Friday, June 17, 2016

it it's not broke



Remember a month or two ago when Instagram first announced that they were ditching chronological timelines and everyone frantically asked their followers to turn on notifications? I can't stand the idea of algorithm-based feeds, and I've watched with sadness as the move away from recency ruined facebook and etsy. I still change my search to "most recent" whenever I search on etsy (especially when searching vintage. relevant constantly yields very un-relevant results, in my opinion) and I switch from "top stories" to "most recent" on facebook constantly. Neither site offers the option to actually change your settings permanently, but at least I can toggle it whenever I need to.

Personally I thought the notifications idea wasn't the best way to handle the instagram change -- that is, until I got the new timeline a couple weeks ago. Now I'm missing out on posts from my friends constantly. I ended up unfollowing a bunch of accounts that I don't like *quite* as much, just so that my chances of seeing my favorite accounts would increase. And even then I still see the same couple posts repeating at the top of my feed when new, relevant, interesting content that I WANT to see is hidden dozens of posts down. I feel like a creeper but I keep manually checking my friends' accounts to see what they're up to, because their photos aren't showing up in my timeline anymore. I was doing that last night (being a creeper) when I realized that this is what the notifications are for. This is why everyone had that idea. I'm turning on notifications for my friends today. It feels so stupid to me, but it honestly seems like the only way that I can still enjoy instagram without unfollowing everyone but like my 8 closest friends and family members.

Anyway, I think the whole reason all this bothers me is the larger picture that companies like facebook (who owns instagram) can make stupid changes that literally NOBODY wanted, and there's just nothing you can do about it. Sometimes it feels like every week one of the websites that I rely on for either amusement (like, say, twitter) or business (like shopify or etsy) or both (like instagram) makes some massive change that was wholly unnecessary, that nobody wants, that messes things up for the people who actually use the site. It's like nobody in the business/tech world has ever heard the phrase "if it's not broke, don't fix it!"


dress - le bomb shop | cardigan - old navy