Bleeearrrgghhh social media is the worst. Again.

I’ve previously written about all the reasons I hate social media, and really only use it a) to stay connected with friends and b) try to get my work out there because I draw and write things so other people can enjoy them, not so they can stay hidden away in my hard drive.

A really horrible and stupid experience I had with Instagram a few weeks ago, though, just solidified why social media is more stress than it’s worth 99% of the time.

Before I want to get into that, though, I want to take a minute to explore and explain why social media is so stressful for me. I’m not just complaining to be a complainer. I’m complaining because I’m an introvert and the fast-paced, superficial, quantity-over-quality world of social media is just about the complete opposite of how introverts like to socialize.

Despite needing the occasional break to mentally recharge, I really enjoy the company of my family and friends. I feel like I could have meaningful conversations and do fun things with them all day. In fact, most of my family are more introverted than me and they're socially done before I am.

But, get me in a crowded, hectic social situation, and I’m miserable. In those sorts of settings, I can feel drained within literal seconds. All throughout school, I struggled with the classroom environment because I found the other kids obnoxious and noisy and I was trapped with them for most of my day. One time I went to a group activity at church, and within twenty minutes I literally started crying and had to leave because being around a bunch of other people I didn’t have close bonds with, trying to do a craft I didn’t particularly want to do, while overhearing a dozen different conversations at once, was too frazzling and not at all fun.

I, like all introverts, have a strong preference for deep, meaningful, intellectually stimulating conversation over surface-level small talk. And social media is just not built for that. It really burns me out to spend most of my social media time just clicking “like” and dropping a few one-sentence comments when I would much rather be having a profound, enlightening discussion as well as making sure the other person is okay and seeing what I can do to be there for them.

So in a roundabout way, this gets us to Instagram. A few years ago, I tried having an IG account for my writing, but I was so annoyed by getting more spam comments than real comments that I just deleted the account outright.

Well, fast forward to a couple of months ago when I learned that three of my good friends use IG, and I really wanted to keep in touch with them and connect with them outside of where we usually hang out. So, despite my misgivings, I signed myself back up for IG, figuring I could also use the platform to promote my work a little.

For the first few days it went fine; I followed my friends and some scientific institutions, posted some art and ads for my Redbubble store. I got a little bit of engagement, which was nice. So far so good.

But then things started to get weird. I started to get locked out of my IG account and received emails from IG asking me to confirm I was a real person by giving them a text message code. Which I found incredibly odd, because I thought I was acting enough like a real person on IG—it’s not like I was DM-soliciting a bunch of people (an action I find so super cringey and a total infringement of people’s privacy; even if it is apparently A Thing to Do On Instagram, doesn’t make it totally low-class), or following hundreds of accounts in a day (I think I’d followed around 20 total over a period of several days).

Then, one day, I got an email from IG asking me to again send them a text message code. I did, and the website then prompted me to send them a selfie to make extra sure I was a real person. Despite finding that a really annoying violation of privacy, I went ahead and did so because I wanted to get back into my account.

Next thing I know… my account’s been deleted. Permanently. What the literal hey. I did everything they asked and still got banned from the site. I still can’t figure out what I did to merit that, and in their statement they said I wasn’t allowed to ask and wasn’t allowed to appeal.

The only thing I can think of is that their algorithm decided I was stealing my own art from elsewhere on the Internet, which is absolute nonsense. You don’t penalize someone for art theft unless you have actual evidence. My IG username was the exact same as my Facebook username, my Bluesky username, and the URL of this blog. Any human being would have looked at that evidence and concluded the IG account was being run by the same person who was posting the art on those other websites. But they didn’t even give me the dignity of being able to talk to a real person about the issue.

It’s extremely frustrating that IG chooses to treat its users this way, with AI constantly trawling the site and instantly banning any account its algorithm decides is problematic. I’m definitely not going back, because I have no guarantee I won’t run into the same problem, and if they’re going to treat me like that, they’re not worth my time anyway.

And a big part of why the situation with Instagram affected me so profoundly is because I had been trying to make more friends, going out of my comfort zone to join groups and talk to people, but not only did I not end up making any friends, but I came away from all those situations feeling thoroughly exhausted. It's really draining to pour so much social energy into a group or a situation and not get anything of value back. And then I basically got an entire social network rejecting me and telling me I wasn't good enough for it. 

After that happened, I decided to take a break from the whole "stepping outside my comfort zone" thing. I have no problem with going outside my comfort zone if I think I'm actually going to get something worthwhile out of it, but all I got from these situations was exhaustion and rejection, so I'm done until God says otherwise. It was starting to turn downright toxic.

As a depth-seeking introvert who gets really easily burnt out by the lightning-quick superficiality of social media, I need to be very selective about how thin I spread myself on social networks. I can only handle Facebook and Bluesky right now, and if anybody tries to persuade me to try out another platform, I’m going to need to think long and hard about it. Especially because we now have the problem of hyperactive AI being allowed to pass judgment without human intervention. That kind of garbage doesn’t give me any faith in a website having its users’ best interests in mind.

All right, I’m off to go laugh maniacally about making a chocolate chip cheesecake. I was trying to make caramel sauce to go with it, but I accidentally cooked the caramel too long and it turned into more of the interior of a Rolo. So I think I’ll roll it into balls and dip it in chocolate instead. Why is life so hard. :)