Why Instagram Won

What bothers me about Instagram isn’t that everyone photographs their food and their cat and the sky—it’s the endless stream of terrible, washed-out, square filtered images it’s been responsible for. Those flattened, sapped squares. I’ve hated them for years.

I can’t even properly link my own images or save someone else’s without diving into the browser source or just screenshotting the whole page, which apparently you’re not supposed to do. For the longest time I kept thinking something better would come along and actually stick.

Every couple of years there’s a new Instagram alternative—cleaner interface, no filters, pure photography. The specifics don’t matter. They all fail because Instagram already won. Everyone’s there. The aesthetic is locked in. Those washed-out, flattened squares are what images are supposed to look like now, even though they’re objectively terrible.

What really gets me is what Instagram did to how people think about making images. Everything goes through that filtered lens before it touches the world. The colors get pulled out. The actual life leaves the photo. Somehow this became the default. Unfiltered photography started looking broken.

I keep imagining images that just exist—no processing, no frame, just the pictures themselves. It’s a dumb fantasy. The alternatives come and die. Instagram stays there, total and bloated, and everyone keeps making the same washed-out squares.