Instagram

I have generally avoided conventional social media. I joined Instagram some months ago soley because someone I knew wanted to show me her artwork, and her Instagram posts were private.

I largely ignored the site (or whatever Instagram is), though I occasionally "followed" someone when the system emailed me a list of people I should follow, and one or two of them were people I actually knew.

I decided this week to play with the site, post a few things, follow more people.

Alas, I followed too many people too quickly, and the bots accused me of being a third party that I contacted in order to increase my "likes." I do not care about "likes," though it would be nicely ironic if people "liked" this post.

I had to change my password (because I had, according to the anonymous bots, given it to some imaginary third-party) and I still cannot "follow" anybody new for the time being.

So: I supposedly sought "likes" (which drives social media) and I tried to follow people, which seems rather important here, judging from the still-ongoing recommendation of people the site thinks that I should follow-- and I was penalized.

And while I have made two posts today, my attempt to post this diatribe were blocked by an "unknown error." Then it posted it three times.

Hopefully, the two-step authentification I've enabled will help a bit. Thus far, however, I face certain restrictions.

As I have posted elsewhere, Instagram, for a variety of reasons, serves as an excellent example of a certain term recently popularized by Cory Doctorow.