My personal tips and tricks to stay sane on instagram

There is a lot to say about algorithms and social media but I will not go into the vortex of sharing my opinions. I will share some things that help me:

1. I have folders on Instagram and lists on Twitter. 
2. I opt-out of promotional content when possible (aka suggested posts).
3. I made my Instagram stream contain those I follow only.

I had a 4th hack for Facebook, but it is broken now. When I find a way around it, I will post it too. 

And here are detains:

I created lists on Twitter and folders on Instagram. There I collect people or posts by the subject matter. For example, I have a list of the "epidemic-related" accounts on Twitter. And another one for local news. I collect things that inspire me in another thread. On Instagram, I have a folder where I save things that I want to draw, and another one, with humor/cartoons. There is a folder for everything I want to save related to the war in Ukraine. I collect quotes/expressions that I want to remember or find interesting to talk to people about. There is a folder for color. Materials. Recipes. Books. Music. And many others. The idea is that a) I can find things that I saved b) I can get a dose of tailored inspiration - and there is a finite amount of stuff there.

Opting out and de-personalizing targeted ads is a multi-step process and it is changing often - the proper way to do this is to do a research and adjust settings on your phone etc. But a simple (and very powerful - at least for the short run) thing that you can do is next time when you see a "suggested post" in your stream of posts on instagram - in the upper right corner of that post tap three vertical dots and opt out.

And the best present is adjusting your stream to those you follow only - in the app on your phone, on the hole screen there is an instagram logo in the upper left corner. Tap on it once and a n arrow appears to the right form the logo. Tap it and choose "following" - I think you will need to do it every time you restart your application. But this converts your stream to a chronological collection of things posted by the people you actually followed. Here is a screenshot that might help:

Best Nine of Instagram Posts

Lots of people are posting their Best Nine images of the year - these are the ones that gathered most likes. Some people adjust these and some don't, some tell the viewers about it and some don't - so I decided to see what are my best nine and here is what I got - with my comments:

If you don't want to read my handwriting the short version is that there are at least two videos that got into the final nine and I am glad as I want to make more of those - but they cannot be presented with a single frame! And lots of gouache-relate painting - I did several large projects in gouache this year - so no surprises there. Two images are from the 100 Views of Silicon Valley project and there is one from my learning of Spanish by drawing project.  But quite a few big things were overlooked! I started scrolling through my Instagram feed of over 430 posts this year and quickly collected a bunch of things that needed to go in the top nine. But there were way more than nine...

So after some careful consideration, I picked a few to switch - I like this selection better.
It looks like a summary and a little bit like a plan too :) 

Project in progress

A photo posted by Nina Khashchina (@ninaapplepine) on Aug 26, 2016 at 1:02pm PDT

Here is a look at about a year of sharing my process on Instagram:

I like that I can share to several sources with just one click (tumblr, facebook, flickr, twitter) and tagging is easy. Why so many places? Trying to see which one works better for me :)

Here is a link to a full album of images to browse through:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/23173190@N07/sets/72157606244662915/

Happy Friday!