The necessity for Steemit to learn from Instagram's flaws. | 📷 💭 |

Introduction

I switched from Instagram to Steemit as my main platform displaying my works 4 weeks ago. There are several reasons for that specific choice and here I will talk a bit about a few of them. I am though, mostly focusing on:

• The crooked functioning of Instagram's community, its conditioned flaws and its psychology. 💭
• Why I think Steemit should learn from those flaws in order to protect the foundations of the current community mentality. ⛨
• Since this is a lot of text, I will also show some of my past work here to have a little more variety. 📷

I think, that it is important to have some discussions now, before the masses join.

Warning: this post will sound quite philosophical. Since I had to compress and diminish complex and fundamental human emotions leading to simple and evolutionary behavior.I am not trying to make anybody feel oversimplified, it just writes more easily.

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Traffic on Instagram

I built up a following +- 14k on Instagram. This was the result of me desperately trying to spark some creative light in the protocolized academic reality of being a medical student. This endeavor took me 2 years. Today I want to share some things I learned along the way with you.
The traffic keeping Instagram's blood flow is driven both by people that play the “follow-4-follow” game and bots. Clever bots, but automated algorithms nonetheless. This maybe is an overstatement, but it's the way most if not all of the big accounts built up their (fake) reputation. This, in turn, makes small and new accounts feel jealous in some sense since they don't know the true nature of the social network they signed up for. Instead, they focus on getting more, and more attention.

Just try a quick google "Instagram Followers" you will be amazed how much paid services there are.

It's certainly not money people are doing this for since there is not a dime to be made on it for 99.9 percent of its user base. Our constant need to confirm our own existence, significance and individual identity, however, is a fundamental component in our human emotion. Hence, It is the main incentive, powering the effort for this deep urge to self-confirm. It is fueling all the effort for this superficial interaction and automation. 🤖

The only way to make money on Instagram is to invest 2 years of your time to build up a decent following, only to hear you have to do a daily post with a visible Happy Sock on each of your models, landscapes, food, dog, etc.

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Human behavior and social media

Evolution is what made us behave the way we do. Our genome gives us the unprecedented ability to be nurtured. We can adapt like no other species can. We should, however, teach new Steemians the right way to behave. Otherwise, we are going to see the same thing that's happening on Instagram. Just a platform on which we all think we are great. without any reasonable self-criticism.

Most big Instagram accounts have bought their followers. Most Instagrammers feel the ever-present urge to continuously grow the number of likes and followers, without there being a logical reason other then self-confirmation. 😍

" I am likable, people want to follow me. therefore I exist."

Are we consciously aware of this? I don't quite know there probably is a lot of behavior "monkey see, monkey do" there too. If Monica got more likes on her beach selfie, then I got to make my selfie more likable (read sexy). As I said before, the automation driving Instagrams traffic, however, does not discriminate between the content provided.

People, therefore, all believe that whatever they post is being appreciated by its community. As a consequence, there is at least a diminished sense of self-criticism because of this.
The internal self-love mechanism to justify these, perceived as real, pieces of affection one gets when creating content on Instagram could be seen as follows:

“I did my actual best take a photo, edit it, and showed some parts of my soul. Hell, I even typed some text to go along with it so now I have delivered a quality product”.

It's only natural to assume the likes and comments one gets underneath below all that hard work can only be perceived as being sincere feedback. 🤔

It’s you who is creating the content which you are probably proud enough of to actually publish. Of course, it can be trusted that whatever you decided to coin publish worthy should be soaking in other people's love as well.

Since some of your friends are on the platform, some of the comments and likes made on a post on Instagram are, of course, genuine. I am mostly talking about interaction between strangers. Comments received from people you don't know are often times just empty copy-paste Likible messages trying to persuade you into doing the same thing for the author. That is, provide them with higher numbers of appreciation (being comments, likes and followers) There is also the reasonable change that your comments were not even written by a human being at all.

Well, it may be written once, and thereafter an algorithm that was bought by a user published the exact comment over thousands of times with slight variation on people’s photos that used the #’s you decide on.

Fake or empty comments and bot based likes are great for self-esteem issues and short-term thinking. Which is not completely a bad thing. it does provide everybody with the attention they are naturally craving for.

Furthermore, I am not saying all behavior driven by our genome, otherwise, this post would be absolete. There is also a fair bit of nurture that makes us behave the way we do.

Try to imagine what people would be doing, if their phones would just out of the blue start telling them the actual truth about what shit they are throwing online… People would at least be left with a serious form of identity crisis. We have enough of that already, so I hope this bubble never bursts.

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Why Steemit should actively arm against the same mistakes Instagram made

One can only logically assume what would happen on a platform where all content is being received with a large amount of tender, love, and care. The collective brain of the community will not be challenged to create new, creative concepts. It would become lazy since love will be received, no matter what the individual does. For the longevity of the platform this means, that although it probably would be a self-fulfilling prophecy for its users, it will not be a platform, where pioneering and thinking outside the box would be 1.done and 2.appreciated.

