For those of you who used to be active on Instagram but have stepped away (or just stopped posting), I’m curious—why did you stop?
I didn’t use Instagram at all in 2025. This year I’m back (but not posting). I look at posts every day. It seems people are posting less or not at all.
Here are some of my reasons why I haven’t used Instagram:
- People rarely see my posts, because of the algorithm
- I can’t see my friends’ posts, because of the algorithm
- Instagram uses my images to train its AI
- Instagram’s terms are awful. They claim forever rights to your photos, even after you delete your images.
- I can’t search multiple words in Instagram
- Instagram is only about the current stream, not about the archive
- You have to be logged into Instagram to view photos
- Instagram crops all my images to vertical format in the preview
- When you look up a hashtag, I can’t see the most recent images. Only the most popular.
- Too much advertising
- I can’t see what other people fav
- I can’t search through what I faved on Instagram
- I can’t include clickable links in my captions
- I realized the app was designed to keep me hooked and anxious
- I post my photos someplace else better than Instagram
By the way, Flickr solves every single one of these problems. The only issue I have with Flickr is that the free level allows for only 200 photos. To keep more than 200 photos, you have to pay a subscription for Flickr Pro which is $82/year.
I also posted this question on Facebook and got a handful of good replies.