Instagram has become the new Facebook

bgrisso

As I mentioned before, I would seriously consider paying a monthly fee for an IG account where I am in control of the feed.

Felix_La_PuBelle

At this point they’re probably less interested in your money than giving themselves the right to do whatever they want with your posts including monetize and train AI with them.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/m...the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/

https://digiday.com/media/metas-new-scraping-terms-galvanize-publishers-into-collective-action/

bgrisso

I stopped using Facebook years ago. Originally, I thought this is a nice place to see pictures and hear updates about what's going on with my family and friends. Then it turned into a cesspool of misinformation and conflict and got to the point where I hated looking at it. That was 10-15 years ago, can't imagine what it's like now. (I recently had to reactivate my account to use Facebook Marketplace, because I had some things to sell, and was told Craigslist is dead. It was a real bummer to have to use Facebook again for that purpose, I would really prefer there was a different platform to handle that kind of thing).

Anyhow when I stopped using Facebook, I switched over the Instagram. Not sure if that was before or after IG was purchased by Facebook. Anyhow, same story, for quite a while it was a nice place to share pictures with family, friends, and fellow enthusiasts (of whatever). And I have a ton of watch collectors that I follow, that follow me, and that I interact with on IG. Vintage watches got more active for me on IG than here on OF for a while, although it's shifted back here in recent years.

Long story short, I was just realizing recently that I am starting to hate looking at Instagram, just like I used to hate looking at Facebook. Most of the stuff in my feed is garbage content that is the exact opposite of why I originally wanted to be on IG, which is a nice benign escape from the daily news. I can't control what I see, there is no paid option to limit advertising, and even the ads are not ads in the normal sense, it seems like mostly endless political wars, culture wars, conflict drama BS. For a long time, the ads were just regular commercial ads, I didn't mind them so much, just tuned them out. Now it seems like the ads are all designed to get you completely worked up. I feel stressed out after looking at my feed for a few minutes and seeing all that crap.

I guess at the top of the feed there is a button where you can click on "following only", to try and limit what you see. That helps a bit I think, but you have to do it every single time you connect. I wish there was a paid option on IG where I didn't have to see all that stuff. I don't really want to leave completely because I have huge amounts of contacts, running conversations, technical information, photos, etc, all related to vintage watches.

Side note, I really appreciate this forum a lot, thank you to everyone who created and run this place. I don't mind paying a fee at all, to skip the adverts. It's like a little haven of sanity. But of course, not everyone is active on here, and IG reaches a much larger audience, so inevitably, you meet and interact with other collectors there.

I feel like social media has almost no value, or at least it's not being used in a way that has value, it seems to cultivate and engender conflict and negativity. It's really a crap situation; I don't know what it's going to take to turn things around.

Anyhow, not sure my point exactly, but was just thinking about these last few days. Curious what other people feel.