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Disclaimer: I am not in any way a+liated to Instagram or any other

companies/individuals mentioned in this article. All sketches and views
expressed below are my own.

Since 2016, the internet has cared more about memes than about Jesus.
According to Google Trends, memes have surpassed Christ himself in online
popularity, and the meme’s cultural relevance doesn’t look to be waning
anytime soon.

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Most of us who use Instagram frequently would know that not a single day
goes by without coming across a meme. The best memes are simple and
funny, the ones that can make you laugh after after a hectic day. But..there
is a problem when it comes to memes.

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A few day backs, as I was scrolling through Instagram, only to discover yet
another celebrity’s workout post, one of my college buddies dropped a
message on our Instagram group. Now, I’m pretty sure you will relate with
what happened next.

I opened the chat only to discover that the meme my friend had sent is
hidden.

Now maybe that’s not a big deal for many people but believe me, meme
lovers would agree with me that this is quite annoying.

The feeling of receiving a meme that is hidden is plain frustrating. Maybe

the best way to sum up this feeling is a meme itself.

I was feeling guilty about my lack of productivity during this lockdown for a
couple of days now and additionally I’ve wanted to start reading and
writing more around the diKerent products out there. So I thought why not
spend some time thinking about how to solve this problem? Here’s a crack
at it. Hope you Nnd this interesting.

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So someone shares a meme. It ends up being from a private account.
Depending on what kind of person you are (or maybe depending on how
much faith you have in your friend’s meme game) you either ignore the
message or else maybe you diligently send a follow request to the private
account. Then, you…err… move on and forget all about it because we are
all busy with our lives. Worse still, your friend who took the time out to
share the meme with you never heard back from you on it.

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I jotted down some of the key points to keep in mind while attempting a
solution:

People are busy — Users need to be able to see the post instantly and get
that instant gratiNcation. Else, they will just end up moving on to other
things in daily life.

What’s in it for me and what about my privacy? — The reward for a

private page owner to expose their page’s content needs to be lucrative
enough for them to consider the possibility. There’s a reason the page
owner marked their page as private in the Nrst place — Privacy!

This got me thinking.

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Yes, a lot of meme pages are in-fact private. No, these are not your lesser
known meme pages with a few thousand followers. These are globally
famous meme pages with over ten million followers that are partnered with
brands like Gucci and H&M, and which help sell millions of products across
the world. I did a little reading and here’s what I found.

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Check it out for yourself.

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Over the past few years, the memes category on Instagram has became
increasingly crowded and competitive. As a result, it has become extremely
tough to create original content that goes viral on a constant basis and
continue gaining thousands of followers every day. The popular meme
pages are no longer someone’s side hustle or passion project, rather most of
these accounts are run by professional marketing agencies. It’s not
surprising then that many of these pages end up contributing to sales worth
millions of dollars each year.

The Trend of Going Private

Faced with growing competition, many memes pages started following the
“hack” of changing privacy settings from public to private thereby forcing
people to follow them in order to engage with their content. This has mixed
opinions on both sides of the fence.

While, social media users Nnd it increasingly frustrating to encounter

hidden post messages and wait for the page admin to accept their follow
request repeatedly, for many meme creators on the other hands this has
worked like a charm. Many marketing agencies have have claimed that this
practice has help them gain as many as 10,000 followers in a single day for
their top accounts.

So, while all this might be working well for many meme pages, all of this
does raise a few important questions around the consequences of this
“hack”.

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Below are some of my thoughts and sketches around how Instagram can
introduce a new feature to solve for these challenges.

This is not a one size Nts all solution as this will not work for all Instagram
users and business accounts and so this can be a feature users and business
accounts opt-in for.

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Keeping in mind the two major aspects of the problem detailed above, I
realised the need of a solution which achieves two objectives:

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Here’s the proposed user dow:

Interested meme page owners enable Preview Mode when sharing their new
post.

Doing this, would allow viewers to preview the content being shared.

Now, the next time you see that annoying messaging saying the post is
hidden, you can simply tap on Preview to get a sneak peak.

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Should the page owner allow it, you can even view the other Preview
enabled posts that are a part of the page which will help you make a well-
informed decision around following the page.

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Once the preview ends, the user will have the option to quickly follow the
page. The page owner can keep their most captivating content Preview
enabled in order to entice viewers to follow their page.

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Keeping in mind privacy concerns, any page owner who wants this
provision would have to opt-in and provide consent so that the privacy
promise for non-interested page owners is not violated.

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It’s an opt-in feature because there is a substantial cohort of users for whom
this feature is not valuable. Here are some of those cohorts:

The average Instagram user who’s not an induencer. Unless of course,

there are standalone posts which they don’t mind giving the public
access to.

Private accounts with high following who have an increased focus on

privacy and exclusivity e.g alumni groups, Nltered fan communities and
the likes.

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I believe that private meme pages are detrimental to user engagement and
simply put annoy users. Though, the “hack” of turning pages which were
public originally into private pages maybe working for many businesses, it is
not something that helps build engagement for the platform in the long
run.

A feature like Preview Mode would solve for the user engagement and user
experience problem while bringing in quality following for the meme pages
and thereby reducing the chance of people unfollowing the page after some
time. The opt-in nature of the feature would ensure that private accounts
who value privacy and exclusivity above following do not get aKected by
this.

Instagram frequently ranks amongst the top 5 social media networks in the
world. That kind of scale brings it with it, it’s own set of challenges. Where,
Facebook has become more cluttered and less engaging over the past few
years, Instagram has thrived. Now, it has the challenge to maintain that
level of quality engagement and user experience it has become revered for,
even as hundreds of millions if not billions of more people join the network.

Thank you for reading. I will really appreciate you sharing your feedbacks
and views on this subject and on this case study.

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