It’s shocking for me to see at least 5 people sending me a PM each day asking me to follow them and repost their stuff, and most of them just flat out say it: 😲

“I just want to have more followers, why don't you respond” I am not even that big of a fish on Instagram, so I can’t imagine how many the biggies must have blocked. I am at 482 in total.

Also, fun to notice, even some of those PM’s are undoubtedly botted for the lack of coherence. Quite a few PM's I got entailed the question "are you a photographer?", even though my whole account is showing over 40 models and countless landscapes.

“So what?, let people enjoy their placebo on being appreciated, don't take that from them you monster”

Once again, I am not saying that is a bad thing per se. a platform where everyone is honest about whether content is good or not should, in essence, make people more self-critical and less lazy. A logical conclusion would be that this would probably make it harder to find pleasure in creating content. But does it? Since Steemit, a new community spirit has come into existence. Having a dislike button that actually impacts bad content is one thing. The fact that it affects real money Is quite another. ☺

Once we start putting in real consequences to the social media game, things start to extrapolate. We now see that smart and creative Steemians are actually working their asses off to create quality content. And as a result, are getting great rewards for it. Having the ability to impact reality on this level revolutionizes the whole concept of social media. It makes the digital world finally real And that is a global premiere.

In the light of this new sense of honest social media, the first posted quote in this article should be read as:

“let me take a super lazy shot with my phone of my dog, which only I like, not that I know that. Now let me put some prefabricated, ugly filters on there, slide the thing to 100 percent. That’s that. I just have made a super personalized and original piece of art. lemma take a selfie. Not just an empty smile selfie, but one in which I show just too much breast and post both this selfie and my beautiful piece of art sequentially in order to make me almost seem like a slut, but just not quite yet. Coining me one was 100% avoided by publishing the degraded form of art. I am an artist and must be taken seriously. and hey, I get appreciation in the form of likes, followers and empty comments nonetheless, see I was right. Should do more of these sessions.”
“Ow, it has already been 2 minutes, how many shots of dopamine I already got, let me check. 3 <3 omg but Jessica got over 5 <3. Etc. ”

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The signs of blindly copying old habits to Steemit are already quite visible

I have been a Steemian for just a month now and it has been an insane source of creativity and inspiration to me. Steemit, as it is now, has been the exact thing I have been looking for the last few years. It has great people on it (for whom I will allocate a complete post later this week)

let's hope newcomers will up front know how Steemit was meant to function before they start interacting. If we manage to teach every one of them not to go superficially again by doing the following:

• posting links to their own posts underneath hard working Steemians.
• Spamming the beautiful steemit.chat with "follow me" sentences.
• Making way too obvious copy paste comments that are incoherent to the content of the post.
• Only trying to better themselves by acting nicely for the sole purpose to manipulate whales.

The above bullet points are happening quite a bit already in what makes up Steemit today. I don't have any idea if and how the above points have changed in the months before I joined, but I would love to read about that in the comments.

Although the last point on that list can be fun for the self-esteem of the average whale, it is not something we should blindly accept. Not saying skepticism should be the way to go either, just a critical mindset.

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Steemit, a possible burstable bubble

With that subtitle, I hope to get your attention.
It's just a scenario on how steemit could evolve if we don't take any conscious measures. I feel like when the masses join and we do not have a proper education for fresh minnows in which we warning them for the above bullet point list, this could be a real possibility though. It would mean that a lot of the earned money would be vaporized. My personal believe is though, that the early adopters already are doing this the right way to how current curation is going as of now. as shown below, there is a lot of voting going on.

The number of total votes for the 5th of January by @penguinpablo (follow him for daily stats). It would be valuable if we could see stats on how much up-votes and how much down-votes there are.

Steemit is already so potent. There are valuable projects with great abilities to scale (more about that in that later post) everywhere you look.

A new way of crowd thinking has begun. I feel deeply that I want to keep that thinking in the direction it is now. However, old habits die hard. There are a lot of deeply rooted behavioral patterns we have been adopted to thanks to the social media middle ages. Modern society has been conditioned to social media's without a dislike button, without a proper self-criticism mindset and without a non-egocentric way of interacting with others. I think it is of great importance to educate newcomers otherwise.

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PS. I know I probably should have done a bit of a literature study to confirm my thoughts here. All I know for certain that there is a great amount of activity on Instagram produces by automation since I have experienced those first hand. It could be that I overstated some things in this article. It may be that this experience only took place on accounts with a high number of followers. All I try to do here is give room for discussion. Not to write the most scientific and realistic depiction of reality. Maybe I will update this with sources once I find the time to. 🏥.

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As always thanks for your time, I hope you enjoyed this. Feedback is always appreciated!

"Emotions are there to be expressed, not to be suppressed and bottled up. I do photography in order to take my mind away from the dilemma's I encounter during my medical internships."

Thi_js. Out.

Up-vote, re-steem and follow ♥