Oh yes. All of these. I am on Instagram but I have a massive love/hate for it. And any artist – mashup artists included on social media should watch at least the end part because it talks about the real cost of ‘chasing the algorithm’ – mentally and physically for Cat Graffam but also it’s a common thing – burnout and hamster-wheeling yourself into illness.
And it affects WHAT you do, which is the pernicious part…you get Pavlov Dogged, gamified into making stuff the platform algorithm wants, at the pace it wants, at the whim of the platform. Even if as in Cat Graffam’s example, it’s actually not wanted by the audience (I feel the same way about Stories on Facebook and Instagram, and Reels – I do not want them and rarely use them), . This is not good for you as an artist.
To paraphrase what I wrote on Cat Graffam‘s video:
This is what disturbs me about Instagram the most – that you get square sketchbooks for Inktober etc and the idea that I have to be a performing organ-grinders monkey with video doesn’t sit well with me – mentally. I found that my small Instagram audience likes representational things, hyper-realism, detail, and weirdly…sewing? (There is a MASSIVE sewing community on there, I found by accident….)
This means I’ve had a love/hate for a long time, because I feel I’m making work for an algorithm than never pays me….I get angry, do some abstract shit…it bombs, rinse, repeat. Chasing those likes is a fool’s game, creatively. Monetarily is a different matter….but if you aren’t doing the work you want to make, you just get disenfranchised and stop posting. I do that all the time….the funny thing is Instagram does push lapsed posters for a bit, then drops you…and wants you to hamster-wheel posts every day. I refuse to do that.r
Also weirdly it rejects some forms of image posts. Instagram hates line art, I regularly get line art rejected. Also it hates using your original dimensions, even with the weird crop…even if there’s a IG ratio just like it. Select one of their crops, especially square this ‘rejected image’ goes through fine. I sometimes had to post a colour image in square format before it would allow me to post another line art/ink image. So it’s doing something weird there – pushing people to work/post in squares, colour, or the existing other ratios. It wants to control what you post as well.
Ultimately it wants you to pay many times in the time and money creating content (‘content for the content’ – a horrible phrase) which it uses to attract people, then actual money advertising the content you made for the platform they are luring people in with for free. It’s shit. And very bad for artists – and as Cat says at the end, there are many ways to support artists – like, share, subscribe directly – like blogs like this or my artist blog, follow, and yes, buy or donate (plug plug – ugh how I actually hate pimping out donation links).
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