Five minutes of unsolicited garbage

That’s exactly what I get every time I try to browse -or scroll down- through one of my Social Media feeds. In this case, Instagram. A platform that was supposed to show me the stuff I’m interested in, aka, in my case, cool photos of airplanes, outstanding visual artists, some Star Wars stuff, cute dogs, and whatever my friends wanna share there.

But we ruined it. Once again. The same way we did it with the Web 20 years ago. Greedy, visually noisy, and poorly crafted tiny squares begging for the attention of ANY user. And let’s please don’t blame “the algorithm” here, is just us, “the industry” once again, sacrificing users in this practice of worshipping the Gods of Lead Generation and Performance.

Desperate to sell whatever it is (it seems to have stopped mattering a while ago), we are the same bunch of people scratching our heads, wondering why engagement and click-through rates are going down, while the infamous cost per click is doing exactly the opposite.

Spending our time from 9 to 5 looking at numbers, on dashboards, control panels, and spreadsheets made us ignore completely how we should experience Social Media on a 24/7 basis. We pray the “user-centric” mantra, although is very clear we only care about whoever is paying for the next campaign.

A more humble approach to ourselves as just users instead of plain potential consumers would be pretty much appreciated by many of us.

The lack of empathy we are showing in a place that claims to be “Social” is astonishing. On top of that, once again it seems we just can’t put ourselves in the shoes of the regular user who just want to have a bit of fun browsing around, or who just need to kill five minutes checking cool stuff online.

The result? We can see it in this sequential series of screenshots. Maybe we can spend some time thinking about how to make the life and experience of users a bit better, before keeping on throwing non-stop more unsolicited garbage to the screens.

What if we invest more time and effort in making and sharing great messages? What if we don’t treat Social Media as the door under which we just slide boring, repetitive, and annoying pamphlets and flyers? Cause that’s EXACTLY what we're doing.