A few days ago, Lucire’s Instagram account had a pinned post that we never pinned. It was a collaborative post from our friend Michael Nelson in Dubai which he posted in March.
Above: Our Instagram page after Mike’s team attempted to edit the post, and we pinned our issue 51 cover to counteract the post’s pin.
This is already a bad, bad decision on Instagram’s part. Why should a pin on a collaborative post that the other party had posted affect the ranking of images on our page?
Because we didn’t create the post, we had no ‘unpin’ option as we normally would.
Above: The only options available to us for a post pinned to our profile.
After some investigation, some helpful netizens on Mastodon told me that only Mike would have the unpin option.
So we got in touch with Mike and asked if he would unpin it. His crew tried everything, even removing one of the images from the sequence in the post. But the post stayed pinned.
Because they had no ‘unpin’ option, either. Their settings showed they never pinned it.
Above: Though more comprehensive, Michael’s Instagram post settings showed no ‘unpin’ option.
So, here are some more disturbing facts about Instagram. Fact: they decide what gets pinned, you don’t. Fact: you don’t get to have any control over your posts.
Ultimately, and with great regret, we had to end the sharing and remove our tag from Mike’s post. It was the only way to put our page back into the chronological order we needed to promote the latest issue.
Once again, it reminds you of how much Meta hates user agency, and how half-baked and clumsy their technology is.
Lucire’s Instagram’s sole raison d’être is to be a collective of images linking to our contributors, because so many of them insist on using it. The tagged images and stories form part of their portfolios.
Our continued usage is akin to why we don’t ban Gmail at server level: too many of the crew rely on Big Tech and its tools.
But we have managed to ignore Meta when it comes to Autocade (for now), finishing up with our Facebook and not bothering to update our Instagram. Neither ever translated into sales, so you have to ask the very obvious question: why bother? (Followed by: why are we making Zuckerberg even richer?)
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