Instagram is Ruined
I don’t know if it’s due to Facebook’s aquisition of Instagram, but considering their clean record up until then, I’m going to have to place the blame somewhere.
Instagram was awesome. I used it all the time in conjunction with 500px and was actually getting quite a few followers, way more than I ever have gotten on Twitter. Then it started. I recieved a mention from someone who had posted a photo and the photo description was my Instagram profile paragraph from a few months prior. Clearly it was a bot or the person had been hacked. Surely it would end there.
It didn’t. I have recieved in the last week over 1,500 mentions from 1,500 unique accounts all posting photos with the same description, my old paragraph. One week. And the thing is, my old account incorporated my handle because it is the same as my Twitter username. Due to that my entire News section on Instagram is clogged. A friend comments? Won’t see it. A genuine follower? No idea who it was. I had to turn off Push Notifications for Instagram so my phone’s battery wouldn’t die.
Ok, that’s bad enough. Now I know there’s not a lot Instagram can do, but it’s been like this for over 4 months now. Every time I check back into my account, my news feed is just as clogged as it was before. So I decided to contact Instagram support, maybe they had some advice for something to do.
There is none. No support. There is a FAQ and a press email address, but after thourouly searching through the website I have discovered that there is indeed no way to contact Instagram for support. In other words, they don’t care.
I contacted the press email address asking to be forwarded to support and the response said:
Thanks for your interest in Instagram. Please note that while we do our best to review and respond to press inquiries, we are a small team that receives a high volume of incoming email, so we cannot guarantee a response to every request.
Unbelievable. Somehow through Facebook’s aquisition, they have shrunken to a size that restricts them from having a support contact of any sort. They used to have one, and I used it frequently to get great help from the team, though that page and address is no more.
To wrap this up, I am highly dissapointed in Instagram. They are the prime example of a startup-to-sellout business model. I personally have seen no improvements come from the aquisition. That’s not to say there haven’t been improvements within the company, but the consumers have seen it get worse. What’s that saying?
