I recently got off Instagram, which I know is the most annoying thing to make a huge announcement and fanfare about. I don’t expect that the platform will collapse without me. But when I was thinking about quitting, I found it helpful to read blog posts from other artists who had made the same decision. These posts helped me realize I wasn’t alone in my issues with using the platform as an artist and stop blaming myself. So I wanted to explain a bit of my thought process for anyone who is curious or considering doing the same.
If you don’t know me, hi, I’m Ruby. I’m a recent college graduate, an MFA student at Iowa State University, and I like to make expressive figurative oil paintings. My current goal is to be a painter who teaches enough to get health insurance.
I used Instagram with the goal of building my art career. I think a lot of these cost-benefits I’m going to talk about would shake out differently if my goal was just to pass time, but I deleted all my social media as a teenager and found that I was happier without it. In my experience, it’s extremely attention-consuming but not exactly fun or fulfilling. If I want socialization, I prefer in-person hangouts or phone calls with friends; if I want a media experience, I prefer cheesy romance audiobooks, podcasts, two-hour video essays and Star Trek fanfic. So when I reluctantly got back on Instagram in 2021, and when I started to get serious about growing my account in 2022, it was out of a desire to market my artwork. I told myself I would treat it like work and it wouldn’t consume me.
Clearly that worked out great.
I think I got pretty good at it. I learned to make reels I didn’t hate myself for, film and edit the videos, got into all the hooks and hacks and overanalysis of my engagement statistics. Of course I watched hours and hours of other artists’ reels for “research.” I never got famous but sometimes I could get a video to ten, twenty, even thirty thousand views. That felt like winning and it kept me going through all the usual negatives: the ever-growing time demand, the self esteem issues, the fact that Instagram would only show my posts to maybe 1/5th of my followers no matter what I did.
I reached a point where I just cared way too much. I used success on Instagram as a stand-in for success as an artist, which is dangerous because those things really aren’t equivalent at all. Instagram is like high school: being a big deal on there doesn’t necessarily translate to success in the outside world, but when you’re there, it feels like the whole world.
Instagram just isn’t made for artists. It’s made to make money for Meta by running ads on content its users generate for free. I’m not saying that it’s evil, just that it’s indifferent. You have to decide for yourself whether you’re happy with the balance of work vs the benefit you get out of it. What frustrates me – and what finally got me to quit – was realizing how much the design of the platform is built to extract more time and energy from users while obscuring how little benefit it actually provides. There’s a lot of psychological trickery at play, and it’s upsetting that it worked so well on me. So that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post. What are we, as artists, actually getting out of Instagram? What is Instagram getting from us? And what do they do to keep us from realizing the house always wins?
Setting Realistic Expectations for Art Marketing
I had a conversation with my stepfather Sean about this recently, and he basically told me that he is comfortable on Instagram because he never expected it to be a vector for sales. He just wants to get his name out there a little bit. And he’s done well with that: he’s got a following for his weird Protean figures in Mexico. They’re popular with young men. Probably not the right audience for original oil paintings, but they may bite if he decides to sell tee shirts someday. That’s an advantage of social media – people can pick up on your stuff and enjoy it all over the world, and it’s free to use. Ads can be worth it even if they don’t directly lead to sales – maybe when his young followers get older they’ll want to buy a painting. He doesn’t invest too much time worrying about it.
I ran into more problems because I expected too much from Instagram, and I mistakenly believed that getting more views and followers would help me sell my art. I’m not sure exactly where I got this impression. Maybe it was just as basic as thinking, “A bigger number is better, right?” But buying original artwork just isn’t what most people are on Instagram for – they’re there for entertainment, to waste time, or maybe they’re other artists trying to figure out how to make content the way I was. Sean brought up an example: would you run an alcohol ad in a kids’ magazine? No. You have to be aware of your audience. In my case, I don’t think all the work I did making reels actually resulted in any sales. Pretty much everyone who has commissioned me, bought a print, or otherwise financially supported my art career from Instagram is someone that I met in real life first and kept up with on the site. And yes, it’s good for that: for weak ties, people you met at an event, friends of friends. It’s good for staying in touch.
Except it’s actually been getting worse for that, too. Social media in general has been moving away from chronological timelines of posts from followed accounts towards algorithmic content curation, which prioritizes the most attention grabbing, most shareable, most tiktok-y content. So even if you’ve gathered a robust contact list of interested fans on the ‘gram, if you want your followers to actually see your stuff, you need to play the game.
The Game: or, how Instagram encourages artists’ unrealistic expectations of success so they can make more money
Alright, this is going to sound like some conspiracy theorist BS for a bit here, but I promise it’s actually just a pretty basic analysis of Instagram’s behavioral design, profit motives, and the psychology behind why it works.
The bottom line: Instagram wants people to stay on the app for as long as possible because more user time is more ad money. So they show people the most successful, most watchable, most shareable stuff they can get: the viral content. Whether it’s a dog doing something cute, a 5-second clip of someone adding highlights to a painting, or a funny standup comedy clip, they’ve got something for every niche. Cool.
But when all you see is viral stuff, the top 1% of winners in a given niche, you gain a pretty unrealistic view of how the average Instagram reel is performing. Even if you have an intellectual understanding that most videos that are posted are going to, as they say, flop – that’s not what you’re seeing over and over. And in my silly brain at least, direct observations of trends in my surroundings (or internet surroundings) overrule my intellectual understanding of what’s supposed to be normal.
