The past few years I have found myself complaining more and more about Instagram. Last night I observed something that gives me even more to complain about the platform. After only scrolling through four to five posts last night, the feed paused and there was this message reading, "Time for a break? Pause for a moment and considering taking a break. Load more posts." If you click on "load more posts," it does exactly that.
Now I have to say if this message appeared after one had spent a straight half hour on the app, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with it. There are probably people who spend a half hour or more straight on the app and may well feel fatigued after doing so. The problem is that the message is appearing after only scrolling through a few posts and less than five minutes. For people like me who don't spend a whole lot of time scrolling through their feed, it can be annoying.
To make matters worse, at the same time that I noticed the "Scroll break" message, I also noticed that my feed was slowing down after scrolling for a while and once or twice even froze. I have to think this is related to the "Scroll break" message, which makes things even more frustrating. Indeed, it can test my patience when dealing with Instagram.
I honestly hope this is only a test being rolled out to a few users and not a feature that Instagram has decided to make permanent. If it is test, I hope Instagram realizes it is a bad idea and does away with it. If it is a permanent feature, I hope they give users a way to turn it off. I also hope they fix the feed so it isn't lagging and even freezing up.
As it is, this is just one more thing that makes me want to spend much less time on Instagram. The only reason I am still there is that I do manage accounts not my own and I have a lot of friends there. As it is, it seems to me that Meta almost has a death wish when it comes to Instagram, given the various things they have done to ruin the experience for many of us: an overemphasis on Reels; no longer saving posts to one's phone's gallery; removing the option to filter searches by "most recent;" altering the algorithm so that one's posts get far, far fewer views than in the past; changing the grid profile previews from squares to oblong rectangles that aggressively crop one's photos; and limiting hashtags on posts to a mere five. Honestly, if I didn't have friends on Instagram and didn't manage other accounts, I would just give up on it entirely.
Instagram used to be one of my favourite social media services. I posted up to two or three photos to it a day and posted to it every day. Now a whole week can go without me making one post. And far too often these days I have to scroll and scroll and scroll just to see posts from my friends, which makes the "Scroll Break" feature even more frustrating. Honestly, Instagram should just ditch every single change they have made to the app since around 2017 and just revert the app back to the way it used to be. Honestly, I would probably start using it more often.
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