As with all things in life, the best way to use and enjoy a social media platform is to make peace with the inevitability of it changing, usually for the worse. Whether you outgrow the internet humor of the early 2010s and eventually drift away from Reddit or find your favorite platform purchased by a fascist billionaire and overrun by Nazis and bots, you can and should not let that shift in platform or self diminish the quality time that was had in the halcyon days. Conversely, pining for a return to that era is an equally foolish (and often reactionary) impulse. All one really can do is acknowledge that a top-down change has been made by soulless algorithms and their somehow-even-more-soulless creators in SF, and decide whether or not a platform’s dopamine juice shot is still worth the squeeze. Though Instagram is still the second (or third) biggest social media platform in terms of user base behind Meta sister-site Facebook (and WhatsApp if you’re the type of freak who counts that as social media), the app’s been in a state of precarity for a number of years. Users post fewer photos these days, which prompted a 2025 UI redesign that prioritized Reels and DMs, the two features that drove the bulk of the company’s growth in recent years. More recently, their overreliance on unsecure AI chatbots resulted in hackers being able to hijack over 20,000 accounts with prompts requesting password changes.