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Productivity: Is Instagram overrated?

Raksha Kannusami on June 27, 2020

TLDR: After spending lots of time on platforms like LinkedIn and Dev.to, I just feel Instagram is overrated. Scrolling through memes the whole day ...
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Sarah Price

I personally am over Instagram. It's great if you're using it as a visual journal and if you have a lot of visual content to market. It's great for shopping, selling, design, artists, and animals. You really can great a great marketing plan using Instagram, FB, Youtube, and Pinterest.

I tried for a while to keep it for professional stuff, but I feel peer pressure to always post perfect stuff and so it has just gotten too stressful for me on my personal account. However, it works great for my side hobbies.

I do think that it's like junk food. It requires the bare minimum to interact, it's less polarized than FB, and it's easy to get sucked into an endless scroll on it. I think the average person can have a hard time breaking from it. Most people go to their jobs and come home and have nothing to do with it. Unlike developers, I feel we are always networking, coding, and creating outside of any traditional job we might have. Therefore, apps like Instagram can feel frivolous to us. But it depends on what you use it for.

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Raksha Kannusami

It's great that you are over Instagram!

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Mohammed Umair

Same here, and now I can feel the freedom from the peer pressure, toxicity and endless memes bombarding my eyes.
I'm so happy that I'm over it.

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Raksha Kannusami

That really awesome, Now you can focus on much better things!

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Animesh Gaitonde

It depends on the way you are using Instagram. It's useful for people who are using Instagram for marketing their business. Recently, many Facebook memes pages have created their Instagram account. As a result, Insta now resembles Facebook to a certain extent.

You can set reminders about the time you want to spend everyday on Insta. It also displays a graph of user activity on the app. I feel very few people might be using it. And even if they set a reminder, the app addiction doesn't allow them to stop using it.

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Raksha Kannusami

That's a great suggestion!

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Ben Sinclair

No, not really?

I mean, I don't spend time on LinkedIn anyway, but other sites aren't going to affect what I think of Instagram, which is that it's alright and mildly interesting.

Having an Instagram account for me is kinda fun, in that I post once every few weeks or months and like to use it as a small gallery of my life. I don't see that as a waste of time. Also, I can sometimes keep in touch with friends who do use it more.

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Raksha Kannusami

you are right Ben. What I feel is it not the right thing to just scroll through memes the whole day instead of utilizing your precious time on something more productive. A few months back, I was one of those, but now I have come out of it and have started learning more and being productive, and now I feel that I don't like Instagram anymore.

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Ben Sinclair

I guess the difference is that I never really saw Instagram as "social media" and haven't engaged with anyone that way. For what it was originally sold as, it's still decent!

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Juan F Gonzalez

Instagram for me is TRULY overrated. But there are a lot of people that use it as a way to create content and market themselves as 'authorities' in a certain niche and there are some courses teaching how to get clients and make money out of it.
I never really had an account there because it became popular when I went all anti-FB, plus the fact that you must use it as a mobile app to upload content is a biiiig red flag to me.

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Raksha Kannusami

Yes I can relate!

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Galuh Utama

Few years ago I heard friendster was overrated, then it was multiply then myspace, then facebook. Now it’s instagram because TikTok is apparently hot nowadays.

Younger audiences always look for something new and I think that’s the cycle. It’s completely fine not to follow the cycle.

These platforma are not comparable with professional ones anyway, such as LinkedIn. Different audience, different purposes.

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Raksha Kannusami

Well said Gulah! I only wish people discovered these amazing sites!

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Ben Halpern

I do really see Instagram as junk food, mostly the lowest common denominator in a lot of ways. That being said, there is a certain beauty to the product and it has cultivated a truly fascinating presence in the world.

I hope Forem can capture some of the magic of Instagram in a healthier and more community-empowering way.

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Raksha Kannusami

True Ben!!

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Jannik Wempe

I use Instagram more for fun, friends, fitness related content (and cat content), but use Twitter and LinkedIn more professional. I only follow people on Twitter of whom I think I can learn something and stay up to date...

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Raksha Kannusami

That's a good idea!

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AndyRosenberg

I use Instagram to look at art and nature photography. It can be a useful tool for inspiration, more than other spammy social networks at least.

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Raksha Kannusami

Right!

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Venkat Vishwanath N Tammina

In my opinion , social media is not at all necessary if you are common man/woman doing 9-5 job. It just adds to your stress(unconsciously).

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Raksha Kannusami

So true!! I have felt that multiple times and I am able to focus much better after reducing social media usage!

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David Yao

It's really easy of wasting time on some social apps, you'd be easily distracted by newly created contents and suggestions without even knowing it. That's also a cool feature about them.

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Raksha Kannusami

True, and that's what scares me!

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Raksha Kannusami

Very well said!