don't pay Instagram?

they're already profiting off you, for the love of god

Oct 19, 2022

In order to compete with the Patreons and Substacks of the world, Instagram has launched a new subscription feature allowing creators and artists to charge a small monthly fee in exchange for access to exclusive content.

While allowing the creators they’ve been profiting off of for years to make a few nickels is a nice idea in theory, it ultimately still is a move that serves to line the pockets of Meta, parent company of Instagram.

Note that because these purchases take place in-app, Apple and Google currently take 30% of all subscription fees. Right now, Instagram itself does not take any percent of those fees, but that is likely to change after the feature becomes more integrated into the online social landscape.

Tl;dr Instagram offering subscriptions will never be effective or ethical because the platform exists within the context of selling user’s attention for ad revenue, and profiting off of uncompensated creators.

Ad-Incentivized Content & the Colloquial “Algorithm”

Instagram, like Facebook and TikTok, is a platform in which the company makes money through selling ad space.

Instagram sells this ad space to anyone from big name brands to small creators, and they sell that space frequently. Probably you’ve anecdotally noticed increasing targeted ads while you scroll through the app. Currently, Instagram’s projected ad revenue for 2022 is $33.3 billion.

In order for this extremely profitable ad space to retain its value, Instagram must keep people scrolling long enough to see the ads. Enter “The Algorithm”:

It should first be noted that “The Algorithm” doesn’t actually exist. The nebulous algorithm is a widely-used nickname for/ misunderstanding of the way social media platforms rank content. Platforms like Instagram use a variety of algorithms, or mathematical processes, classifiers and other processes to rank content and determine what to show users. When using the term “The Algorithm” here, I am not referring to a specific algorithm in the mathematical sense rather the processes social media apps use to rank content and the underlying software of the social media itself, all of which app developers are aware of and directly have their hands in.

The sole purpose of “The Algorithm” is to push content in a way that keeps Instagram profitable. Very simply, content that keeps people on the app makes Instagram profitable, and so content that keeps people on the app is rewarded. This content tends to be clickbait-style, designed to grab your attention and keep you watching or reading for a promised answer to a question, or content that provokes emotion.

Negative emotions tend to be the easiest to provoke, resulting in extremism on social media spreading like wildfire. For example on Twitter it was found by a 2017 NYU study by William J. Brady et al. that moral or emotional words used in a tweet increased that tweet’s dissemination or virality by 20 percent per word. In the most extreme example of this, Rohingya recently sued Facebook for failing to prevent incitement of violence in the Myanmar Genocide which began in 2016 and is ongoing, blaming Facebook extremist and genocidal ideas being spread unchecked on the app.

Addiction Psychology & the Psychological Impacts of Social Media

Apps like Instagram and Tikatok reply on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, where users are seemingly randomly rewarded with likes or views, within their algorithms to keep users on the app. This is the same strategy used at slot machines in Vegas and linked directly to addiction psychology. In the context of Instagram variable reinforcement schedule works in that users do not know when they will be rewarded with likes, or views, or online social interactions when they open the app, and as a result users dopamine reward system (the same neurological pathway involved in addiction) is triggered every time they open the app.

The psychological impacts of social media run deeper than just exploiting addiction psychology and are, in fact, insidious. A group of ex-Facebook, Google, and Apple employees have come out and cautioned that not only do these big tech companies know that their algorithms play on addiction psychology, but they actively work to exploit it, disregarding the well being of especially vulnerable young users in order to profit off of them.

It’s generally widely known social media is bad for our brains, with study after study demonstrating that increased social media use has been linked to increased depression and suicide in teens, eating disorders, and more. Wait actually, here’s a list of studies done on the negative health effects of social media, specifically Instagram:

Increased depression and suicide-related outcomes linked to new media screen time (new media used to refer to social media/smartphone use)
Appearance related social media behaviors may be indicative of eating disorder risk (All that this study examined was the relationship between online behavior and eating disorder, not if the online behavior caused the disorder or vice versa.)
A collection of 67 studies that all found a relationship between social media use and eating/body image concerns. I.e., found that increased social media use was correlated with increased eating/body image concerns.
Excessive Instagram use is found to be linked to low-self esteem, anxiety, depression, and body dissatisfaction. Again, important to note while many popular articles take this a step further and say Instagram caused these negative symptoms, it is equally probable that low-self esteem caused excessive Instagram use or that an underlying issue causes both low self-esteem and excessive Instagram use as its symptoms. Either way, Instagram knows of the link to mental illness and chooses to profit from compulsive behaviors and addiction rather than reevaluate the ways in which the app enables these disorders and their negative impacts.
Taking and posting selfies, both retouched and unedited, was found to make women more anxious and less satisfied with their appearance.
Social Media use in minors (once again) linked to depression, self-harm behaviors, and suicidality. Also evaluates the ways in which being online increases exposure to these behaviors via both being directly encouraged in messages, exposure to methods of self-harm in videos, and emulating behavior of others. Demonstrates that greater time spend online actively promotes these behaviors.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. All of these findings have been replicated, and most importantly, tech companies know about these findings and do not care.

While it’s not news to most people that social media isn’t good for our brains, it seems that many of us don’t realize the extent of the damage done by social media, and the extent to which the companies profiting know about the damage and do not care.

Even so, many of us even with this knowledge and context would not choose to delete social media; it’s a part of our lives now. Addicted? Maybe. I have to put my phone in a different room when I’m trying to write.

Attention Economy

The entirety of Instagram and most other apps, including search engines and even streaming services, is operated within the parameters of the Attention Economy, or the idea that a person’s attention is limited while information is unlimited. Therefore, attention itself becomes a commodity, and something that can be sold as ad space.

