So Long Instagram, Thanks for All the #Sunsets

Instagram was just six months old when I opened my account in April 2011. At the time, I was living in New York and had a fancy executive job with a remit to be "up on the latest digital thing."

I downloaded the app, refused access to my contacts, and painstakingly typed in the "handles" of my early adopter friends. No one was using real names, a holdover from the early days of the internet (oh, how I miss that anonymity).

I shared my first Instagram post later that night. Walking through a neon-saturated Times Square, I looked up at the LED screens, stretching almost 10 stories above me. A giant yellow M&M smiled down at the crowd. I was tired, it was late, and it amused me. I figured that's what this new photo-sharing site was about—random wry moments—and took the shot.

Not yet hooked on the ritual of "checking my likes," I posted and instantly forgot about it. Days later, I clicked the icon again and scrolled through my newly populated feed. People I used to see just a couple of times a year at tech conferences had liked my M&M post. I returned the compliment on their #geeklife snapshots and paused to craft some comments.

App-etites

Most apps I'd tried were swiftly deleted as soon as I could confidently discuss them with the top brass and let them know how it might affect the business. But Instagram remained. The jury was still out on what it stood for or its business model. When Facebook bought it for $1 billion a year later, I assumed it was a buy-and-bury deal intended to squash a competitor, but it kept ticking.

For me, Instagram coalesced into a community. We talked (a lot) amongst ourselves in the comments and resisted Facebook-imposed changes. Cut to today and nobody appears to care anymore, probably because there are now over 1 billion monthly active users. The mindless scroll has subsumed any passion for the arresting visual image. And good luck trying to find a genuine comment in the mess of auto-bot-land.

Over the years I got bored of Instagram and ignored it for a while. Then someone mentioned seeing my earlier shots from a stay in Malibu (flattery is a seductive drug) and, under the pretense of seeing "what everyone is up to," I logged in again.

It was the reading between the lines that made Instagram so tantalizing. Unlike other social media sites, with their explicit and textual "here's what I'm thinking/doing/avoiding/planning," Instagram's focus on the visual form made it a subtle medium. We saw people get promotions, fall in love, break up, produce offspring, relocate (with Instagram friends waiting for them IRL), realize their dreams, and mourn losses—all through a few well-chosen images.

For seven years, I used it as a research assistant to source tech stories. It also became an excellent travel tool. I'd carve out a precious three hours before catching a flight, tag a bunch of well-traveled contacts, and ask them for suggestions on where to go.

Through Instagram, I built some great shared long distance, multinational friendships, which spilled over into long-running conversations with IG-ers in Korea, South Africa, Japan, and the Middle East. Some IG encounters evolved into real-life suppers in Berlin, breakfasts in Madrid, and one memorable walk around Dublin's city center in the rain.

When I moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 2013, I kept in touch with friends and former colleagues back East, primarily through the app, sustaining connections that would have otherwise fallen away.

The Dark Side

But by late 2017, Instagram descended into a free-for-all of marketers, "influencers," vacuous bots, and lazy curation. Facebook hasn't invested in any serious upgrade to the UX or the servers. It looks dated, performance is patchy, and the outages are more frequent than ever.

It also slipped into the dark side, for me and others I know. Stalkers and predators abound, but I gave up reporting misuse ages ago. It's clear there's no management or oversight. It's a mess. The algorithm that supposedly favors shots you "might like" is broken or willfully manipulated for commercial gain. I received so much spam from third-party scraping tools that I wanted to block comments, but that felt weird and against what I loved most about Instagram at the start.

So last week, I decided to quit.

Facebook/Instagram doesn't make it easy (but you knew that already). Before I hit the disable account button—the stage you have to go through before full deletion—I requested my entire data store. It took 24 hours for the link to arrive and consisted of six zipped files. I sat staring at my Chromebook for a while, overwhelmed.

In seven years, I'd uploaded 11,000 posts. Even I was shocked—Instagram founder Kevin Systrom has only posted 1,605 to date. I gave myself 60 minutes to do a quick browse through the images folders, which were helpfully organized by months. I picked several at random and prepared to go down memory lane.

Memory Lane

I smiled (at first) as the years rolled back. I miss the geek tchotchkes—Yoda, C-3PO, and Asterix the Gaul—from my NY office, and hope they still have a room with a view.

I don't miss the New York executive hours, although it was ameliorated by the robot stickers from Hong Kong I'd illegally placed on the windows and my bubble-blowing kit—all transgressively shared with my IG buddies as I sat working late again at my desk.

There's nothing quite so strange as seeing your life pass by your eyes. After an hour of going back through my feed, I was relieved I was leaving Instagram. The thought of doing this random trawl through memories over a 10- or 20-year span was depressing, and I knew would feel really sad.

(One geek point here: I could definitely tell when I switched from a $700 Samsung Galaxy Note 5 to a "smart-enough" $35 ZTE slab; you get what you pay for.)

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Pictures browsed and deleted, I then turned to the folder marked "followers," a JSON file which opened in my text editor.

Some names I remembered from 2011—a few I still know, others dropped away when I left Manhattan. There were the followers who came en masse when I started posting idyllic scenes from Los Angeles and left soon after when I got bored of that and posted about bio-genomic cultures and robots from within academic labs for PCMag. Not the sunsets they'd signed up for.

Click Delete? Y/N

Then I deleted it ALL.

It's now gone. Not from the massive Facebook-owned Instagram servers, of course, but no longer out there on the internet. I cannot dwell on my digital past.

A week later, how do I feel?

Well, my hands are happier and joints less creaky (no obsessive posting, mindless scrolling or—I'm embarrassed to admit—constantly checking like counts). Then I bumped into a friend IRL who saw my account was gone.

"You okay?" he said.

"Yeah, I feel calmer having left the rabbit hole of ritualistic sharing," I replied.

"Well," he grinned, "Let me know if you need any images via text message of what people are eating today."

We both laughed, but as I walked away and turned around, I saw he was already back on his phone, capturing some cool LA #streetart. I admired the mural too, but my phone stayed in my pocket. I took it in for a moment, and continued on my way.

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