Joachim Kennedy

"Social" Media

Or How To Get Your Instagram Account Suspended

I hope everyone’s enjoying the blog’s annual, unplanned, unannounced Summer hiatus. I know it’s against the Rules to blog when the weather’s this beautiful, but I have this half-baked idea that’s been taunting me from my drafts folder, and I can’t concentrate on anything else until I get it out. Besides, what better time than when Instagram has a momentary Thread of relevance. And who knows? It may be refreshing to have such a cold take this time of year. Plus, I’m not moving halfway across the country this Summer, so who knows what could happen.

Originally this was going to be about how everyone should migrate their Instagram feeds to RSS Readers. I deleted the app and made the switch a few months ago myself. I’d long been annoyed at their features that made it hard to see people I followed, and I already used RSS to follow blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels, so it was an inevitable albeit long overdue change. The process was painful because Instagram is so hostile to anything 3rd party, but I managed to find a reader with the stupidest name, Feedbro, that let me set up an individual feed for each account (Confession: I did not migrate all the accounts I follow). I set up subfeeds for IRL Friends, News, Music, Sports, etc. and to refresh daily so I wouldn’t check it obsessively. Everything worked as long as I was logged in on my laptop. Life was great.

Until a couple weeks later when Instagram got suspicious and started giving me captchas and logging me out every week. I didn’t mind at first because I have a password manager, and I know what different vehicles look like. But soon all the time I was saving from avoiding ads and old TikToks was going towards gaslighting Instagram into thinking I was a human. Sometimes even after I did them it would display some generic error and not let me in. Once, I tried to log back in, but it told me the credentials were wrong. When I gave up and pressed “Forgot my password”, it sent me an email saying, “Just kidding. That password was correct, we just really wanted to make sure it was you.” How considerate.

This past weekend, they finally suspended my account because it violated the Terms of Use. Fair enough. Except after entering a code they texted me, uploading a selfie with my name, username, and another code, and waiting a couple days, they sent me another email, again saying, “Just kidding! You didn’t violate the Terms of Use (even though we both know I did (still haven’t read it, just assuming)).” (If anyone from Instagram reads this, first of all, I’m flattered. Second, you win. I deleted Feedbro, but I’m still using the browser version because it’s a couple years behind and hasn’t got the bad features yet. There’s also this weird bug where sometimes scrolling is totally broken, so that’s another way I avoid wasting too much time on social media.) So yeah, you probably shouldn’t do what I did.

Originally this was going to include a tangent about the Amish and how my dad always reminds us that they don’t reject technology indiscriminately. They consider and eschew technologies that will harm the community. The classic example is that powered tractors allow you to farm bigger fields which forces you to live farther (and be less reliant on) your neighbors. It’s a cute anecdote, but it makes me wonder what metric they use. I’m sure you could make a sensible-sounding argument in either direction about any arbitrary technology, and yet they always seem to come down on one side of things.

A lot of things could be considered “social”. Some of them are that I know where all of my acquaintances go on vacation and some are more like, when my barn burns down I’m obliged to invite everyone over (even people I don’t particularly like) and feed them while they fix it. The term “social media” belies the fact that it’s mostly entertainment anyway whether by top-down choices from the companies or by bottom-up behavior of users.

In comparison, blogs and RSS run much less of a risk of devolving into entertainment Posts take enough effort that you won’t write something unless it’s genuinely interesting to you. (Evidence: my friends who do have blogs write about totally different things from me) Sure there’s some effort to make things coherent and interesting to your readers as well.

Similarly, compared to opening Instagram, reloading my RSS feed is not that exciting. Since it takes more effort to read posts, it’s harder to fool myself into following people or topics I don’t care about. Also there’s no weird algorithmic weight placed on different accounts. I know I’ll see someone’s next post whether they post every day or in a year from now.

But then that part was getting too long and screedlike, so I decided I should cut it. It occurred to me that people might not want to take socializing advice from someone with a personal vendetta against an app. Besides, all that’s not to say Instagram is bad or evil; it’s just not very social. But I’m nosy and I like to see what people are up to as much as anyone else.

Originally this was going to be another nudge to all my friends to start blogs. It was going to be a self-centered argument about how I would feel less presumptuous if I knew more people with blogs. It would feel less like I thought my own life and ideas were superiorly cool and interesting and more like I was interested in the lives and ideas of people close to me and excited to share things with them (which I am!) The more people I know who have blogs, the less I have to justify to myself that I’m special enough to have a blog. Now it’s still a selfish argument about how if I quit Instagram or my account gets suspended again, I can still keep up with people.

I have this problem where I only ever go to museums when I’m travelling, so I’ve never been to any of Seattle’s museums (except the Chihuly Garden and the Bainbridge Island Art Museum. I’m thinking of trying to do a week where I visit 1 museum every day. I haven’t decided on the exact list yet, but if you’re in Seattle, let me know if you’d be interested in visiting any of the following:

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