Please Go on Instagram Right Now and Tell Me Who Hurt You

Users You might think posting about your breakup is embarrassing—but you should tell me everything. The future of social media depends on it. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by By tawatchai1990/Adobe Stock, ZinetroN/Adobe Stock, and nenetus/Adobe Stock. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Two weeks ago, Meta announced that Instagram would be piloting 90-minute horizontal “feature” videos in the app in an effort to turn the app into a destination for full-length shows and podcasts. “What you’re now going to be able to do is, you see a clip of a podcast that you love, you can just click and continue watching or watch the full video, and you’ll be able to dive in and see the whole thing because creators are going to be able to link these Reels to their overall feature,” Tessa Lyons, VP of product at Instagram, told the Hollywood Reporter. It’s a bit of a pivot from Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s vision. In the announcement, Mosseri said that he was against incorporating longform video for “a long time,” as watching 90-minute videos could mean fewer interactions with Reels and less content that you could send to friends. But the fact of the matter is that barely anyone’s hanging out with their friends on Instagram anymore. Over the years, the algorithm has become a tidal pool of sponcon, increasingly littered with shoppable posts and influencer brand partnerships, as well as a healthy number of undisclosed ads. Reels is becoming more popular, with the shortform video platform accounting for 46 percent of time spent on the Instagram app in 2025. So it would appear that instead of fighting the fight to keep us all connected to each other, Instagram is instead choosing to lean in. Let them eat slop! Let’s get right to the bottom of the trough and see what’s what! Forget watching a movie in 50 parts that was originally posted on TikTok, so the Reels crossposted version has the resolution of a witness protection interview—why not tap into it and watch the full thing in one go? Let’s make your life easier and take those clip-farming accounts that are mining Caleb Hearon’s podcast for views and give you greedy little piggies the full thing to munch on in one go. I have no objective beef with this development, honestly, although I do miss seeing my friends on Instagram. (Maybe one day we’ll find each other there again.) But I think if we really want to bring back the original Instagram, community Instagram, the kind of Instagram that used to give us yearslong internet friends, there’s only one thing we can do to preserve this part of internet history: We have to get way messier. At some point in time, we all decided that since the internet was forever, we were going to be on our best behavior and do no wrong at all; in turn, content became eternal surveillance, a panopticon by which we are always judging how camera-ready and entertaining everyone is on a daily basis. Now, scrolling through any feed, everything is curated, everything is poised, and everything that is “authentic” isn’t really so—it’s still a little fashionably packaged for our algorithm-soaked eyeballs (people have curated their baby hard-launches and their breakup announcements alike, as if either of those things were ever pleasing to the eye). It’s no wonder, then, that people are instead turning to watching 100 ASMR horse-hoof-cleaning videos in a row, because no one dares to be petty anymore on Instagram. We shamed each other out of it. There was once a time when celebrities would post sheer chaos on there for nothing but the love of the game, and those were the times when we made internet friends, when we banded together over cultural moments, and when we made new memes based on existing ones. It happened because we saw each other, and we were patient and willing enough to be astoundingly messy together. Meta is dumping a ton of ad space into a place where we were already lying to each other in increasingly weird ways (once again: a curated photo dump is an oxymoron), but now, the algorithm won’t even favor opportunities for fun. So let’s put down our weapons and stop lying to each other. We know that being incredibly vulnerable in public works—Megan Thee Stallion proved just how effective it can be this year when she lit up Klay Thompson on her Instagram Stories for lying and cheating, broadcasting to her 32.7 million followers. Humans need human stories, and I believe if we want to scroll on an Instagram that is eternally fun, it’s time for someone to do the brave thing and start getting extraordinarily human on main. Is this solution a healthy one? Probably not! But I think it’s the only one we have left. We all stopped being vulnerable because we think no one wants to hear it. You might think you’re yelling into the void, and that posting about your breakup is corny or strange, but let this be confirmation that there is a willing audience who wants to hear about all the weird eras of your life, and that person is me. I want to see an in-feed post of your situationship that you share before he tells you he’s not ready for a real relationship; I’d like to see his full face and height in a photo you took on a date-that’s-not-a-date so I can get in there and be the judge of his looks. I want to feel the rose-tinted infatuation you feel for him through my screen, and I’d like to see a cryptic text-only post about what he did to you after the dissolution of the talking stage, so I can feel angry at him, too. And I want to be able to go back to the in-feed post after your cryptic breakup text to boo him in the comments, too! I would like to vote in polls about whether you should get that bad tattoo removed (my vote is always no, even if it is an infinity-symbol Minnie Mouse tattoo—that’s the spice of life), and I would like to be given the opportunity to screenshot your selfie of your post-breakup polycule. I think, if you would like, you have the rare opportunity to heal Instagram before it becomes the digital equivalent of a box-brand dollar store with Judge Judy constantly playing in the corner. I await your content. Instagram Internet Internet Culture Relationships Social Media Video Friendship