Ash Pickett is a Business Administration Senior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
I deleted TikTok about four years ago. I got tired of the endless scrolling on the app and felt like it drained my energy more than anything else. I was able to avoid Instagram reels for a few years before succumbing to temptation and falling back into the black hole that is doomscrolling. So around a year and a half ago, I deleted Instagram, too.
I became frustrated with the fact that all of these social media platforms have turned into the same thing. They’re all raiding our brains and curating perfectly individualized algorithms (although some argue that other platforms do this better than others), sucking us deeper into a slippery slope of short-form content addictions.
Sticking to what platforms are good at
To be honest, I’m still just as much of a media consumer as the next person. I love watching YouTube videos where my favorite influencers post daily vlogs, strangers build huts in the middle of the forest and show me how just in case I decide to go off the grid, or a British narrator explains his existential crisis through an edgy video essay.
I love YouTube: it’s been with me since I was young and I love how it gives anyone the chance to share bits and pieces of their lives and ideas.
Nowadays, when I’m scrolling on the home page looking for a video to watch, I’m bombarded with YouTube Shorts. And to be honest, they totally get me. It only takes a second for me to read an intriguing title or see an interesting image, and without thinking, I’m already clicking on the Short, then I scroll to the next.
Just like that, I get back into the very thing I aimed to escape.
It’s not just YouTube. When you open up a social media app these days, almost every single one gives you the option to scroll through short-form videos that are built to suck you in and keep you there.
Even LinkedIn, a platform built for building professional connections, is now full of vertical video content for all of the LinkedIn Warriors. Users share videos with corporate culture advice, Warren Buffet quotes and skits poking fun at Gen Z workers. Sure, the content can be entertaining and relevant to the professional intents of the platform, but you know something’s wrong when you open LinkedIn to doomscroll.
I wish companies stuck to what they were good at. I can understand how these short-form video strategies benefit the companies employing them, because profit and maximizing shareholder value are their goals. They need to keep up with the competition or risk falling to the wayside.
But it makes me lose respect for and interest in their product when these companies lose sight of what they’re good at, what their platforms were built for in the first place and what they’ve been built into over time. They replace their uniqueness with the cheap trick of algorithm-driven doomscrolling to garner as much traffic as possible.
Devolving to short-form video factories
Instagram, for example, began simply as a photo sharing app. And for a long time, it was. People posted whatever they wanted whenever they wanted for their friends and family. Over time, influencer and celebrity culture began to take over, but I’d argue that there was still a balance.
Now, most of my friends claim that they use Instagram for the reels feature, which they created to compete with TikTok. Not to enhance the quality of content viewers were seeing, or to further connect people with one another. Just to compete and win people’s attention spans, without regard for how it might negatively affect them.
I suppose corporations have always had this goal, but now it seems a much more prevalent issue with the rise of short-form video content that’s potentially dangerous for people’s health and wellbeing.
So just like that, Instagram was ruined for me, because it became a second TikTok. It lost its originality, and I didn’t like the feeling of an algorithm constantly persuading me to scroll.
Maybe it makes me weak or shows my lack of self-discipline that I succumb to temptation so easily, and I’m willing to admit that. It’s definitely something that I can work on and that I’m actively trying to do right now in my battle against scrolling on YouTube shorts. But I wish that didn’t have to be a problem at all.
I wish these companies would just stay in their own lane and, instead of trying to emulate one another’s successes, focus on building the quality of the craft they already have.
As another example, Snapchat also introduced their Spotlight feature at around the same time Instagram brought in reels. Again, it’s their version of TikTok within the Snapchat app. I was okay with it because it felt less invasive than Instagram’s version, and I’d been using Snapchat a lot less, anyway, so it wasn’t really affecting me at all.
From what I’d been hearing from friends, they’d also been using Snapchat a lot less, too. It seemed like their attempt at the short-form video content strategy wasn’t as successful as Instagram’s.
Now, Snapchat is going to start charging users for photo and video storage, after years of offering free unlimited storage. I speculate that this is to compensate for their loss in competitive edge when the Spotlight feature failed.
Charging people for storage is its own entire problem, but here’s my point: I wonder if, instead of trying to copy TikTok and Instagram, Snapchat had invested in improving its own app or in innovation, it wouldn’t be falling so far behind its competitors in the social media world.
Can we ever return to the old digital world?
I realize I’m being idealistic here and that business is business, at the end of the day. These companies are doing their best to stay afloat in an industry that moves at a breakneck speed and is extremely difficult to predict.
As a user trying to balance my time on my phone with my time spent on real life, though, I’m frustrated with how the apps I previously trusted are trying to pressure me into scrolling. I don’t want to live a sedentary lifestyle or lose any of my engagement with reality.
It turns me off from using their platforms, and honestly makes me a little sad to know that social media has gone from worldwide connectors (that were still for-profit, just to clarify) to profit-maximizing machines.
I miss a digital world where I could open an app and know that I was in control of the amount of time I spent on it. There’s an individual consideration here that has to do with self-regulation, but there’s also a larger responsibility on the companies to serve their customers better, and to aim for a society with a healthier relationship with social media.