“If you have good experiences with social media, nothing in this book invalidates those experiences. In fact, my hope is that we—meaning both the industry and all of us—will find a way to keep and improve on what we love precisely by being precise about what must be rejected. Deleting your accounts now will improve the chances that you’ll have access to better experiences in the future. Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry, but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard. Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.”
Technology
VSCO > Instagram
Instagram sucks. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. VSCO has a great business model. They make and sell digital products to help enhance your photography and provide a social platform to host too. VSCO desktop presets for Adobe Lightroom and VSCO mobile are great tools to create and share your work.
Compare this to Instagram’s business model: advertising. Fun fact: I have never purchased anything from an online advertisement and I will go out of my way to not buy their products for their intrusive behavior. Also, I don’t want my data sold to anyone I don’t want to business with.
VSCO is minimally designed where the focus is on photography, not how many followers you have or comments and likes. These fake forms of measuring how good your image is can be unhealthy and distracting.
The attention to photography and storytelling beats the Instagram feed of 1 ad to every 4 photos. Instagram has ceased to be relevant and ceased being fun.
VSCO is a creative tool program where it provides the tools to edit your images and share on your feed or even in a journal format. Repost others in a Collection as a mood board of inspiration. Even reach out to others with private messaging.
I’ll still use Instagram for my Shots photo group and that’s all. I want to focus on enjoying photography again and being more creative as a result.
**Update** It is finished
It’s Not Relevant
Instagram sucks.
It used to be a great way to network with great photographers and friends. It has evolved from a creative community into an abomination of memes, unoriginal work and advertisements.
When Facebook purchased Instagram everyone knew that it would change drastically and not for the better.
Shortly after, ads were popping up with no regard for anything. Nothing was relevant because Facebook hadn’t yet figured out your likes, dislikes, friends. It still hasn’t figured me out. I am seeing ads for candy, ads for salt. Yes, salt. Ads for a house flipping seminar by some faux celeb on a DIY channel. Ads for paint etc etc. What the hell does salt have to do with photography? This is a photography platform…or it used to be.
IG has added video features, photo/video stories, IGTV for longer video stories. All laced with ads.
FB and IG both have shitty algorithms that is distracting what we want to see. Their shitty algorithms have also destroyed the order in which we want to see our friend’s photos by assuming they know best. But FB and IG don’t know me at all. They’ve stopped caring and allow any advertiser to show whatever they want, relevant or not and then have access to our data.
How pervasive are these irrelevant advertisements? It averages one ad for every four photos in your feed. Four, maybe five of your colleague’s images and then you get a “sponsored post”.
Think these offered options matter?
Why don’t you want to see this ad?
It’s not relevant
I see it too often
It’s inappropriate
Think again.
Deleting Facebook was easy. I never took it seriously and my friends appreciated me mocking everything that they enjoyed about FB.
Speaking of deleting…I just accidentally erased my whole last paragraph and don’t have the energy to recreate it. Anyway, IG sucks and I am getting real close to pushing that “delete account” button
It’s Not Relevant
Instagram sucks.
It used to be a great way to network with
great photographers and friends. It has evolved from a creative
community into an abomination of memes, unoriginal work and
advertisements.
When Facebook purchased Instagram everyone knew that it would change
drastically and not for the better.
Shortly after, ads were
popping up with no regard for anything. Nothing was relevant because
Facebook hadn’t yet figured out your likes, dislikes, friends. It still
hasn’t figured me out. I am seeing ads for candy, ads for salt. Yes,
salt. Ads for a house flipping seminar by some faux celeb on a DIY
channel. Ads for paint etc etc. What the hell does salt have to do with
photography? This is a photography platform…or it used to be.
IG has added video features, photo/video stories, IGTV for longer video
stories. All laced with ads.
FB and IG both have shitty
algorithms that is distracting what we want to see. Their shitty
algorithms have also destroyed the order in which we want to see our
friend’s photos by assuming they know best. But FB and IG don’t know me
at all. They’ve stopped caring and allow any advertiser to show whatever
they want, relevant or not and then have access to our data.
How
pervasive are these irrelevant advertisements? It averages one ad for
every four photos in your feed. Four, maybe five of your colleague’s
images and then you get a “sponsored post”.
These are the offered options when telling IG you don’t want to see their ads:
Why don’t you want to see this ad?
It’s not relevant
I see it too often
It’s inappropriate
Deleting Facebook was easy. I never took it
seriously and my friends appreciated me mocking everything that they
enjoyed about FB.
Speaking of deleting…I just accidentally erased
my whole last paragraph and don’t have the energy to recreate it.
Anyway, IG sucks and I am getting real close to pushing that “delete
account” button.
**Update** It is gone.
iA Writer
After several free trials, beta tests and tribulations I have chosen iA Writer as my tool to help me create stories I want to tell (not calling myself a writer or author yet).
The software for me had to pass several standards such as:
Cross-platform (Windows, iOS)
Inexpensive
Clean, simple and aesthetically pleasing.
No overwhelming amount of tools that I’ll never use
Mission accomplished.
Progress
Time to get serious and disciplined regarding digital asset management (DAM). As I type, I am transferring files off of the various external hard drives to a master file on my computer. Then I will use Lightroom to remove the duplicates, sort the wheat from the chaff, sort by year/month, geotag, keyword and then maintain this archive. After this I will upload to my photo hosts. On backup drives, Flickr and Smugmug. Speaking of..I’ve redirected my Photo Denbow web domain to Smugmug. (above)
With my new camera, I am considering this all to be a clean slate. Way overdue.
Photo Archeology
My very first digital photograph back in November 2001.
When I was away at college I borrowed my father’s Olympus C2100. I loved the zoom and bokeh it produced. This had helped solidify my photography enthusiasm.
I discovered this when sorting through the archives and organizing the digital assets (DAM). Yeah, it’s simple, but we all start somewhere.
Coding Misadventures
Or another working title: what a tangled web I weave.
Delving back into coding but this time with some basics like javascript (finally).
2-For-1
Now that I have Windows 10 installed on the laptop, I can not leave well enough alone. I have installed and am running Linux 15 inside another virtual machine. Running smoothly. Two machines inside one. Brilliant!
Win-Dohs!
The last Microsoft Windows 10 Preview build has made my laptop almost useless. The public release was today and still unable to download due to memory issues with the beta program.
It’s slowing me down. Grr.
The Purge
As long as I am purging tech, I am also weening off of Google Plus and Twitter.
Being so embedded into Google for so long I cannot fully detach just yet but it will be a slow process. For now, Plus is not installed on my devices. I haven’t updated it in months.
The same for Twitter. I’ll keep the account open but will not be an active user.
I’m not receiving value from either one of them like I used to nor do I have the time/desire to blurt out anything of interest to anyone but myself.
I have my website for that.
Convert
A month ago I made the decision to convert to the iPhone and iOS. Thanks to some software issues with the Samsung Galaxy S6, I was allowed to jump over to the iPhone 6 Plus a few months early.
After years of Android support, I grew tired of the way the software was evolving.
The iPhone’s hardware, including the 8MP camera, are solid. And of course most of the apps I want to use are developed exclusively for iOS not Android.
Adios, Android. It’s been good but not good enough.
**UPDATE** 2024-09-04. And I have never looked back!