I don’t know where Instagram, the face of modern social media, took the wrong turn to the south. Just kidding, I know exactly when it went to shit.

After Meta acquired Instagram in 2012, the enshittification started slowly and then, recently, happened all at once. What began as a small, charming app for posting everyday photos turned into a massive social behemoth built on influencing, personal brands, and ads stacked on top of more ads. Commercialised is the word sitting on the tip of my tongue.

On Instagram, everyone is trying to become an influencer now, just to earn the chance to show you yet another ad they were paid for, inside a platform already drowning in ads. As a side effect, it’s getting really hard to distinguish the genuine content (god, I hate this word) from yet another ad, and the best posts always come from people who earn their living elsewhere.

One of the latest tricks I’ve noticed is how they changed the way stories work when you visit someone’s profile. It used to show only that person’s stories and then send you back to their profile page. When I tap to see stories from someone’s profile, and finish with them, I’m suddenly shown the rest of the stories from everyone I follow, just like in the main stories feed. It feels deliberately designed to suck me deeper into the app so I keep scrolling and watching and, of course, seeing more ads. Maybe it’s just another A/B test, but it says a lot.

That’s why these days I’m trying to cut Instagram from my daily diet as much as possible. It’s not even that hard – it barely shows me posts from my friends or the people I actually follow anyway, but it’s still surprising how much time you get back once you stop opening it. Time to write this post, or read a book. You finish your books much faster if you simply don’t open Instagram – try it.

Reed Hastings from Netflix is right when he says they compete with sleep. All these companies compete for your free time, your screen time, and your mind time.

So choose wisely.