"I went on a weekend trip and didn't invite friend A, so I hope friend B keeps it a secret and doesn't tell anyone I was there" is the kind of social dynamic that people grow out of in high school. If you are having trouble with it as an adult then it isn't really Instagram's fault. People talk to each other and share stuff, and sometimes they talk about you, both online and offline. Just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people. They are adults as well, and care about it less than you think.
There’s value in grace. For all sorts of reasons you might be right to do things that make other people feel bad. That’s no reason to rub their nose in it.
What’s the virtue in offending people when you could instead be kind?
I know one woman who is having a baby shower, and I know another woman who recently dealt with the loss of her child. It’s not “secrecy” to celebrate the baby shower and avoid bringing it up with the recently bereaved, it’s respect and good taste.
I've tried to incorporate the notion that it's none of my business what other people think of me. I don't always get it right, but having that attitude has helped tremendously on reducing my cortisol levels.
I don't think that's a fair reading of the post. They're not really complaining about particular friend dynamics where they're trying to keep information away from one friend while going out with another friend. The complaint is more about the society-wide change in norms brought about by social media. I don't think the author would complain about one close friend calling another close friend and sharing information about a trip the author was also on. The problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network which includes many more people than an individual would normally be able to share stories with in person.
Sure, people talk to each other and share stuff. That doesn't magically make it ok for people to share stuff about you on a (public?) instagram account. There's a huge difference between those two dynamics.
It's fine to overshare as much of your life as you're comfortable with. But we should be more mindful of how we include others in this.
Not really. It hurts people's feelings to find out they weren't invited to something they thought they should have been. Protecting feelings and smoothing out awkward social dynamics are the the category of "very adult."
As a more general example, you wouldn't talk about a happy hour you were going to after work with people who weren't invited/aren't invited/you wouldn't invite. I believe every sitcom on the planet has at least one episode with this lesson in it.
Good points! Totally agree that people care less than you think, and it’s very healthy to live your life without thinking you have to please everyone all the time. The nuance I tried to make, but I was perhaps not really clear, is that when people talk with each other, people have the chance to make sure a message comes across so that it does not offend a person. That chance for nuance is lost when people post on social media. Not that people do it deliberately, it’s just that social media is designed to be focused on the poster rather than on how that message makes certain people in the audience feel. And I do believe people are bothered not to offend someone, and that they are less likely to do so when you actually talk.
It's absolutely the fault of the mechanics and submission of our society to surveillance capitalism,
one which has been intentionally cultivated, exploited, and capitalized, by Meta,
so yes, it is Instagram's fault. They are the primary party—though I do not excuse those complicit with surveillance capitalism, meaning every person who continues despite unending evidence for how sociopathic and destructive the company, its management, and its impact is, to use their products. Which use however is also traceable in significant part back to Meta, via the ugly mechanics of exploitative and amoral engagement-engineering and their exploitation of monopoly.
This is a front upon which they might and should be confronted... a class action on behalf of those have not consented to participate in surviellance would be a lovely thing.
Under the current political shitshow, also in measurable part the "fault" of Meta, however, we can expect no such thing.
After being friends with public people, I got in the habit of asking people in pictures before I post, regardless of if they're on Instagram or not. And I NEVER post kid pictures. I find these rules should be obvious to most people. I'll even ask my wife first, who is always just about to post the same set of pictures I am. It's the decent thing to do.
This reminded me of the time ~10 years ago I was at an event featuring Richard Stallman, and he started by say that no one was allowed to post photos of him on FB. This was to a room of hundreds of people, mostly hackers. I thought, "damn, if there's an uphill battle somewhere, this guy will find it!"
On the flip side: if I were to attend an event featuring Richard Stallman, I would rather it have a no-photos policy. I am interested in many of his ideas, but I have no desire to be associated with his ideas in their entirety or any public figure. Unfortunately, too many people believe that A implies B.
I also hate drama, and would much rather lead a quiet life as a person no one likes than an interesting life who some people dislike.
i've thought the same thing about email. i run my own email server, so i'm one of a very few number of people whose email is opaque to gmail. on the other hand -- almost everyone i exchange email with uses gmail, so actually gmail has almost all my email anyway.
