There are so many reasons to not like Mark Zuckerberg*, but I think one of the most egregious is that despite being the 9th richest person in the world (according to the Forbes real-time billionaires ranking 🤮) he seems ~really bad~ at his job. Facebook is literally ruining American democracy and creating cultural rifts so deep we could sail a fleet of cargo ships through them, WhatsApp normalised group chats and thereby made all of us 300% more exhausted/anxious, and Instagram? Whew, Instagram. Once a wonderful app that allowed us to see the world through the eyes of others, it is now a noisy commerce platform full of virtue-signalling slideshows, celebrity spon, and memes that people who use Twitter saw four days ago. While the list of things that are bad about instagram is not yet so long that I’ve fully ghosted on it, using the app in 2022 definitely feels more like wading through muck than flicking through a magazine I enjoy, as it did for so many years.
Over the last few months, I’ve thumbed my way over to my Instagram Explore page to key in and search for the following content: Salad for President’s recipe for roasted cabbage (so I could make it for the fifteenth time), the designer of the coat Alison Roman wore in her New Yorker profile, the name of the company Mr Bingo uses for screen printing, and Aubry Bennion’s breathtaking behind-the-scenes account of her disastrous made for tv kitchen renovation (which Meg Conley also wrote extremely thoroughly and thoughtfully about). Food, sustainable fashion, design, art, niche HGTV-adjacent gossip, these are the topics I’m interested in and closely align with the accounts I follow that aren’t just my personal friends. So riddle me this, if Meta, or whatever they’re called now, has the ability to know what I’m searching for, who I follow, what toothpaste I use, and that I’m currently on the lookout for black USB socket covers, why does my Instagram Explore page consistently feature so many photos of the Icon and Living Legend, Britney Jean Spears, who I do not follow anywhere, in any capacity?
After noticing a lot of Britney photos when I was looking for not-Britney content, I decided to check my Explore page a few times a day, just to see if she was actually always there or if it was just a coincidence. It turns out she really is always there, shining out of my screen in three or more tiny squares shared by fan accounts with names like @britney.by.spears or @bri.tneyspearsfan, all with thousands of followers despite the fact that they only share pictures and videos of Britney that you could easily find if you googled “Britney” followed by any year that she’s been a part of the public consciousness. I recognise many of these images, and remember them from MTV and gossip magazines from the early aughts, when Britney’s body was more familiar to me than my own and the yardstick by which my friends and I measured ourselves (I could still easily pick her torso out of an anonymous lineup, regardless of era). While I’m not annoyed to see these small frames of Britney on my Explore screen, and actually quite enjoy being reminded of moments ranging from her iconic Pepsi commercials (they were all bangers, no skips!) to highlights from her Vegas residency or clips of her acrobatic at-home workouts, I am confused about why they’re there, nestled between Mila Kunis pin-up photos, Kardashian pap walks, and someone’s hands brushing out a head full of hair extensions. Despite genuinely liking Britney and wanting the absolute best for her, none of these things are things I’m interested in seeing on Instagram, or related to the posts I like or accounts I follow. Is everyone’s Explore page like this??
Because I’m a woman in STEM, I reached out to a considerable sample size of two close friends to ask if they felt their Instagram Explore pages adequately represented their overall Instagram experience. They both bravely sent screenshots and confessed that yes, their Explore pages felt pretty on brand for their interests and overall experience on the platform. I zoomed in and pored over the squares of their Explore pages, which were mostly comprised of colourful art/design/fashion, memes, trendy line-drawn tattoos, craft projects, and recipes, with only a light sprinkling of celebrity. But Britney? She was nowhere to be seen.**
According to LaterBlog:
“the Explore page and the feed algorithm are quite similar — they both deliver content Instagram thinks you’ll be most interested in, based on your prior interactions.
However, while your Instagram feed is made up of content from accounts you already follow, the Explore feed consists almost entirely of content from new accounts.”
Huh.
Unfortunately, I am not a journalist and don’t have the balls or time to call up a tech expert (techpert?) or someone from Instagram and ask them about their shitty algorithm, but I did visit Serena Williams’ husband’s website to see if other people felt like their Explore pages were also a wasteland of generally unwanted content and the consensus was yes. While nobody else mentioned a high percentage of Britney content, it was nice to know that I wasn’t alone in being served algorithmically irrelevant posts.
Why some of us have Explore pages that feel aligned with our true beings and some of us do not is an unsolved mystery, just like how we don’t know where all the Millennial boys named Ryan went. But one thing is for sure, Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to innovation and somehow making Instagram worse with each update will likely not end anytime soon, and we will all jump ship before they do something sensible like create a payment tier where, for a monthly fee (maybe like $6ish?), they bring back the chronological feed and allow us to choose better privacy settings. And if listening to the podcast The Just Enough Family has taught me anything, it’s that the latest tech, and the money people make from it, can all disappear tomorrow. But Britney? Britney will always be here, stronger than yesterday and incomprehensibly smiling out from my Explore page.
On the topic of podcasts!
Like five people have asked me for podcast recommendations this week so I wanted to share a few recent-ish favourites that aren’t just Who?Weekly or a thing or two:
Gangster Capitalism - Covering the way greed and corruption has ruined American institutions, season two (about the NRA) and three (about Liberty University) are especially good, while season one (about the college admissions scandal) is good/fine. If anyone knows of anything similar to this about curruption here in the UK, I would love to listen!!
Lecker: A Food Podcast - Specifically the Kitchens episodes, which I listened to while painting my own kitchen and are so thoughtfully put together, heartfelt, and interesting.
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill - There are definitely some, uh, problematic aspects to this show (like how women and children seem absent from so much of the reporting) but if you grew up in an Evangelical church in the 90s, this will likely be a gripping, and maybe triggering, listen.
It’s Britney, Bitch! - Released in 2019 to commerate 20 years of …Baby One More Time, this is old but relevant to today’s post. I loved these meandering episodes and learning so much about Britney from hosts T. Kyle and Bradley Stern, whomst both probably have Instagram Explore pages fully dedicated to Britney and the pop girlies (which would make sense for them!). Their newer podcast, Legends Only, is also a fun listen for when you’re cleaning or cooking or doing something that only requires half your brain.
* 1) Being a billionaire in general is unethical and immoral. 2) He doesn’t even seem to enjoy being a billionaire. (see also: Succession. Why would anyone want to wear boring clothes and sit in an office making dick jokes with their family all day when they could, like, literally do anything else??) 3) He’s so lame that he’s made both virtual reality and surfing look extremely not cool. 4) Instead of doing something useful like giving unhoused people homes or helping to fund public schools, he’s buying up thousdands of acres of land in Kauai, Hawaii and pissing off locals 5) His digital platforms are rife with misinformation and are bad for democracy, small business, our mental health, and the safety of our personal information, to say the very least.
**While Britney was absent, both of my friends’ Explore pages did feature a picture of Pete Davidson, which honestly makes me worry for them. We are women in our 30s! We need to have HIGHER standards!!
My Instagram Explore is fairly weird. It’s going to take to long to try and explain! Partly because don’t have an explanation