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As the uncle of three teenage nieces, this article hit home for me. It's a look at some of the elaborate rules teenagers have created on how to use apps like Snapchat and Instagram to maintain their self-image and what it means to get insufficient likes.

It's amazing how mean I see girls being to my 15 year old niece on Instagram. Their little meangirl phrase is "tbh" - short for "to be honest." So they're write something nice, then "tbh" and then something mean. It goes like this, "you're a sweet girl but tbh your new backpack is kinda ratchet" or "your hair is beautiful but tbh u r slutty." Or whatever... I told my sister about this and she locked down her insta but she still gets random comments like this all the time. They all do.

Getting likes weighs on my neices 24/7. They were complaining when I took them to Star Wars that their insta photograph of them kissing yoda "only" got 15 likes.... and were considering deleting it! Because only 15 likes is about 30 too few likes.

I don't know why you deleted your other comment just now, but I agree with it. When I get just one like, I'm thinking to myself how awesome I must be because I touched another person's experience this moment with some photo or comment I made to the world electronically. If I got 15 likes, I'd be wondering if I'm some kind of gifted social icon without knowing it!
Likes are extremely cheap in the world of young people, so I can see how "only" 15 likes is a signal that the post wasn't greatly received. I watched my nephew (12 year old) use Instagram over the holidays and it was interesting to see how he used the app. He rapidly scrolled through his feed, barely giving each post enough time to register what it was, and he double-tapped (liked) around 80-90% of all posts as they went by.

If people are liking 90% of the posts on their feed, the "like" doesn't become that useful of a signal to determine what people truly like. It is being used for something else at this point. Some way of extending and re-inforcing a persons graph of friends? I'm not entirely sure.

Wow that's crazy. I'm sure that usage is not the expectation from the app makers. It almost makes me wonder if there is a strange counter-psychology going on there, as if your acceptance was in part measured by your participation, and that if someone did not see a like from you, it had consequences.
> that if someone did not see a like from you, it had consequences.

I'm 28 and people definitely notice when you don't notice one of their posts. A like is often just an aknowledgement of "Yes, I saw this, I still follow what you're up to, we're still friends"

You could think of it as a development to handle the absence of "dislike". Those 10% of posts which do not receive a "like" can be assumed to be "dislike".
Sure. And when I was a kid, $2 was a lot of money.
As teenagers we craved for acceptance, now acceptance has a hard number associated with it.
The general metrics I've observed on Instagram to show success:

- have at least twice as many followers as you follow

- have at least 10% the number of followers as likes per pic

So, you could have 700 followers, but follow no more than 350 people, and must get 70 likes or more per pic. That's "success." Granted, as you get into 2,000+ followers, it can get harder to maintain the 10%.

I'm curious. Since I don't have an Instagram account. How does Instagram "success" impact life in general?
One could argue that kids and teenagers use these apps to learn promoting oneself successfully. This is a useful skill to have.
It's a measure of social success. All the mean bullshit of middle/high school is now quantitatively measurable.
Made me laugh - hits the nail on the head!
I'm male but I think many people also overlook that Instagram is a visual medium which along with upvotes/downvotes for girls is powerful medium.
Today I learned that very smart people are working very hard to make my teenager's life demonstrably worse (organizing push notifications at lunch time for high schoolers? Thanks, folks). I probably should have known that already.
This is the first I've heard of Wishbone, which seems pretty harmless but Instagram is one of the most toxic internet substances out there at the moment poisoning our collective psyche. I think it should be fucking destroyed.
"...Instagram is one of the most toxic internet substances out there are the moment..."

Social is the weapons-grade plutonium of online design; you can use it as part of a stable fuel source, or as the components of a weapon, but it's most likely to end up carelessly scattered around your community poisoning it for generations to come.

In Instagram's case, its social enablement is relatively anodyne, but it illustrates some common problems: comments are higher-bandwidth than content, and comments are easier to create than content. Thus, low-value information is added to the system at a much higher rate than high-value content. Solving this is, to put it mildly, not easy.

> Social is the weapons-grade plutonium of online design; you can use it as part of a stable fuel source, or as the components of a weapon, but it's most likely to end up carelessly scattered around your community poisoning it for generations to come.

That right there is sheer genius, ladies & gentlemen!

It's interesting to compare sites with healthy social components (e.g. HN & reddit), to those whose social component has died off (e.g. /.), to those which use it unhealthily, if profitably (Instagram?).

I would not identify Reddit as having a healthy social component. Everything that has been said here about Instagram is also largely true of Reddit, and then you can add in the Neo-nazis, fatpeoplehaters and so on on top of that.
So let me ask a provacative question.

What makes a social component healthy/unhealthy? I generally found myself nodding to posts until I read yours, which made me think quite a bit harder. Can a community with questionable moral value (neo nazis) have a healthy social community? I certainly think those two are not mutually exclusive, and to tie them together may detract from a complete understanding of what "unhealthy" means.

(To answer the question myself, "healthy" vs "unhealthy" in my eyes is whether the community is a self perpetuating echo chamber, (for which many parts of instagram this certainly holds true, content regurgitation and mindless browsing, but I'm apt to believe not ALL of it) and similarly an ISIS forum may have more of a tendancy towards "unhealthy" social content, I don't believe it necessarily dictates it; I've read some fascinating discussions even on HN (linked to other sites) between extremist Muslim/European religious experts that would be a fit for the most cultured discussion boards, even if context of one sides subject matter is far darker.)

