Instagram got stupid; we got stupid; I'm not mis-remembering this
I recently went through my old posts on my mostly abandoned Insta account.
My Insta was always a modest bookstagram. About 10 years ago, I got max 100β200 hits per post, and comments were mostly from my irl friends, although New York literary agents and small press publishers I was interning with as a student also followed it. This was plenty for me; I was happy in my lil' book community.
Then reels became a thing, first making up a small percentage of my feed so that it wasn't immediately clear that Meta had decided my style of posting was out the door. My stats very abruptly tanked at one point, though, going from 3-digit 'likes' to only a handful of my closest friends liking my posts.
I found out that Insta was shadow banning people who posted pictures instead of reels, so my posts were no longer being seen. That was pretty much the end of Insta for me.
I hadn't looked at my old posts in awhile, but here's what I found:
Lengthy, detailed, thoughtful book reviews. Multiple paragraphs. I quoted excerpts from the books, author interviews, and other reviews. I just ran some of my captions through Microsoft Word, and I was writing these Instagram captions at a grade-12 reading level.
And they were getting engagement! When I asked for book recs, I got them. My friends liked my close readings of Kazuo Ishiguro. NYC literary agents were using this proof of me as a thinking human being to offer me a place in the professional book world.
I think I did not fully grasp the extent to which Meta intentionally barred intelligent discourse on its platforms until now. Disagree with me if you think otherwise, since I haven't engaged seriously with bookstagram in years now, but I just do not think that reels ever get anywhere close to the intelligence and depth of old-style bookstagram.
In-depth book reviews that you had to, you know, actually read* were replaced by people dancing and screaming at cameras.
*And which you had to actually write, which in and of itself was a great exercise for me as a reader, and which served as proof that the person discussing the book had actually read the book and wasn't just being paid to promote it.
The billionaire clapped his hands and said, "Dance, monkeys, dance!" And people all around the world put their words away and did it.
dededos
stormborns
annaxmalina
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
origamiaround
