.
for a variety of reasons, i can see why instagram as an art platform is so appealing -- the profiles give you images at a glance, allowing you to curate an aesthetically appealing portfolio with social-media features. furthermore, instagram is a very ubiquitous social media platform used by the average joe who might use it to message friends or keep up with their fave movie star (in my experience in college, when someone wants to exchange social media to stay in touch, they usually mean instagram!), so your art can reach people beyond the niche demographic of people who would be on art apps like deviantart.
but uhhhhh instagram has significantly degraded in quality over the years!! enshitification at it again :P meta's invasive privacy policies, the non-stop ads, glitches that make its ease of use worse, fucking reels, etc. but i think one of the most egregious reasons why i couldn't stand it anymore is that i think both its structure and the posting culture it encourages is terribly detrimental for art!
here is just a laundry list of reasons why i've grown contempt towards this platform....
- the photo-grid format each profile has encourages curating a consistent aesthetic so that, at all times, your profile is pleasing to look at (to grab new potential followers). this is pretty common for art portfolios, which ig's photogrid emulates closely, but like if you're just posting casually i don't think you should be caught up in this "gain followers" grindset. what's especially grating is, during my time desperately looking for advice on how to grow big, lots of platforms suggested to maintain a specific style so that all of your art looks cohesive. screw that! i think young artists, often the people who are most susceptible to this grindset and inclined to follow this type of advice, end up getting stuck in a comfortable loop if it means Beating The Algorithm without being tempted to take new stylistic risks. i have always felt lukewarm towards the "oh no, i don't have a consistent art style!" panic because, unless you are taking commissions (and therefore need art samples that gives a clear precise vision of what your client is getting), having an inconsistent art style fucking rules wdym! (not to mention, examples of what could be an "inconsistent art style" are usually just the same forms but with different color groups or textures. disappointing! i want you to tell me you drew a sparkly anime girl and a crusty newgrounds-lookin character design on the same paper if you promise an inconsistent art style). and i think the posting culture of instagram and the folklore of the algorithm perpetuates this need for aesthetic safety and consistency
- this is a much less lengthy critique, but fuck the crop bro! fuck the strict aspect ratio! whenever i finish an artwork i don't apply much else to accompany it like closeups of headshots or a border box to accommodate a stricter aspect ratio. and so many times instagram wouldnt let me display my whole artwork because it's just too long or just too tall! and even if it's only a small portion cut off, it still sucks! (and i don't find adding a border box to show the whole thing to be worth the effort. like wow here's my grand massive art but shrunk to fit in a square so now you can barely see the details. cool) it made me feel less inclined to do art with wilder aspect ratios (something really tall or very long) bc i know it would get fucked over by the crop, obscuring important details in the process. this is another reason why i think instagram's structure encourages constant safety in art. free yourself from the shackles --- make that sky high tapestry of your blorbos. don't let zuck stop you
- after being accustomed to sheezy, tumblr, and to a slight extent bluesky (only fully applicable when it adds post editing), i really couldn't stand instagram as a place to host a portfolio because you can't tag search. it's the same reason why browsing a twitter profile is so annoying because all the content is presented at once in posting order, and you don't really have a means of tracking it down besides vaguely remembering when it was posted + related posts that might hint to that time frame. and what bothers me is that whenever i added hashtags to my art on instagram, especially early on, it's pretty much exclusively for marketing purposes. to get it out there or on someone's feed. sure, i've used some big tags to get art that i'm proud of to more people on tumblr (like "artists on tumblr" or what have you) but my tagging system on tumblr, on top of being able to get my art out there, is because it makes finding a specific post easy. cuz you can go in the archive or a tag link or even use the search bar to find a specific category of art pretty easily. whereas instagram it's just a feed (and that's not accounting for reposts of the same art, or fancy wip videos of some pieces, which is a necessary thing some businessy art accounts must do so as not completely blip out of their followers' radar for not having anything to post in a while, making the feed just kind of a mess)
- instagram famously kneecaps your reach to your own followers. even when i accepted the consequences of no longer giving a fuck about trying to tag my art for Reach, my art was often slow-going with numbers if it wasn't vocaloid related (which is where most of my followers know me from). not that numbers should be that meaningful (the way instagram dangles analytics in front of users REALLY makes the posting culture super number-brained) but yknow, knowing that your art has been seen and appreciated by SOMEONE is very encouraging and is why some people treat Tips on How to Beat Instagram's Al Gore Rhythm like gospel just to get a taste of that encouragement. i'm pretty lucky as i was able to consistently get 10-20 likes per artwork when i posted, and i know that getting double digits is something a lot of artists there struggle with.
- instagram also just.... doesn't leave any room for recirculating your posts. they're gone from everyone's feed in like a week or two. unless it gets reshared on a massive artist's story because they were lurking your old posts, your old art won't be seen much. on tumblr your posts, if it hits the right accounts, will be shared around til you die (for better or for worse! stay safe) because most people get their posts through the reblogs of people they follow, regardless of when the original post was made. knowing that other social media platforms don't have that similar post longevity as tumblr just kinda bums me out -- bc resharing art is part of the fun with engaging with it!
so basically, that was me getting up on my soap box and acting like a curmudgeon about Social Media ⚡ (thunder clap). i privated my instagram just cuz (lot of my old art is pretty bad)... i'm not sure if i'm gonna get to the point of nuking my account, despite meta's previously mentioned invasive privacy breaches. i'm sentimental as fuck and it's probably my oldest art archive i have (since my amino account is deleted, rest in piss), plus i have a lot of saved posts that are neat that would just wither into ash if i let go. but idk, maybe i'll move on for real for real. :)