You: I am working on an Instagram clone just for fun. Want to take a look?
Friend: Sure. Where are all the filters?
You: They are a work in progress.
Friend: Instagram is better.

Millennials are getting right f*cked.

Low paying jobs,
Many hours of travel to work because one can't afford to live closeby,
working 10 hour a day, and
there is no hope of owning a home.

Then people say 'oh what do you do when you get home?'

Sleeeep for the limited hours left!

Then your partner says 'oh you just come home to sleep'

Then you have instagram and all these 'influencers' saying go after your dreams... while they very well know they only get paid for heavily edited images.

Wish things were better for everyone.

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

I honestly don't understand people. They are unable to understand easy to use apps when you provide clearly labeled labels yet they use apps like Snapchat which apart from being the worst designed app I have ever seen (it brings SD820 to knees) is unintuitive as hell with no difficulty. How is this even possible.

Also on a side note, go fuck yourself Snapchat. And if any of Snapchat devs are reading this: " go fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live after creating such a piece of shit. Even a fresh out of college intern does better job than you. You think this is good? I have never seen anything worse than it. Even fucking in-house government apps are miles better and more intuitive than you. All your ripoffs from Instagram stories to facebooks new clone and others are better than you. Whoever thinks this POS is good enough deserves to be burnt."

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

"in this ad i will show you how to code something called hyper-casual games. these games have brought developers millions of dollars and i happen to know just a little bit about these games. see i also coded my own game and i brought me 6.5 million downloads. i then implemented my business plan and guess what i got now 65 million downloads. crazy. now if you just buy my book u will learn how to make millions of dollars just like me because game development isn't that hard after all!"

I never thought I'd say this but I fucking hate my cousins and relatives.

Money and fame hungry people, constantly judging and excluding if you are not 'cool' enough. Give them attention, obey their orders, spend your money on them if you want to be considered human by them.

They spend 24x7 of their on Instagram with all their activities and gatherings revolving around the core idea of taking pictures and showcasing on Instagram.

All of them have inherited a fuck ton of fortune from their parents and live to spend. Nothing else in their life.

Their ideology is everyone should spend all their money and even if you have $5 in your savings, you are miser.

Cousins and relatives have bullied so much in my childhood that I had to go for therapy before I stabilised a little. They still fuck around and use me.

Now that I am living a better life than what I used to, they have started mocking my parents for it by shaming and excluding them from the family.

Not only I never wished ill but I prayed for their good health and success all my life. But all they did was neglect and ignore me.

Fucking blood sucking bastards. I still don't wish bad but I never thought I'd see this day where I'd hate them so much.

As I have worked really hard for my current life, because unlike them I had no fortune to be inherited, they pick some weak aspect of my life and poke it continuously to the point that it hurts me.

I never felt so alone. If not for my parents, I'd cut off all the times with such scums and move out for a better life with new people in life.

It didn't take long to replace my instagram discovery page from showing attention seeking bitches to stylish cars and programming related stuffs.

Life is much better already now.

Does social media make you suffer? No? You sincerely enjoy Instagram and TikTok?

Then never listen to all that "social media detox" crackpots. There is no need to feel guilty about what you enjoy.

Some people find social media detox relieving. But some people don't. Detox supposed to make you feel better. If it doesn't but you keep blaming yourself and keep going just because some ray-ban-wearing hipster told you so, stop.

Watch your TikToks. Leave yourself alone.

Snapchat is by far the worst app ever developed. I like the concept but the actual development of the app is fucking garbage. It hurts my head that they haven't given a fuck about usability, optimisation or anything for that matter considering its one of the top social media platforms. It disgusts me, though Instagram has completely ripped off Snapchat in so many ways; they've done a hell of a better job at it and if people weren't so tired to SC I'm sure it would be dead by now.

Slow UI, slow gestures, probably the highest amount of bugs and crashes, shit camera because it thinks it can do a better job than the native API at rendering, painfully slow upload, stupid "featured" stories that you cannot get rid off and slow the fuck out of the app, battery drain even worse than FB, oh and not to forget that once you accidentally enable your location it's impossible to switch it off, the best you can do is hide it from everyone. I can probably go on and on with the endless issues this shit has.

On the most serious of notes, and i need yall to think hard about this.

What makes you a good developer whether Backend or Frontend or Web or mobile.

What qualities actually make you a good developer?

I mean, we all use google, github, stack overflow etc. So what makes Programmer A better than Programmer B.

and in a more practical sense, ive been coding for two years now and i have deployed an API written in node and an instagram automation tool in PHP (which is down now due to lack of funds), i lack frontend knowldge (but i want to make up for that) and i have projects that when i finish, with my connections can and will blow up in terms of income. now you on the other hand, what makes you better than me?

and lastly, how much code do you have to change from an existing project, lets say from github for you to comfortably say, yes this is mine.

So i ranted about how bad the snapchat app was in terms of design and performance a few days ago here and at a couple of other places and the general conscience was that I should use it for a few days and i would like it.

Well, here's what i have to say. IT STILL SUCKS!
I tried to use it every day to keep up with what others are doing and sometimes try to post but i really don't like his bad the app is. It doesn't make me want to use it. Its a battery hog. It fucking drinks through my battery like nobody's business. The v10 update made it a bit better but it still sucks.