I don't use Instagram, but I understand that you go there with your real life persona, but the usual reddit handle is a quite unidentifiable nick?

And subreddits are different. I really don't see much connection between Instagram and /r/polandball

That depends on the sub. Many are quality groups. Most that have very large subscriber bases like the default subs are not.
I have created a mostly anonymous Instagram account, and I love it. Gives me somewhere to post all the photos I'd feel like a cock posting on Facebook. I am "friends" with some truly random people and we comment on each others' photos: some random 50-year-old Nigerian guy living in Atlanta who loves getting table service at clubs and natty shoes; a single mother (I assume) in Brazil; a whole bunch of other luxury travel lovers.
That's a bit strong. I love sharing photos with friends and family, and Instagram makes these super easy to do, and quickly, and with easy ways to get comments from those I'm interested in.

Instagram itself is not the problem. How teenagers are using social media is a behavior or perspective issue in my opinion, not a problem with an actual product that just offers a nice tool. Growing up before the internet, these attitudes were in effect, just exposed differently. Honestly I think it is a cultural problem, because there are other places in the world where this obsession with acceptance does not exist, and where everything is not driven by ego or lack thereof.

Flickr never caused the problems Instagram does, and maybe the narcissism and neurotic behavior Insta encourages is purely accidental but it is what is is, which is a pretty nasty invention I'm not so comfortable dismissing.
Flickr also never really had teenage users.

I'm pretty sure that these behaviors just come from being a teenager and aren't caused by any specific technology.

And even more specifically, I do believe the problems stem most from American teenage behavior, because while kids are kids the world around, American culture does have a much higher degree of judgemental behavior. I'm an American and my eyes were opened to how different it really is in the U.S. compared to other countries when I moved abroad several years ago.
Having traveled pretty extensively, I think judgement comes in different forms with different cultures but it's definitely not an exclusively American phenomenon. In fact, I don't think Americans hold a candle to the Hong Kongese.
I use Instagram to share some of my photography experiments, and to discover new photographers; along with Twitter, it is my favorite social network. I don't think your point is well argued.
Sure it can be used artistically but overall I'd say it represents one of the more ugly facets of modern life.

It's become the mosquito of the Internet, possibly useful in some mysterious way but if I had to choose a species to exterminate it'd probably be that one.

Instagram would not be 1/10th as popular as it is if it was only "possibly useful in some mysterious way". If you don't like it then don't use it, but it clearly has a use for many many people. We shouldn't get rid of a tool 300 million people voluntarily choose to use just because you're upsets at the way some american teenagers use it.
This article seems to equate teenagers with teenager girls.
"'You want to create an environment where it doesn’t feel like only 1 percent of the people win,' said Eric Kuhn, Science’s head of product. 'And we’ve heard that with other platforms, like as soon as you’re clearly not in that top 1 percent, you don’t want to use the app anymore.'"

Important point about the evolution of social networks - unpacking it:

1) focus more on small groups rather than a large whole - most teenagers now know they won't become social celebrities, but still need validation within reach.

2) validation should be lasting, and "social failures" should be short - teens are aware enough of the algorithms promoting & demoting their content that they consistently manually remove content. As such, these algorithms either adapt to being played, or become useless.

Any smart community architects out there should be encouraging small, close groups over a large whole.

If I were Wishbone I would not be furiously angry at that article - oh wait - I might even struggle to pay my way to a better advertising. Of course their target audience might not be the average reader of NYT, but a bit more objectivity, research and depth would have been nice.

Important issue - but unimportant article in my opinion.

I deleted it because it had about -5 points. :) If anyone's curious I just said that sometimes the only "likes" I get on facebook are from my mom. Ever since I accepted her friend request, my mom likes every single damn thing I post. I am experiencing Facebook Like Inflation from my mother.
The comment had -1 points (two downvotes). Usually those situations self-correct after a while, since other users see there is nothing wrong with the comment and bring it back to par.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830311 and marked it off-topic.

> "only" got 15 likes.... and were considering deleting it!

> I deleted it because it had about -5 points.

I wonder if you're the one more concerned with the feedback and likes than your niece, and you're what caused her to delete it. Why are you worrying about the negative comments they receive and bothering them about your worries, which they then respond to by deleting what worries you? I can see an alternative view where from their perspective it was more like, "Gah, my uncle is stalking my IG and freaking out on me; deleting to make this drama go away!"

That a pretty funny irony you pointed out.
Usually when I delete a strongly downvoted comment it's because I realize that I've failed completely at expressing myself. People are getting a harsh message where I intended to say something valuable.

It's not that I need validation, I use social networks to help me understand how to negotiate difficult topics. If I re-read a downvoted post and I think I did a good job of expressing an idea people just don't like, I'll leave it up.

There are consequences of being downvoted enough on HN. You get rate-limited, hell-banned, etc
HN becomes really unpleasant to use when you get enough downvotes, daily post throttling, etc.
I was surprised to see it downvoted so much, there was nothing bad about the comment, I found it rather charming.