I made a video recording of my Instagram feed. I opened the app, started scrolling, and captured exactly what appeared for one minute and fifteen seconds.
Then I watched the video back, pausing at every item, and made a tally in my notebook.
In 75 seconds, Instagram served me 33 items. Twelve were posts by people I follow. Eleven were ads. Ten were suggested posts – accounts the algorithm thinks I might want to follow.
So: for every one post from someone I chose to see, the app slipped in almost two from parties I didn’t. About a third of what I scrolled past was what I signed up for.
The other two thirds was commercial or algorithmic.
I have been on Instagram for a long time, and watched engagement on my own posts fall. Now I look at the tally and I think: this is arithmetic.
If my followers see the same ratio I see, then two out of every three slots in their feed are ones I can never occupy for free, whatever I post. And I am still competing with everybody else they follow for what is left.
When I joined Instagram it was to follow people whose lives and work I liked. Now Instagram is a place where the people you follow get a walk-on part in a programme mostly made of ads and suggestions.
Meta will, of course, sell you your reach back. Meta Verified promises expanded visibility – your Reels and Stories and image posts pushed further out into other people’s feeds, priority in search and recommendations – for a monthly fee.
I don’t pay it. I was verified years ago, when the blue tick meant a platform had checked I was in fact the person I claimed to be. Nothing about me has changed since then. I passed their tests. I am still who I said I was. The only difference is that I have stopped paying the monthly rent – and, by Meta’s current definition, that means I am no longer verified.
The tick used to be a statement about identity. Now it is a receipt.
Which is one reason I keep coming back to POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. If the platform cannot be relied on to deliver you to the people who explicitly asked for you, your own site and newsletter are the only channels where the person who wants to read you actually does.
The reverse is also true. If I want people to follow me off the platform, I have to be willing to find the people I want to follow off the platform – which is why I am always quietly pleased to discover someone has an RSS feed.