Face it, You’re a Zucker
Instagram, everyone’s favourite social media platform. Or should I call it Insta-Snap-Tik-Book-Gram? Yeah, that sounds about right. I’m sure you know exactly where we’re heading with this, but let’s take it from the top.
It all started with Facebook, the Zuckerberg brainchild. A platform created for people to converse, share experiences, reconnect with long lost friends and family or simply tell us about what they ate for breakfast. A wild concept for its time, completely changed the internet, becoming the main source of your data pack drain. This groundbreaking platform had its time in the sun until Snapchat pulled up with its wacky filters, stories and disappearing messages. While they wrestled for our short attention spans, Vine slowly crept onto the field with its short videos and, boy, did it go through the motions. From Vine to Dubsmash to Musically until it finally found stability as Tik-Tok, which then went on to get banned in India but that’s another story.
During the time of Vine, Instagram made its debut, lurking in the corner gathering loyal users to eventually render Facebook outdated. It’s no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going down without a fight. So what did he do? He dropped a Billion dollars and made Instagram his own. You know the old saying if you can’t beat them… acquire them. Like any shrewd player, he used the same tactics on Snapchat and Twitter where, fortunately, he was met with much resistance. This was a pivotal moment – it was time to update the playbook.
Instagram and Facebook began to bombard us with feature updates, ranging from disappearing messages, stories and face filters to IGTV videos and reels. In case you didn’t catch it, the strategy was blatant plagiarism, unquestioned. It replicated almost every social media platform within a planet-wide radius, becoming an amalgamation of your favourite social channels. It made sure that you no longer had to switch between multiple platforms when one can offer it all, giving us a threatening level of convenience.
If you wipe the dust off your favourite middle school board game, you will remember just what monopoly feels like. Money, power and glory. Putting a single platform at such a high position above the rest gives it an undue amount of power to wield. Small platforms will never see the light of day because they will be nipped in the bud, and the consumer will cease to be king because only one will call the shots. It’s not a definite future as long as platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat still hold their ground, but at this rate, it is the most likely one. Whether this an exaggerated dystopian future or a real possibility a few years down the line, relies solely on your response to one question – are you a Zucker for Instagram?