Interesting. I never thought about adjusting my message based on the email provider they use. Would be hard to do, someone could be using their own domain but the email goes through Gmail.
> Imagine a friend you were on a weekend trip with. This friend talks with another common friend. This common friend could have equally well been on that weekend trip because you like him or her but, due to circumstances, as is life, you did not invite him. You probably would feel uncomfortable with that first friend talking about that trip as if it was the most awesome trip ever, that everyone had non-stop fun and now everyone who was on that trip are best friends for life.
I feel like this is an issue one just has to grow up past. Walking on eggshells and deception so as not to hurt anyone's feelings is an annoying way to live. (I preach as a sinner). Related: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-frie...
As to Zuck's machine having your information, yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts, it can also determine what the friend groups of this person are. Probably even determine their wealth by their clothes, accessories, vacation locations, house ("Oh 5 users are gathered in a particular geolocation that is none of their houses [which we know about because 95% of the time a phone returns to a particular geolocation at night], and we can see from the photos that that 'unregistered user' is with them", that must be this user's house. Oh he lives in this neighborhood, that has a median income of EUR xyz. A reverse lookup of addresses we have because online shops upload their customer data to our system determines that one of the people living in that address is named Wouter Janleys, and from the shopping data he likes, amongst other things, mid-range to expensive wines.".
I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, that'd be a feature improvement for a Facebook project manager. Start showing your friends wine ads a few weeks before your birthday (as well as "It's Wouter's birthday in a few weeks" and "Remember this photo?" which is a photo of the group with glasses of wine)...
> yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts
This is a thing in FB: shadow accounts.
A lot of time and money and research goes into it, so that if/when people do decide to join, they will have a very "familiar" experience with all the right suggestions ready to go.
Yes, it's creepy as hell. No, you can't opt out as far as I know.
Approaching zero of my friends are on Meta any more. Most have inactive accounts; a few have canceled outright. Those that are “active” are mostly limited to wishing each other happy birthday.
Afaic, Meta pretty much killed their platforms by pumping rage-bait clicks instead of social content.
Exactly my experience as someone in the ostensible target demographic, late twenties to mid forties social circle. Granted I'm German with most friends/family in central/Eastern Europe so a bit less Instagram obsessed than the Anglosphere but so much has moved to Whatsapp (technically Meta I guess, but not really a public facing social network), Signal, Telegram.
And from what I see working with younger people out of uni, it's almost all private group chats, Discord, only real social platform seems to be TikTok. If there wasn't a date on the blog post I'd have guessed it was from 2017 or something, because the problem just feels obsolete now. Didn't Zuckerberg himself even say something to that effect?
No one is active on social media anymore like they were in college or high school. People just age out or get too busy for that kind of stuff. They might lurk but posts are pretty rare for most people who would have been posting 3 times a day 15 years ago. I'm not sure if the younger generation is actually active anymore or if they also just lurk now. Dead internet theory and all...
A think this is partly why a lot of this activity moved into private group chats, where it's more naturally segregated by social circles. Most people around me are pretty active on social media but vast majority of that activity is not in the public profile.
It's radicalizing as a twenty something who hasn't had social media in over a decade. Almost everything revolves around it or some friend Discord server. I hate it.
They needed to have proper defaults and they needed to let their social network grow organically and they needed to have an actual sane, proper, feed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
There's a reason everyone is on Facebook (one reason is that everyone is on Facebook): Myspace legitimately shot themselves in the foot (I guess Friendster too by lack of proper site performance, even though it was cleaner) by having 'messy' pages. There's real value in being able to find the people you want/need to find by their real names (except, Google, maybe don't you know, hijack people's Youtube accounts in order so that they use Google+)
But then Facebook introduces shifting privacy settings, tagging without permission, not giving people control over how information is displayed generally
I understand it's about beating the competition and about growing and 'connecting the world' but some companies' DNA is set a certain way from the beginning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
People who know me know that even though I'm very public (my handle and my email address are my name, for instance), I care about privacy, and therefore it's unacceptable to post abount me on corporate social media without asking permission, just as they also know to not name or tag me.
People who post without asking don't know me well enough to name or tag me, so I don't care.