1970 Nobel Prize winning Economist Herbert Simon like a horseman of the apocalypse foreshadowed the vast impacts the technological revolution would have on our economy with the quote: “What information consumes is the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

In the time since 1970, we’ve seen the rise of social media and an explosion of information available on the internet.

This has led to the increase of free content— because why pay for information when you can get it for free— and the placement of ads within that content— because that content has to be funded somehow.

“If you aren’t paying for it then you are the product” is a phrase often repeated to drive home the fact that free information services like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, all of it is profiting off you as a user. Either they collect your data and sell it in order to create targeted ads, or they sell your attention itself by way of ad space.

The Bigger Picture of Technology and Humans:

The complex human brain and modern cognition may have evolved as early 1.8 million years ago, and the human brain has not changed much in the last 160,000 years. Technology on the other hand, has progressed exponentially in the last hundred years alone. Humans have not and cannot evolve to keep up.

Psychologist Robert Dunbar posited that humans are designed to have a social circle of about 150 individuals in a healthy social network from hunter-gathers to residential campsites. Dunbar found that a group much larger than that would quickly destabilize.

The human animal is not meant to be exposed to all of the information, content, and opinions available to us on social media and the internet. We are not good at regulating ourselves when exposed to platforms designed to exploit our psychology and create addiction, make us feel terrible, and sow negative and sometimes violent emotions. These tech companies will not effectively self regulate when profit is on the line, and even if they did regulations coming from inside the house would still be put in place with profit in mind. That leaves it to governments themselves to impose some sort of regulation, which is difficult due to the scale of the internet and the American ideals of free speech often exercised on the internet; ie, limiting the amount of people that content, particularly content designed to provoke negative emotions, is allowed to reach in order to preserve our own mental health and society would be seen as an attack on free speech.

I recommend reading the article People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much by Ian Bogost published in 2021 in The Atlantic, which provides an excellent and eloquent look into topics of human anthropology and the ways in which platforms like Facebook capitalize on human nature to promote violence.

Subscription Style Content is Inherently at Odds with Content Created in the Context of Ads:

So Instagram, a company that sells ad space by getting users to keep scrolling on the app via exploiting addiction psychology and using content created by uncompensated creators has launched a subscription program in which the users whose attention is already being sold for ad space can now directly pay previously uncompensated creators who’s work is already being used to sell said ad space. But don’t worry— Instagram isn’t taking a cut (yet; they haven’t committed to promising not to in the future).

Content created within the framework of a platform that sells ads is inherently designed to capitalize on catching and holding a users attention and keeping them on the app.

Content created within the framework of subscription style content is inherently different. There are no ads to be sold, and people will not pay for clickbait. The best way to get people to subscribe to your paid content is to create quality content that people want to support. Subscription based platforms do not reward rage or content designed to go viral; there is no way to go viral within the confines of these platforms themselves.

The two types of content are at odds with each other; the type of content that thrives in a subscription-based platform cannot do the same within the ad-incentivized environment of Instagram.

On a more speculative note, keeping these subscriptions on the platform of Instagram (or Twitter) might even allow for more vitriol to be enabled, as people can now subscribe to a creator relying on rage-provoking rhetoric and have access to more extreme, in-group messages within the exclusive content of that subscription. One of the most relevant critiques of Substack, a subscriber-based publishing platform, is that it allows the dissemination of extremism because of the direct to inbox intimate nature of subscriber style content and the lack of moderation of this content.

Bottom Line for Creators on Instagram:

This isn’t to say Instagram creators shouldn’t turn on subscriptions— that’s an individual choice determined by a persons needs. For many creators it’s probably just not this deep, and that’s fine.

Still, Instagram is already using your work to sell ad space. They are already directly profiting off of your labor, your art, and the online community you built. By turning on subscriptions, not only are you giving them another opportunity to profit off your work by taking a cut of that money, which they will do as soon as it becomes clear that they can, but you’re further investing more of your time and creativity into that same app. While Instagram will likely stick around for a while longer, disgust for social media and its exploitation of addiction psychology is growing, and with that more and more people will exit exploitive platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.

Subscriptions on Instagram are a direct response to the success of platforms like Patreon and Substack.

On Substack specifically, the only content that is rewarded is the content someone reads and decides they like. The Algorithm doesn’t exist in the context of an email-list, and content designed to sell ad space is not rewarded. The only thing rewarded is good art, good journalism, and creative thoughts. Unlike Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, you actually own your email list. If you decide you’re done with Substack, you can download the list, pack up, and jump ship to another app. Instagram is trying to prevent people from spending more time creating on these other platforms by offering subscriptions in house, but they miss the fact that any content created within the context of the app is itself inherently compromised by the app itself. Much as Siva Vaidhyanathan noted “the problem with Facebook is Facebook”, the problem with Instagram is Instagram.

You are not using Instagram; Instagram is using you. Online creators will continue to jump ship for platforms where they feel they own their own content, because people are tired of being used.

Quick note for subscribers: while I don’t generally tackle tech writing, I do think it’s important to talk about the impacts of social media in our modern world because they are so wide-reaching and will ultimately define this era. While I usually write about the outdoors & adventure , how social media effects us and our mental health and actions is tied up in pretty much everything we do, including when we go outside (perhaps especially when we go outside with the goal of taking a photo for Instagram). I will probably cover more on the intersection of social media, anthropology, and the outdoors in the future. Feel free to DM me topic requests on Instagram, my least favorite place in the world.

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