So you always feel like a win is just around the corner, just a lucky mix of hard work and persistence away. People joke about that: it’s never the posts you put effort into, it’s always the randomest things that “blow up”. It’s common, as an artist making reels, to have one video that vastly outperforms all your other videos, seemingly out of nowhere. And this feels great. Research suggests that unpredictable rewards produce greater pleasure than predictable ones; but after you get a random little hit of success, you come to expect it, and it’s a continual source of frustration and disappointment when you can’t do even better next time. Like building tolerance to a drug, we come to need greater and greater responses to feel the same joy.
I don’t know how to stress enough that it’s really not realistic to expect this kind of success every time. The odds are bad, maybe even State Lottery bad. I knew that, but I still somehow expected to keep doing better, and felt socially rejected when I couldn’t. What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? How can I do better? I just need to try harder. Do more. Post more, make more, more ads, more profit, (mo’ money, mo’ problems.)
I think it’s because I couldn’t help but think of “the algorithm” as more human than machine. Like, I know the ultimate arbiter of the 2023 social media game is a confusing black box of code fuckery that is biased in all kinds of uncomfortable ways. But the other players are (for the most part anyway) real people. And somehow, the other users’ realness always mattered more to me than the artificiality of everything else. So I would think, perhaps magically, ”Yeah, the algorithm or whatever, but if people really liked my art, if I was really good enough, it wouldn’t be this hard.”
Because I’m human, and we love to ascribe ourselves more power than we really have. If I’m losing on merit, I could someday win on merit. Even if that makes me hate myself for not being good enough, it’s easier to understand than randomness. We want to believe in a just world where rewards and punishments are meted out based on who deserves them. We want a world where talent and hard work produce results. We want an algorithm that makes sense.
But, to quote The Enshittification of Tiktok, “what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities?”
In that article, Cory Doctorow uses the metaphor of a peach basket carnival game to explain how companies like TikTok use virality to entice certain creators to invest more time and energy into making content for their platform.
“The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one.”
At Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance, there’s a “heating tool,” a literal button that employees can press to make certain videos go viral. And while it isn’t confirmed, I have no reason to think Meta, a company which stands credibly accused of everything from basic privacy violations to inciting genocide, would be too ethical to employ similar tactics.
With all this in mind, it’s illogical to assume that Instagram success is just based on how likable you are, how good your art is, or anything as straightforward as that. Who actually knows how the sausage gets made? Maybe it’s random. Maybe someone at HQ decided 7-second videos are so last week, they should be 15-30 seconds now, or the AI-based moderation can’t tell the difference between a nude painting and a real human breast. Maybe you haven’t been posting frequently enough lately. Or maybe they’ve just decided to hand someone else the teddy bear today.
Beyond the use of a manual viral-button to specifically court certain big name creators, having an algorithm that semi-randomly doles out tons of attention to certain videos clearly works to keep people making content, even when we know it’s not showing our posts to our actual followers. We have an inflated expectation of success because of the content suggested to us, and we keep going in hopes that this time will be our turn to have that big break. It’s the same unpredictable reward dopamine cycle as regular ol’ gambling.
So that’s instagram: it’s a broken mess of mindgamey, addictive behavioral design. It has a billion active monthly users. Of course it doesn’t feel good. Of course we keep coming back. You can’t just quit, right?
Yeah, you can just quit.
Instagram is not the whole of the art world. Yes, there are a lot of people on there, but that doesn’t mean you have to be.
Here are some alternative art-sharing endeavors I’ve been trying to focus on:
- Art fairs
- Local gallery openings and pop-up events
- Local farmers’ markets and non-art events that welcome artists
- Studio tours
- Art shows in nearby cities! (I saw one in Des Moines that totally rocked a few weeks ago.)
- Just trying to get out of the house, meet people and make friends in general
- Having a personal website
- Sending out a newsletter
- Writing a blog (hi, blog!)
How have things been since I quit?
How have things been for me since I quit? Good, I think. I don’t really miss it. I probably spend more time on Tumblr looking at memes, but I’m alright with that; I’m not seeking status on tumblr and I don’t follow people I’m likely to negatively compare myself to.
I’ve been focusing on other goals with my art. The majority of my sales and commissions have come from meeting people in person, which Instagram was never a replacement for. I’m still trying to figure out how to talk to people at art openings and events without crying; I’ve been to a few of those, and I’m getting better at it. (Pro tip: stand by the food table and make an obvious statement about the food. Now you’re talking to someone, and you didn’t have to walk up cold and say “Hi, my name is ____“ like some kind of maniac.)
As for online documentation of my art activities, I’ve found a lot of relief and freedom in making long-form posts and newsletters that have a longer shelf life. When I find myself wondering about some specific art issue or seeking advice, I tend to read artists’ blogs. It feels good to contribute to that. And it’s nice that my newsletter actually reaches everyone that subscribes to it, regardless of whether some algorithm has decided I deserve to speak to my followers. It’s a smaller group of people but I know they all actually want to hear what I have to say. I don’t have to make a pitch to keep strangers’ attention in the first three seconds; I can take my time and say something meaningful.
I would like to say I’m spending a lot more time painting, but life happens and I haven’t really been super productive for the last few weeks. On the bright side, I am spending less time trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. I feel more comfortable spending a longer time on a painting or reworking something after I thought I was finished.
Maybe at some point I’ll feel confident enough to get back on social media and not hate myself, but for now, I’m not putting so much pressure on myself to make my process public anymore. I think there’s value in a painting made slowly in private.
Want to get an email that doesn’t suck for once?
Sign up for my silly little monthly newsletter.
It includes all the updates about my artwork, WIPs, doodles, new finished paintings, events (if any), and links to anything relevant. Plus a section at the end for other artists’ work I’m admiring, poems and prose that inspire me, and all that good stuff. Maybe I’ll throw in a book review. It varies. I try to write them like a letter to a friend.
Ruby Walker 