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Boles.xyz, Post.News and Pixelfed Are the New Social Media

I finally took steps to distance myself from three moldy, overdead, social media services. I deactivated my verified Facebook business page with 17,000 followers. I also deactivated my Instagram account. I made my verified, 47,000 follower, Twitter account, private. I let go of those social media services because all three have lost the common touch. They’re run by robots, mastered by intentional cruelty, subjected to bad human policy decisions, bothered by awful automation and, in one case, a sort of madman rules the nest. Today, none of those ideations of those social media services are what they were when they started, and I made the decision to no longer be a part of the “creative community”  that makes content for those services just so mega media can sell advertising off our hard work. Enough!



Continue reading → Boles.xyz, Post.News and Pixelfed Are the New Social Media

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From Instagram Fan to Hater: Why I Deleted My Account and Why You Should Too

Up until recently, I was a pretty solid fan of the Instagram service. I loved how it helped people to connect to one another through their photographs, whether those photographs had been artistically altered through filters or not. I really enjoyed how my friends could easily see the photos I took and give me a big thumbs up, so to speak, when they saw the photos they liked. All of this changed on Monday, December 17th, when Instagram suddenly announced that they were changing their terms of service — and it didn’t look like it was going to be for the better.

Continue reading → From Instagram Fan to Hater: Why I Deleted My Account and Why You Should Too

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Against Instagram and Other Filtering Agents

I do not like image filtering services like Instagram and their ilk, because the purpose of those services is to change reality and alter in situ facts.  Why bother preserving in image if you don’t want it saved and displayed with the highest possible, non-filtered, quality?  I recently mentioned my concern in the comments flow for this article:

Here’s what I don’t get about services like Instagram — we always want better cameras with higher megapixel counts and clearer optics — and then many of us “dumb down” those crisp and beautiful images with predefined filters from services like Instagram.  Why?  If you are preserving a moment in history — why are you coloring that moment, and inherently changing it, to look like a 1970’s Polaroid?  Why are you losing all the magnificence of the original shot that your camera is able to create?

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Hurricane Sandy, as Told by Instagram

Many years ago, people scribbled on cave walls — the bison they hunted, and the experiences they shared. Years later the scribblings were made on papyrus, and eventually printed with a printing press, which eventually evolved to include color photographs. What all of these things had in common was that in order for anyone to take part in these shared experiences, they had to go to where the written experiences were or to get a copy of the experience somehow — subscription or otherwise.

Continue reading → Hurricane Sandy, as Told by Instagram