If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it.
We need to stop acting like others' ignorance gives them an excuse to do things we don't want. "But everyone does it" is bull, and we're doing people a disservice when we let things slide because of that.
> If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it.
Ultimately you can't stop this though, at all. You say people who don't know you don't tag you, but it just takes a friend of a friend in a group to do so, and then dismiss your concerns and not care, and you have no recourse to do anything.
This bothered me a lot in the past. I want to be in full control of any information that is on the Internet concerning myself. Some of the people I know will add an appeasing comment before taking a picture: "don't worry, I won't upload it anywhere!", but most people will just post it willy-nilly all the same.
By the way, during last Monday's blackout in Spain, I had a sense of this kind of burden being lifted from the atmosphere... the idea of nobody having the ability to record and publish anything anymore (for the duration of the blackout, at least), was quite interesting... relieving, even.
Should it be allowed / legal to 'tag' people that are not part of a service?
I might agree that 'celebrities' and leaders of larger organizations are 'public figures' and thus if there's a reasonable public interest it should be allowed to tag them, probably with a publishing delay for security.
However individuals? Random citizens who aren't part of a platform and cannot manage their data? IMO the default should be deny data collection and do not profile.
I don't think the problem raised in the article is limited to tagging. Friend A can recognize me in a picture from friend B regardless of whether I'm tagged there or not.
Then again, this is a pretty obscure problem, or more of a "problem".
What happens if you don't have an Instagram account, write to them and demand that they take down images of you, or provide you with all the images you appear in? Some level of this seems to be provided for by the GDPR and the EUs right to be forgotten.
I'm visiting Instagram lately only to see funny reels sent from my friends. My Instagram timeline is consisting of 90% influencers and life coaches, who is going to tell me my life sucks because I don't do what they have to tell me to do and 10% my friends.
if you're a passive person, there are most likely more famous people for them to judge and make fun of if that's what you're worried about who tarnish their images online every day! i look at posts like these like sharing a photo album with friends
I expect people to ask me before they publish documentation of where I've been and what I did on services like Instagram, and I usually decline the offer. Is this considered unreasonable elsewhere?
One of my "its probably time to quit IG" moments prior to quitting 3 years involved being on a condo board.
A resident sent a petition asking for a variance from the bylaws, and part of the pitch was "well I saw XYZ on your IG so I thought you'd approve of this".
Uhh thanks, rejected.. blocked on IG, quit IG, bye.
That's just normal politics though? If you publicize that you have an interest in X, and you're on the board, and someone wants X from the board, isn't it normal they'd approach you first?
Were you trying to require them to use a more formal process? The smaller the number of people involved, the less formal the processes yet (no matter how much bureaucracy you try to drown them in - in a small political system, drowning someone in bureaucracy is just a rude way of saying no).
I don’t understand, what kind of marketing do you think this is? I’m OP. I setup the blog a while ago but only for the first time I thought of something that was actually worth writing about. Something needs to be the first post! I’m sorry you found it boring.
The social etiquette argument has been thrown away with the bath water. You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok.
The term I like is Social Cooling, the subtle way in which people change their behavior because they are both present in person and online. Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.
Have you had that experience, of being taken as a weirdo? We may move in very different circles, but when I ask to be left out of social media posts I’m always met with respect and understanding, at least to my face.
If anything, in recent years, I’m met with something closer to the respect people afford recovering addicts turning down drinks: “oh man, I wish I were off of it too, good for you.”
>You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok.
You might call me a "weirdo", but this has absolutely not been my experience whatsoever. Friends, family and coworkers don't really give a shit that I don't participate in social media, and I haven't been treated any differently for it.
Edit: And hell, generally, what's life without a bit of weird? The homogeneity of everyone doing the same thing together all the time sounds boring as hell. Here's to the weirdos!
A lot of people thought non-drinkers were kinda weird a decade or so ago when drinking wine on morning TV was popular. Now half of the beer aisle is N/A offerings.
No one thinks it's weird. You'll likely have a harder time making friends, flirting or networking for your career, but it's absolutely not weird to not use social media these days.
> Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.