I still don't like the UX design but I have come to hate it less. It still sucks though.

I still don't like that there isn't a proper way to discover people. The "discover" tab is just paid advertisement.

The biggest problem of a social media platform when it gets popular enough is how to handle low quality media that people post.

Facebook clearly sucks at this.
13 ways of doing *
7 things *

Even when you have not subscribed to those kind of pages.

Instagram is doing a bit better but I can see low quality posts popping up as the vultures are now targetting Instagram more after Facebook's fall.

Friends, gather round for a story of "the user".

Two days ago I assisted a friend in reviving their scammed Instagram account with final confirmation it was back in their possession yesterday. I stated "make sure you clean out phone numbers, emails and change the password. WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T USE THE SAME PASSWORD"....I bet you know where this is going....

Queue 6:45am: "HELP! THEY DID IT AGAIN! THEY TOOK MY FACEBOOK THIS TIME TOO!" as a safety measure, I told her to link them for recoverability.....not thinking you just created a bridge to the facebook...

Now We're going through EVERY account BY HAND and changing EVERY password for EVERY service and enabling MFA. We've also learned the power that the forgot password button wields for everyone.

ProTip: If your friend was "hacked" be patient, friendly and soft to get every detail...sometimes you learn more and can position them better.

Now I'm upset with myself because I couldn't save their accounts and at this point we've lost the only footing we had to them. Social Media is a curse.

Build my own phone and support the Zerophone project by writing code.

Seriously what the fuck is going on with the development of major companies smartphones. Every year all there is are larger displays, better and more cameras, faster processors and some more 'AI' thrown into the mix.

What the heck am I supposed to do with a phone costing multiple hundreds of euros but locked down with an OS spying on you. The processing power available is hardly ever used because most people just use apps like Instagram, WhatsApp or other messaging services.

I get why larger screens are useful but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Better cameras are useful to some degree as well but there's a limit to it.
If you really want to get into photographing then please buy an actual camera.

Another aspect I'd of course like to talk about is privacy. It's hardly existent on IOS or Android smartphones with Google services. Of course one can install different ROMs like Lineage OS but if I already pay multiple hundreds for a device then I'd prefer it working for and not against me.

And dare you break a single part of your phone. You can't really repair it yourself anymore and one can't even change its battery. Most people either have it repaired or just buy a new one and throw it away. There is so much electronic waste, very difficult and expensive to dispose of, just buried in the ground somewhere.

Summing up: I don't really know where the development of smartphones is heading. A phone is a device you carry around with you almost everyday so I'd like it to be tailored to me and not spy on me.

I hope the Librem phone will be a success and other open source phone projects will gain more attention. I want a phone I can repair myself and tailor the software running on it to my needs. I'd like to write messages, listen to music, make calls, run a WiFi hot-spot on the phone and maybe play some tiny games on it once in a while.

Am I seeing multiple month old posts on my feed here because I wasn't really using devrant much till like three days ago, or is it because I've spent so much time on it that all the recent posts have been exhausted?

Deactivated instagram a few days ago and switched over to devrant as the primary procrastination social media. This is a much better place but it feels slightly odd to comment on a month old post.

Why is instagram so thoroughly broken and a user experience torture.

I know the standard answer of "As long as the core flows that hold up the popularity work, no one cares much", and yeah, true, but that's a reason for why no one fixes the broken stuff.

What I want to know is why is it so thoroughly broken in the first place? Granted, Facebook isn't the best of places but one would expect at least a certaim level of competency from a team coming from the same organisation that gave us React JS(even if Instagram did not originate there, they have been in the Zuck empire for a while now). Why do such thoroughly messed up UI/UX and features get pushed to prod in a company that has the time, resources, and talent to do things professionally(read: better than the mess that instagram is). Not to mention a fuck ton of missing simple features that would make using it much better experience (JUST LET ME AT LEAST COPY COMMENTS GODFRKINDAMNIT IF ENABLING EDITING COMMENTS WILL COST YOU YOUR FIRSTBORN'S SOUL)

Maybe I am somewhat biased since I use Instagram desktop more than the mobile app, but my point should still stand.

There are two kinds of art and leisure: Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollo was the god of light, knowledge and other such things. Dionysus was the god of wine and ritual madness. In a nutshell, the beauty of the stars in the sky is Apollonian, and the beauty of nice juicy ass is Dionysian.

My info landscape was too damn Dionysian lately. I don’t even use TikTok or Instagram. I mean music I listened to, like aggressive dumb rap, bad slang, swearing… Wherever you look, there are Cardi B’s and Kim K’s, with their ugly eyelashes, ugly makeup, ugly inflated lips, ugly voice, ugly things they say. Watching the dumbest shit ever on YouTube. The louder you scream, the funnier the joke. Also, the number one content is some people tearing down some other people: penguinz0 destroying someone again, debunk channels, drama…

Dionysian things can be attractive and comfortable, because they speak to our animal part. In a way, Dionysian is natural. But not everything that is natural is good.

I gave my info landscape an Apollonian cleansing. Unsubscribed from a lot of debunking channels. Changed the way I speak, adjusted my vocabulary. Deleted a lot of music from my library. Went from 6ix9ine to Pink Floyd, Sting and Dire Straits.

It all started two weeks ago. I feel… different, but not necessarily better. Time will tell.