“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness as they bowed before this new altar of uncensored, uncurated, and utterly thoughtless photo dumps.”
I hate Instagram’s 20-photo carousel.
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
It is truly possible to have too much of a good thing. It’s like gorging yourself on macarons until you throw up, or bingeing a show for so long that your eyes start to cross. And such is the case of the Instagram 20-photo carousel.
The original 10-photo carousel was splendid. Perfect, even. As a much-needed improvement on the single-photo post, the 10-photo carousel option gave you just enough room for aesthetic variety and narrative storytelling, while forcing you to be choosy and considerate of IG genpop’s time.
And then, like a thoughtless toddler destroying a gorgeously well-structured tower of blocks for no apparent reason, Instagram destroyed this balance. Last August, the app announced that it would allow users to include up to twenty frames in one post. And so, what was once a tidy medium of thoughtful curation became instead the visual equivalent of viewing an endless stream of distended cow stomachs’ worth of barely digested material.
Expanding a 10-photo carousel into a 20-photo carousel was like turning a Shakespearean sonnet into a grocery list, one of Chaplin’s silent films into the QVC channel, or the Venus de Milo into an H&M mannequin. In the platform’s naked pursuit of quantity over quality, it killed the delicate art of the dump.
I would have been able to ignore this ridiculous update if everyone had just stuck to an unspoken agreement, where we all respected the 10-photo cap. But no. No, no, no. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness as they bowed before this new altar of uncensored, uncurated, and utterly thoughtless photo dumps. Suddenly everyone wanted to use a 20-photo carousel to post about their Labor Day weekend which, mind you, was only three days long. I was aghast. It was like waking up one morning to discover that we abolished traffic rules overnight, and instead of driving like the civilized beings you’d trusted them to be, your friends were tearing through school zones at 85 MPH and running red lights left and right. Have we no decorum??
Let me be clear: There is no single post, event, or life update that would ever necessitate 20 photos. Never, ever, ever. Your very first exchange trip to Berlin where you somehow got into Berghain and got your tongue pierced in Neukölln does not need this kind of diaristic play-by-play. Your honeymoon with your high-school sweetheart in Palermo where the two of you found your centers of gravity and reconnected with your Italian heritage while celebrating new beginnings does not, either. (Maybe seven photos, max.) Your meme compilation about evil bisexual non-ethically non-monogamous men from Bushwick also does not make the cut, I’m afraid. (Frankly, does it even warrant a post at all?? Maybe stop and marinate on that one for a day or two.)
I genuinely cannot imagine a single life event that could inspire me to scroll through 20 photos as one of your followers, or to post a mega-carousel myself. You could tell me that a rogue asteroid was about to hit my home and knock me dead and the only way I could stop it was by posting a 20-photo infographic that contained a magical incantation on its final slide and, even then, I still couldn’t say for sure that I’d be able to make it through all 20. By the fifteenth slide I’d think to myself, Enough of this, I’ve lived a pretty good life. Why not just call it?
I know you have rebuttals. Like: what if I’m a real photographer/visual artist/actually successful memelord, and I need all 20 photos to maintain the fullest expression of my craft? Get real. That’s what Rizzoli book deals are for. I can also practically hear the social butterflies complaining: What if I just have too many friends who all need to be given equal visual weight in my Q1 dump (plus their tags)? To which I respond: that’s the whole point, Janet. Life is all about making difficult choices.
Twenty photos is simply too long. Say what you want about society’s plummeting attention spans, but the fact of the matter is, this is Instagram. Not your actual portfolio, not your actual memory palace, and certainly not your actual social circle. Nothing posted on Instagram can ever truly be that serious because this is the same app that houses Instagram Reels. Life is enough of a struggle, so why make the rest of us feel like we’re running a marathon, huffing and puffing to scroll through your spring break in Barcelona? Why do I feel like I’m diving into a dissertation when I look at your tribute to early 2000’s celebrity #couplegoals Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron? Why does your Sanrio meme compilation take more time to get through while I’m on the toilet than it does for me to actually take a shit? Nothing matters anymore, so you could at least do us a favor and keep it tight.
love how hate read introduces me to whole difft worlds, not a single person i know IRL posts to grid anymore, it's just a wasteland of celebs and meme pages.
the WORST tho is if you scroll to slide 3 or 4 then move on, the post will keep. popping. up. and showing you a new slide until you've seen them all against your will
100% agree, the worst, who wants to sit there and scroll one by one through a million boring photos...but i'm nosy so I do, and regret it every time