Instagram, Pinterest, and the betrayal of images

I’ll never forget my excitement at discovering the platforms of Pinterest and Instagram. I don’t remember which one I learned about first, but my feeling about each was the same.

Finally, a platform for us!

And by us, I mean visual people. Those of us trained or inclined to communicate first and foremost in images.

Prior to those platforms, it felt like the Internet was dominated by text. Everything from SEO to the 140-characters of Twitter seemed like it required artists and makers to translate what we do into words.

Even for someone like me, an artist who also dreamed of being a writer even before I could write, someone who started her first blog in 2006, these platforms felt like a sigh of relief.

Finally, finally, we were free from the stress of having to translate our visual expressions into elusive words.

Yes, there were platforms that pre-dated Pinterest and Instagram that were about images – I’m looking at you Flickr – but they were more about image hosting than actually hanging out online.

But in these new spaces, we could use our cameras, our pencils, our paintbrushes, and our image-making skills to communicate with others on the vast Internet. And not only did these platforms tolerate images, they were the main focus!

And we had a good run.

Sure, the platforms weren’t without their issues. Success on Pinterest was greatly aided by your ability to use relevant keywords, though a stand-out image could still cut through the noise and go viral. (I know because it happened to me more than once.) And I always felt like some of the magic disappeared from Instagram once the online marketers discovered it, which coincidently wasn’t long after Facebook purchased it. It seemed to be in a slow spiral from that point on.

But then came video.

Once Facebook purchased Instagram, their strategy was to dump the features of their rising competitors into IG so as not to lose market share. Stories were added to compete with Snapchat. IGTV was created to compete with YouTube. And finally, Reels were added to try and stem the flow of users jumping to TikTok. Suddenly IG users were tasked with trying to figure out which of the 27 different ways (ok, maybe it was four) they were actually supposed to be sharing video.

To which Instagram made their position abundantly clear by monetizing Reels and Reels alone (to encourage users to make them) and flooding our main feeds with them.

Pinterest, where video was mostly a fringe activity, panicked as well, adding in Idea pins (a knockoff of the Snapchat knockoff IG stories) and filling our feeds with video to the point where jumping on an app designed to inspire us with project ideas and aspirational images suddenly felt like landing in the middle of Times Square.

The message on both of these platforms is clear – video is the way, take it or leave it.

It suddenly feels anachronistic to be a person who primarily wants to create and consume images.

And don’t get me wrong. As a teacher who has built an online teaching business, I am grateful for the ability to create video for the web. Though I should also point out that I started teaching online by running audio-only courses over conference call software, so I probably could have gotten along just fine without the deluge of video tools available to us now.

I also recognize the ways that the proliferation of video, especially since the pandemic, has been hugely beneficial to people with disabilities, limited mobility, or compromised immune systems. Video has brought previously inaccessible teaching, conferences, and entertainment (hello, live theater and concerts) directly into the homes of those who are unable to attend in person.

I’m not saying video is bad.

But there are those of us, myself included, who still believe in the power of a still image. Who still use images as a way to communicate, as a way to express our feelings, and as a way to connect with others.

And there are those of us who, push come to shove, would often rather consume a still image than a moving one. (I go to many museums every year, yet I couldn’t even tell you the last time I set foot inside a movie theater.)

Those of us who celebrated the visual focus of Instagram and Pinterest as “our platforms” no longer have a social media platform to call home.

I realize that in the grand scheme of all the world’s problems right now, this is a small one. But I can’t say it doesn’t sting.

I’ve spent my life sharing through images. I was in private drawing classes by the time I was six. I learned to photograph my art on slide film (yes, I am that old, but only just) so I could create a portfolio to apply to college and graduate school. I took black and white and color darkroom photography in college and at one point even contemplated changing my major to photo. But I also was an early adopter of digital photography. I received my first digital camera – a clunky, low-resolution affair that saved images on 3.5 discs – when I was in high school.

When they launched, Instagram and Pinterest felt like platforms that were meant for me, that truly reflected who I was and how I wanted to share with the world. Losing that feels like a betrayal.

None of this is to say that images don’t still have their place across the web. They do. Not all of us want to watch video all time and it can be disarming to go to a website where everything is flashing and moving. Not unlike what I imagine it would be like to walk the moving portrait-lined halls of Hogwarts, or what it was like to browse the Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s when GIFs and animated banners were clearly the way to get someone’s attention online.

Images aren’t going away. They will still have their place on our websites and blogs, accompanying or sometimes replacing written text.

But without a platform dedicated solely to sharing and connecting through still images, I’m feeling more than a bit unmoored online.

Every so often, in a mix of despair and hopefulness, I open the Flickr app thinking maybe it could serve as an alternative to Instagram. But my feed is filled with people I knew a lifetime ago, in the years before Instagram. It feels like the feed of a different person, and quite frankly, I don’t have the energy to recurate it to match the person I am now.

More often than not, when it comes to this blog, I share advice. But I’m afraid I don’t have any right now. I’m sharing my thoughts, partly because I needed to get them off my chest, and partly because, based on responses to this post on Instagram, I know I’m not the only one.

As I said in that post, I’m done performing for an algorithm. This isn’t to say that I’ll never post video on IG, but I’m putting my focus mainly on images, because I like to make them, and because posting them now feels like an act of resistance, even as fewer and fewer people see them.

I’m also reminding myself that, as I talk about in this post, images have a place online outside of Instagram and Pinterest, and that won’t change.

And in the meantime, I’m going to keep hoping against hope that, in the immortal words of Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone’s thinking of me, and building a new image-based social media platform tonight.