Nobody is being socially pressured to avoid the word "dead/died/killed" in person, that's just an illustration of slang perpetuating.
paxys|10 months ago
alwa|10 months ago
What’s the virtue in offending people when you could instead be kind?
I know one woman who is having a baby shower, and I know another woman who recently dealt with the loss of her child. It’s not “secrecy” to celebrate the baby shower and avoid bringing it up with the recently bereaved, it’s respect and good taste.
I feel like we used to call it discretion…
mjevans|10 months ago
kcmastrpc|10 months ago
tshaddox|10 months ago
elric|10 months ago
It's fine to overshare as much of your life as you're comfortable with. But we should be more mindful of how we include others in this.
hammock|10 months ago
As a more general example, you wouldn't talk about a happy hour you were going to after work with people who weren't invited/aren't invited/you wouldn't invite. I believe every sitcom on the planet has at least one episode with this lesson in it.
wouterjanl|10 months ago
throwanem|10 months ago
Are you sure?
aaroninsf|10 months ago
one which has been intentionally cultivated, exploited, and capitalized, by Meta,
so yes, it is Instagram's fault. They are the primary party—though I do not excuse those complicit with surveillance capitalism, meaning every person who continues despite unending evidence for how sociopathic and destructive the company, its management, and its impact is, to use their products. Which use however is also traceable in significant part back to Meta, via the ugly mechanics of exploitative and amoral engagement-engineering and their exploitation of monopoly.
This is a front upon which they might and should be confronted... a class action on behalf of those have not consented to participate in surviellance would be a lovely thing.
Under the current political shitshow, also in measurable part the "fault" of Meta, however, we can expect no such thing.
zombitack|10 months ago
noman-land|10 months ago
timcobb|10 months ago
delusional|10 months ago
procaryote|10 months ago
II2II|10 months ago
I also hate drama, and would much rather lead a quiet life as a person no one likes than an interesting life who some people dislike.
lostmsu|10 months ago
elAhmo|10 months ago
If they don't respect that, you need a new set of friends.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
igor47|10 months ago
2Gkashmiri|10 months ago
Zero issues since then. First time my emails got into spam but after unspamming, it worked.
Havent had issues. I use a cheap racknerd $12/year server so its way cheaper than proton or stuff and I have dozens of emails across family members.
AndriyKunitsyn|10 months ago
barbazoo|10 months ago
pabs3|10 months ago
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
netsharc|10 months ago
I feel like this is an issue one just has to grow up past. Walking on eggshells and deception so as not to hurt anyone's feelings is an annoying way to live. (I preach as a sinner). Related: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/01/fringe-frie...
As to Zuck's machine having your information, yeah I can imagine if they bothered, they could see that there's always a person or two in all the pictures that aren't associated with any of the faces of the accounts, it can also determine what the friend groups of this person are. Probably even determine their wealth by their clothes, accessories, vacation locations, house ("Oh 5 users are gathered in a particular geolocation that is none of their houses [which we know about because 95% of the time a phone returns to a particular geolocation at night], and we can see from the photos that that 'unregistered user' is with them", that must be this user's house. Oh he lives in this neighborhood, that has a median income of EUR xyz. A reverse lookup of addresses we have because online shops upload their customer data to our system determines that one of the people living in that address is named Wouter Janleys, and from the shopping data he likes, amongst other things, mid-range to expensive wines.".
I wonder if they can even advertise to you through your friends, hah, that'd be a feature improvement for a Facebook project manager. Start showing your friends wine ads a few weeks before your birthday (as well as "It's Wouter's birthday in a few weeks" and "Remember this photo?" which is a photo of the group with glasses of wine)...
mhitza|10 months ago
Probably did so through shadow profiles
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
not_a_bot_4sho|10 months ago
This is a thing in FB: shadow accounts.
A lot of time and money and research goes into it, so that if/when people do decide to join, they will have a very "familiar" experience with all the right suggestions ready to go.
Yes, it's creepy as hell. No, you can't opt out as far as I know.
alistairSH|10 months ago
Afaic, Meta pretty much killed their platforms by pumping rage-bait clicks instead of social content.
