#1 - weighing the value of an instagram like:
I'm sure its not a new observation that the instagram like is a flattening phenomena, your interaction with a funny meme is equivelant to your friends wedding post. Of course there are other methods of interaction, you can comment or privately send the post onto a friend, or as of recently you can repost it. Regardless, the like remains the primary mode of interaction.
Comparing to youtube, where the primary mode of interaction has 3 states: like, dislike and neutral, instagram has a binary. Interestingly, some youtube old heads(not me lmao I was born after that website was made) may remember youtube having a rating system, like what can be found on reveiw sites like letterboxd and goodreads. It would seem obvious that a system that gives more room for nuance, you can probably gleam more from a film having an average rating of 3.65 than a post having 10 likes, but I've found that using letterboxd, I've found it easier when I don't give films a score, but rather flatten it to the like/not like binary of instagram. A 3 star film to me means its ok, but a like means the film was enjoyable, my use of the like on letterboxd acts as a succinct answer to a yes/no question, any elaboration on that answer can be found in the text of the reveiw rather than an abstract score out of 10. I'm not the only person who uses letterboxd this way, youtube people Jacob Geller and Patrick H. Willems also flatten their letterboxd reveiws and I find that their reveiws are far more legible given what I know about their tastes.
Does the instagram like form part of the text of an instagram post? It feels like a ridiculous proposal, a review doesnt form part of a movies text, the price at auction doesnt form part of a paintings text, even if they can inform our own analyses. In my example of letterboxd I hopefully demonstrated that the process of writing and reading reveiws has changed by changing the scoring mechanism, so it would follow that the experience of an instagram post, whether you are audience or author would change if you were asked to rate it out of 10, or weren't given any choice to interact with it.
And then theres value capture of course. In an earlier blogpost I talked about an instagram page that I have to advertise this blog and I expressed something akin to fear of being value captured by it(even if I didn't have the precise language of value capture), and over the last few weeks I fear thats exactly whats happened. The addictive cycle of making a post and then checking the metrics to see if its working is working on me even if I don't know what the numbers mean or how else I'm supposed to sort and tell people about this project, call it instagram realism. I think my problem here is that the feedback for my blog and the delivery mechanism are the same, this usually works in 1:1 correspondence, if I text someone about my blogpost they'll text back, but then I have to do the work of sorting through who is interested and who isn't, it is also far less efficient where I could theoretically reach all of the relevant people. Instagram does give 1 metric that I do genuinely care about: bio link taps, but I have been unable to find out how to convert that, and I don't have the energy to figure it out. I have instagram burnout. Granted, I've been incredibly busy this summer.