The start-up Un1Feed promises a vastly superior experience to the Instagram app, and raises questions about why big tech platforms seem to hate giving users things they enjoy.
Instagram has been embroiled in community discontent over the past months as it has brought changes to the way the app suggests content and ads.
To keep up with TikTok and buoy its profitability, Instagram has been trying to incorporate short-form video with Reels, altered its advertising system and moved to an algorithmic feed that gives you little control over the content you see.
The OG App has been released on Android and iOS to try to reverse the changes, and give users control over how they use the platform.
OG is not a new social media, but rather uses Instagram’s tools to give you a new way to access the social network and its content.
The OG App gives users tools to customise their feed, rather than relying on whatever Instagram’s algorithms think you want (which, considering the outcry for a return to a chronological feed, people don’t seem to want).
The app allows you to create custom feeds for topics like food, photography and celebrities, which you can separate from a feed of just your close friends. You can also choose the default feed which will greet you whenever you open the app, and can disable reels entirely if you want.
In a move seemingly geared towards digital mental well-being, the OG App also has a feature to stop the app from fetching updates to your feed for 24 hours.
This should help curb the desire to always open Instagram and look for new content, like a person who keeps checking their fridge until their standards have lowered enough to settle on a snack.
If you are trying to search for the app on the Play Store, I recommend using the developer’s name and searching “The OG App Un1Feed” or going to their website. Otherwise, just searching for “the OG App” will make you scroll through pages and pages of unrelated car simulator games.
Speaking to TechCrunch, the app founders explained why they started the project: “We saw our friends and family getting affected by social media, and even deleting apps because they didn’t have enough options to modify what they see.
“We wanted to put users, and not the advertisers, first with this app. We started with Instagram because we thought the app has the most toxic relationship with its users.”
The developers say they are aiming to introduce features like sharing your custom-feed settings, with others and downloading stories so that they can be watched off-line (a great addition for times of load shedding).
They also plan to add sorting filters that you can use on any feed, like “recent” and “top in the week”.
The OG App joins a group of applications which aim to provide improved, customisable,or ad-free ways to access popular social media, with similar projects for sites like Reddit and Twitter.
The apps are made possible by tools provided by the developers of the official apps.
This means their continued existence relies on Instagram not restricting the tools, but OG App developers have said they are not concerned about that at this time.
The founders have said they are not looking to charge users or to find new ways of monetising the platform. The work is being done on the back of $1 million (about R18m) raised from various capital investment entities.
But capital investment like that doesn’t happen because investment firms are feeling generous or personally want a new way to use Instagram. Therefore users should keep in mind why this service is being offered for free.
“If the service is free, you’re the product,” is a quotable sentiment that seems to stem from television advertising in the 1970s, but which has become significantly more relevant since the rise of big internet platforms and which accurately describes the all-encompassing advertising network that powers much of the current internet.
Following some technical hiccups in their login process, OG App statements have been clear that they cannot see or store your account “credentials, password, or data”. But worrying that some tech start-up wants to hack into your Instagram account has never been the real concern.
If you’re using the OG App, be aware that it is probablystoring and selling the data about how you use Instagram – what you look at, like and buy through the platform.
Considering the tech industry’s history of technically legal wording and motivations laser-focussed on profit, OG App’s vaguely worded statements about not seeing your “data” are hardly reassuring.
That said, Instagram was obviously already collecting and selling your data for ads, so perhaps it makes sense to give your data away in exchange for an ad-free app you enjoy.
In the wider context, it is almost astonishing that the features are not available in the official Instagram app.
Despite big tech’s big talk about innovation and the technological future, social media platforms seem apathetic about giving users tools and experiences that they clearly want and which don’t seem all too difficult to implement.
Platforms seem averse to giving users tools for customisation, despite a “personalised experience” being the reported goal of algorithmic feeds.
Different feeds for different topics, ways to prioritise or sort content, and changing default settings seem like easy ways to get people more invested in your app.
However, perhaps this gives the user too much power, and cuts platforms off from their source of monetisation and power – showing you ads.
Letting you decide what you want to see deeply affects these platforms’ business models.
Even if it just means only showing you sports-related ads on your custom “tennis” feed, or showing sponsored posts at regular intervals, user choice may be a fundamental change from the algorithm model where the platform decides what you see and you have little idea why.
IOL Tech