Barrin92|10 months ago
And from what I see working with younger people out of uni, it's almost all private group chats, Discord, only real social platform seems to be TikTok. If there wasn't a date on the blog post I'd have guessed it was from 2017 or something, because the problem just feels obsolete now. Didn't Zuckerberg himself even say something to that effect?
asdff|10 months ago
panstromek|10 months ago
ruined|10 months ago
chelmzy|10 months ago
alex1138|10 months ago
There's a reason everyone is on Facebook (one reason is that everyone is on Facebook): Myspace legitimately shot themselves in the foot (I guess Friendster too by lack of proper site performance, even though it was cleaner) by having 'messy' pages. There's real value in being able to find the people you want/need to find by their real names (except, Google, maybe don't you know, hijack people's Youtube accounts in order so that they use Google+)
But then Facebook introduces shifting privacy settings, tagging without permission, not giving people control over how information is displayed generally
I understand it's about beating the competition and about growing and 'connecting the world' but some companies' DNA is set a certain way from the beginning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
johnklos|10 months ago
People who post without asking don't know me well enough to name or tag me, so I don't care.
If someone posted and named / tagged me without asking, I'd have a serious conversation with them about it.
We need to stop acting like others' ignorance gives them an excuse to do things we don't want. "But everyone does it" is bull, and we're doing people a disservice when we let things slide because of that.
JCattheATM|9 months ago
Ultimately you can't stop this though, at all. You say people who don't know you don't tag you, but it just takes a friend of a friend in a group to do so, and then dismiss your concerns and not care, and you have no recourse to do anything.
Funes-|10 months ago
By the way, during last Monday's blackout in Spain, I had a sense of this kind of burden being lifted from the atmosphere... the idea of nobody having the ability to record and publish anything anymore (for the duration of the blackout, at least), was quite interesting... relieving, even.
mjevans|10 months ago
I might agree that 'celebrities' and leaders of larger organizations are 'public figures' and thus if there's a reasonable public interest it should be allowed to tag them, probably with a publishing delay for security.
However individuals? Random citizens who aren't part of a platform and cannot manage their data? IMO the default should be deny data collection and do not profile.
simiones|10 months ago
Then again, this is a pretty obscure problem, or more of a "problem".
bobismyuncle|10 months ago
mrweasel|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
nalekberov|10 months ago
raccoonhands|9 months ago
strathmeyer|10 months ago
cess11|10 months ago
steveBK123|10 months ago
A resident sent a petition asking for a variance from the bylaws, and part of the pitch was "well I saw XYZ on your IG so I thought you'd approve of this".
Uhh thanks, rejected.. blocked on IG, quit IG, bye.
immibis|10 months ago
Were you trying to require them to use a more formal process? The smaller the number of people involved, the less formal the processes yet (no matter how much bureaucracy you try to drown them in - in a small political system, drowning someone in bureaucracy is just a rude way of saying no).
mvdtnz|10 months ago
sannysanoff|10 months ago
[deleted]
imaginationra|10 months ago
[deleted]
wouterjanl|10 months ago
standardUser|10 months ago
[deleted]
wormius|10 months ago
firefoxd|10 months ago
The term I like is Social Cooling, the subtle way in which people change their behavior because they are both present in person and online. Have you ever heard some use the term "unalive" in person? It's as if they are protecting themselves from an algorithm, as if the conversation will be posted online.
alwa|10 months ago
If anything, in recent years, I’m met with something closer to the respect people afford recovering addicts turning down drinks: “oh man, I wish I were off of it too, good for you.”
jjulius|10 months ago
You might call me a "weirdo", but this has absolutely not been my experience whatsoever. Friends, family and coworkers don't really give a shit that I don't participate in social media, and I haven't been treated any differently for it.
Edit: And hell, generally, what's life without a bit of weird? The homogeneity of everyone doing the same thing together all the time sounds boring as hell. Here's to the weirdos!
soupfordummies|10 months ago
A lot of people thought non-drinkers were kinda weird a decade or so ago when drinking wine on morning TV was popular. Now half of the beer aisle is N/A offerings.
standardUser|10 months ago
kube-system|10 months ago
Nobody is being socially pressured to avoid the word "dead/died/killed" in person, that's just an illustration of slang perpetuating.
barbazoo|10 months ago
Definitely _not_ a universal feeling.