On Photo Sharing
I’ve since deleted the Instagram app from my iPhone and have only jumped back into my timeline once or twice through a web browser. Each time I came out of it feeling worse than when I went in. I don’t want to do that anymore.
But it got me thinking about photo sharing in general. And more specifically about how we’ve created this efficient system for sharing to a mass audience. The personal aspect of photos is lost in the sharing process. When I would post a photo, I wouldn’t receive any comments, it never sparked any conversations. I would just get a handful of likes and that was that. What’s the point? It’s become a game of vanity where the number of likes you receive is the only feedback mechanism. It stinks.
As an experiment, I started sharing photos with individual people, privately, over iMessage. I wouldn’t send them a whole collection of photos, just one at a time here and there. And what I found is that when you send an individual person a photo privately, you actually spark a conversation.
3 Comments
They're a signal for the algorithm.
Watch a nature documentary of great apes grooming one another by picking nits off their fur. Likes serve a similar purpose among modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Stay up-to-date by subscribing to the Comments RSS Feed for this post.
One of the more telling questions to ask about the web we've built is who likes are for. What purpose do they serve?