Maggie
Maggie is not a heavy social media user. She has recently become much more intentional about her use and only uses social media for 30 minutes every day. Though she likes seeing content from influencers she follows, she admits that she rarely gains anything from this experience as all her content is extremely predictable. She finds targeted ads effective but annoying, and wishes there was some way to edit them, especially when she is getting ads for a product she may have only clicked on once. She wasn’t aware of some of the existing features of Instagram that can help you discover more content, but says that that is something she wishes was more accessible. She recognizes that she is stuck in her own echo chamber and would like to change that.
> "I try not to like mindlessly scroll"
> "I can list you exactly what's going to show up on my blog my Instagram
I would like to be able to see what my algorithm is picking for me and being able to change what my algorithm picks for me"
> "Being able to change what I'm being shown your algorithm, or being able to control a little bit more the content"
> "Like I don't follow hashtags at all. Like I think a lot of people don't know that that's a feature."
> "like once or twice a week having it show up a banner at the top of your Instagram thing saying like, hey, maybe you'll enjoy"
> "why I don't really use Facebook, a lot is just because it's an echo chamber"
> "don't have to necessarily be a celebrity to be successful on TikTok"
> "I would say that Reddit might be the most equitable platform. Also there's a lot of anonymity"
Samuel
Samuel is a big social media guy and is very involved in the music and podcast scene. He uses Instagram, Facebook, snapchat and reddit a lot. He was fascinated by the idea of being able to filter through music under different kinds of hashtags, where you would see the new top posts of every week to help him discover new music. He thinks this kind of system could also work for different kinds of themes and categories. He thinks that engaging users in Instagram polls could be an effective way of handling “voting” for the top songs.
> "music polling like I have a more efficient way for Instagram to specifically target so you can like compare and contrast songs because right now you can attach music to h gram stories"
> "Like I don't care like what type of song it is, but like everyone wants to hear a fire song in the genre they're listening to you know, so if there was a way to filter out shitty songs of weird genres."
> "People should vote on what they believe the best of that genre is and then you can listen to that, you know, rather than having to like, the daunting part of listen to this is you have to peel through so much shit like there's so much bad"
Rebecca
Rebecca has also recently become a less frequent user of social media, though her top app remains Instagram. She finds the content to be very repetitive and therefore boring, and has a hard time digesting the vast amount of posts if she only uses the app occasionally. For her, she would like to have the option of seeing “top posts” that are universal to everyone’s Instagram, regardless of algorithm, as she believes this could break down the information better for her but also allow her to have more connection and conversations with people she may not otherwise have anything in common with. She likes the idea of creating a “Oscars for instagram” where people can self-submit their posts into categories like “most creative” “best effect” “most comedic” and have these videos voted on by the general public.
> "I opened that search bar, it ends up being like very repetitive kind of content. And then, as a result I don't really click on any of that stuff because like why that's like kind of boring."
> "opens the door for Instagram to provide more of a like educational purpose than it does normally."
> "sometimes in the mood to like kind of shake it up"
> "seeing the same top three content and like, maybe that does break down some boundaries between like partisanship"
> "I'm getting more effective information by it being more general than it being personalized, especially if it's a weekly thing because then it's like really across the board I could run into anyone anywhere, And we would have seen the same Instagram content, even though I wasn't on all week maybe they were on all week and I was on for two hours on Friday."
> "And then and then the fact that everyone in my life, regardless of what their views are but if they all use Instagram that we're all going to see that same thing, you know, opens up I think more lines of communication then the constant personalization of social media."
> "like the Oscars or something, You're like you have basically like a new newspaper, and it's an it's comes in the form of like headlines"
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