I'm aware the progress bar doesn't work as intended. It's all your fault.
Almost everyone can agree that Instagram is the worst social networking platform. So many scandals have come out of one app it's actually kind of insane. The app continues to push features that nobody asked for and is overall just a bad place to post to. Yet every single time it feels like Instagram is finally dying, it seems to come back from the grave. Why is that?
you are my friend
Instagram has put a lot of work into the close friends experience. The Instagram algorithm doesn't really push small creators as much. Because of this, it feels like you're posting for your friends instead of for a larger audience. If you don't like somebody, the amount of options that are given to hide your content from them are overwhelming. You can mute, block, restrict, hide, remove, and delete.
edgy
Instagram actually allows a lot more content than other platforms such as TikTok allow. For example, mild porn and gore are allowed. You can't have an entire account dedicated to just posting these images and videos, but you can still get away with posting a lot of them.
TikTok has been making their commiunity guidelines more and more strict recently. It's gotten to the point where I only post the least offensive, boring content I possibly can due to the risk of being suspended for uploading a video of football. Because of this, younger people go to Instagram to find videos of the cars from the movie Cars having sex, and they love it.
With that being said, there is also a negative to this. Almost any video containing children uploaded to Instagram will have comments such as "lets see you get oiled up lil bro". Not only that, but there is so much racism. Instagram is heaven for people in middle school and a hell for everyone else.
so boring its not
This is just a personal theory from me. One thing about the Instagram interface is that it is very dry and dull. The whole app is mostly white, with color used vary sparingly. This might sound like a bad thing, but this allows the content of posts and profiles to really take the center stage. I've seen many more asethetic grid layouts on Instagram compared to any other platform.
stories
Stories are a big part of Instagram now. They're basically Twitter, but each post is full screen and is hidden after 24 hours. But Instagram has definitely perfected the formula for stories. You can share posts to your story (which you should just be able to repost, but whatever), do polls, quizzes, question and answer sessions, add full songs (TikTok only gives you the iTunes sample), and much more. Plus replies go straight to DMs, which can help take the load off of talking for people like me who suck at talking to others.
variety
Instagram has copied basically every app possible. You can send Snapchat style disappearing images, there used to be BeReal style reactions, you can livestream, scroll through a TikTok timeline, look at a feed of regular posts, write articles (they removed this one recently), and more.
network effect
Everyone is already on Instagram, so if you aren't, you're missing out. And this is a big one.
okay
im done talking
If Mario, than only bros!