You open Instagram for a quick scroll. Five minutes, you tell yourself. Just a quick catch-up with people you actually know. You see a video of a friend’s dog chasing its tail. Someone’s holiday. A gym selfie you politely ignore because you’ve not been last week… Then suddenly you’re three reels deep into a bloke in Canada restoring a 1970s toaster and a girl in Miami explaining “how I made £10k this week working from my phone” (course you did luv, keep telling us that coz you’ve got all that cosmetic surgery to pay for and you need more followers for your adult content channel…)
You stop. You think: hang on, where’s everyone I actually follow? You scroll back up; no, nothing; it’s all gone because it’s been replaced. This is not your imagination or a glitch; this appears to be exactly how Instagram is designed to work now and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Instagram used to be simple. You followed people, they posted; you saw it. Maybe not in perfect order, but broadly speaking, your feed reflected your choices. Now it seems more like your feed reflects Instagram’s choices. The platform no longer prioritises who you follow but what it knows/believes keeps you on the app. That sounds subtle. It isn’t.
It means Instagram will happily show you 3 or 4 posts from accounts you chose, then immediately flood your screen with content from people you have never heard of, will never meet, and did not ask to see. You didn’t follow them; Instagram followed them for you and now it wants you to add them; and it’s relentless.
* You watch one video about cooking. Suddenly you are a Michelin inspector.
* You pause on a fitness reel. Now you are being recruited into a 6am ice bath cult.
* You accidentally linger on a video of a half-dressed “barely legal” and congratulations, your feed is now 80 percent instasluts; quick, back to watching people chopping onions so your feed learns you’re not some creepy paedo…
The platform learns fast, sometimes alarmingly so and here’s the important bit: this isn’t about improving your experience but maximising your attention. The business model is simple: the longer you stay, the more ads you see. The more ads you see, the more money they make. Content from your friends is familiar, comfortable but does not make money for platforms and it doesn’t always keep you hooked.
Content from strangers is unpredictable; engineered to grab you: quick cuts, bold claims, outrage, aspiration, nonsense that does nothing much education wise; it’s all designed to make you stop scrolling, even if just for a second because that second matters. Multiply it by millions of users and suddenly you’ve got a platform that quietly shifted from “social network” to “entertainment machine”.
And your friends? They’ve become optional. A good example is this. Think about the last time a close friend said, “Did you see what I posted?”. And you didn’t; not because you ignored them or don’t care. You just… weren’t shown it.
Meanwhile, you somehow watched three full videos of a man pressure-washing driveways in Ohio; because it’s so mesmorising because he dances while he does it; that’s the trade-off.
Platforms will argue that this is about discovery. Helping you find new creators. Expanding your interests; yup those very interests that helped to mould the soldiers who fought in world conflicts (I jest of course!).
But let’s be honest; if your feed was only people you follow, you would run out of content fairly quickly. You would close the app. You would go and do something else. Fee earning platforms cannot have that; so they fill the gaps, then fill them some more. Then it quietly makes the “filling” the main event; essentially you’re making them jam (and not in the musical sense, I’m talking £££s)
There is still a way to see only the people you follow on some platforms. It’s just not where you’d expect it; on IG for example, you have to actively switch to the “Following” feed. It shows posts in chronological order, just like the old days; no suggestions or random slappers. No algorithm deciding your taste for you; sounds perfect, right – but there’s a catch (of course there is!). It doesn’t stay as your default… Every time you open the app, Instagram gently nudges you back into the main feed; into the algorithm that pays the bills and keeps the bean counters happy: the endless stream of “you might like this”, because that’s where the money is.
So where does that leave you? It means if you feel like you’re seeing fewer people you actually care about, you’re not wrong. If you feel like your feed is increasingly full of strangers, you’re not imagining it! So if you increaasingly find yourself wondering how you ended up watching something you have absolutely no interest in, well… that’s the system working exactly as intended.
The uncomfortable truth is this. Platforms are no longer primarily about keeping you connected to people. It is about keeping you occupied. Those are not the same thing and once you understand that, the experience makes a lot more sense. You’re not losing touch with your feed – it’s been redesigned, for the financial benefit of the Corporations.
What this does over time is quietly wear you down. You are not just dipping in to check on people you know, you are being pulled into an endless stream designed to keep you there longer than you intended. Minutes turn into an hour without you noticing. Your attention is constantly interrupted, your focus gets weaker, and you come away feeling oddly flat despite having consumed a lot. You are comparing yourself to strangers, absorbing noise you did not ask for, and losing time you do not get back. It is not dramatic, it is gradual, but it adds up – tick tock, tick tock – the sands of time version…
Feel like a pawn on the chessboard – that’s because you are ! Is this what you want to do with your life?
