Instagram | Media Culpa

How to install the drop down menu for suggested accounts on Instagram

A while back, Instagram introduced a new feature where you would see an arrow and a drop down menu next to the follow button on some Instagram accounts. The menu shows other accounts that are similar to the one you are looking at. But not every account had this menu and it was unclear who got it. I speculated that only accounts with a certain number of followers got it, but now I think I have found the solution.

If you log in to your Instagram account on a desktop and edit your profile you will find a box at the bottom of that page. If you tick the box that says “suggested accounts” then Instagram will add the arrow and the drop down menu to your account. This also means that your account will appear on other similar profiles as a suggested account. Please note that you need to have a public profile in order for this to work.

I tried it myself and logged in to a second account to see if it worked. I already had the menu on my profile which looked like this.

When I unticked the box the arrow disappeared.

I then went back again and ticked the box and the arrow came back.

Does this work for you? (Note: you can’t see it if you look at your own account)

Follow me on Instagram at @kullin

UPDATE 2: Even if you follow the description above, it doesn’t mean that you automatically will get the arrow. Some do and some don’t and at the moment I have not been able to figure out why.

UPDATE: There is a rumour that if you don’t have the arrow on your account it will be deleted on Jan 1, 2015. This is just a hoax, your account won’t be deleted and you don’t need to get it verified.

Check out my feed on Instagram and feel free to follow:

Instagram is wasting precious screen space with new look

Instagram continues to bring out new updates to its app every week now and the change I blogged about a few days ago has already been removed again. I love Instagram and I check the app several times per day. In the latest update there has been a change to the design of the activity feed.

The tab that used to be called “news” is now called “you” and for some time the notifications (likes, comments or follows) have been presented in a quite condensed feed. Images to the right had no white space between them. Before that, the images had rounded corners and also some white space between them. The latest look made it possible to squeeze in more notifications on the screen since each notification took up less space.

New look is wasting precious space
But as of yesterday, the feed has a new look again and the white space between images is back. That means that each notification takes up more space and that is not good. If you are a user with lots of interactions, you get loads of notifications and you don’t want unnecessary scrolling if you can avoid it. The new look is wasting precious screen space. Here’s the difference between the previous design and the new one.

Even on a smaller screen iPhone 4 to the left, you see more interactions than on the larger screen iPhone 5 to the left.

I hope they will revert this change and go back to the previous look.

Instagram adds suggested accounts in drop down menu

I’ve blogged about recent changes to Instagram and today I discovered another new addition to the popular app. Instagram is obviously adding improvements that will make it easier to follow new accounts. The one I just noticed is a drop down menu next to the follow button on a profile page.

When you click on the arrow Instagram shows three suggested accounts to follow that are similar to the one you are watching. A clever little feature that probably will contribute to the growth of connections among accounts.

Follow me on Instagram at @kullin

UPDATE: Here’s how you can add the drop down menu to your Instagram account.

Time stamps are back on Instagram photos

Last week I blogged about a new follow button on Instagram photos which unfortunately meant that time stamps were removed from images under a specific hashtag or location.

Well, they weren’t missing for very long, because now time stamps are back. Now they are displayed under the images so that both the new follow button and the time stamp are visible. Although I won’t take any credit for this change, it was exactly what I expressed in my blog post.

Here you can see the same image now with the new time stamp and below the example from last week without the time stamp.

Instagram removes time stamps and here’s what I don’t like about it

Instagram has added a new follow button on images that you find when you search on a specific hashtag or location. This change has the potential to increase the number of accounts users follow because it removes a few steps. Now if you see an image you like you can instantly follow that account with one click as opposed to before when you had to click on the user profile in order to follow that account.

It’s a smart move but the downside of this change is that the follow button has replaced the time stamp (“Följ” is Follow in Swedish).

I think the loss of the time stamp is bad for two reasons.

Hashtags on old photos
First of all, searching for images from a location or from different hashtags is a great way to discover new accounts to follow. But some people like to game the system and I don’t want to follow such accounts. Some people have a habit of deleting and adding hashtags to old photos just to get more likes and followers. And since Instagram displays images in reverse chronological order under hashtags, the images with the most recent hashtags are displayed first, even if they are a year old.

Previously you could instantly see if a photo was old, but now you can’t see the difference between an image that was uploaded 10 minutes ago and one that is 10 weeks old. Well, you can, but you have to click on the user profile and scroll through that person’s feed. In the feed, time stamps are still visible.

Photos in Instagram competitions
The second reason is that when brands arrange competitions on Instagram, there are almost always a time frame in which photos need to be uploaded to be eligable for a prize. If an image is uploaded after a certain time and date, it can’t win the competition. Previously you could see that immediately under a competition hashtag in Instagram, but now you can’t. You can still do this on sites like Iconosquare so it’s not a big problem.

The replacement of the time stamp is somewhat of a trade off. It removes a few steps in one place and adds them in another. I would have liked if Instagram could have kept it and still add the new follow button.

Follow med on Instagram: @kullin

Hello from the other side

Ett foto publicerat av Hans Kullin (@kullin) Mar 7, 2016 kl. 10:52 PST

Teenage girls sentenced in Swedish Instagram defamation case

Two girls, aged 15 and 16, were today sentenced in Gothenburg, Sweden, for defamation of 38 teenagers on Instagram. The two were responsible for posting photographs of mostly girls on Instagram, calling them out as “sluts” with claims of different sexual activities. More than 200 teenagers claimed to have had their photographs published on the “hate accounts” on Instagram, which at one point led to the so called Instagram riots outside the Plusgymnasiet high schoool in Gothenburg late 2012. The case eventually involved 38 plaintiffs where the evidence were strong enough to press charges against the girls.

The younger of the two admitted to publishing the photos, but the older girl had denied that she has been involved. During three days in December 2012, the Instagram account “Gbgsorroz” published names and photos with slanderous comments of more than 200 teenagers. The convicted girls asked others for tips, photos and comments via the messenger serivce Kik, and then published this information on Instagram.

The two girls have now been convicted and sentenced to youth care and youth service. In addition, they shall pay damages to each of the plaintiffs to the amount of 15,000 SEK, or 570,000 SEK in total (85,000 USD).

The information about who was behind the account was obtained from Microsoft and local internet service provider ComHem, according to the district court. They then tracked who used the actual IP number that had been assigned to one of the accused parents, according to SVT.

The entire sentence can be found here in Swedish.