{"id":938,"date":"2026-06-28T13:42:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T13:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=938"},"modified":"2026-06-28T13:42:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T13:42:18","slug":"instagram-is-monetizing-humanitys-worst-impulses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=938","title":{"rendered":"Instagram Is Monetizing Humanity\u2019s Worst Impulses"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A couple of years ago<\/span>, an old flame of mine had the nerve to start dating a new woman. He had posted a photo with her on Instagram; they were wrapped around each other, smiling, with a cheeky caption that I took to be some sort of lovers\u2019 inside joke. I clicked on her username. She had a public Instagram account, so I was free to peruse her photos until I reached her high-school graduation, or until I made myself cry, whichever came first. I noticed she\u2019d posted an Instagram story that day. It was the only bit of content I couldn\u2019t access without revealing myself\u2014users can see a list of everyone who opens their stories. So I did what any sane woman would do. I logged back in to my dead dog\u2019s Instagram account and looked.<\/p>\n

Read more The Slave Ship and the Mayflower<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHidden lurkers,\u201d as one TikTok user put it, are either in luck or damned: Instagram announced earlier this month that it will be rolling out a new paid subscription called Instagram Plus. For only $3.99 a month, users can access a slew of dismal new features, including the ability to \u201cpreview stories without appearing on the viewer list,\u201d as the ads say. Other features include an option to shirk the burdens of online popularity by searching your story viewers for a specific person, instead of scrolling through all the names you don\u2019t actually care about; insights into how many times people rewatched your story; and \u201cstory extend,\u201d which allows you to set a story to expire in 48 hours as opposed to the usual 24, in case that special someone hasn\u2019t viewed it yet.<\/p>\n

All of this is \u201cdesigned to give you more of what you love about Instagram,\u201d the app claims, helping you \u201cexpress yourself, connect deeper with friends, and customize your experience.\u201d If what you love is the ability to more conveniently keep tabs on crushes or enemies, by which I mean torture yourself, then Instagram nailed it. Instagram Plus is social media\u2019s newest low\u2014a company preying on our most pathetic impulses, for the price of a small iced coffee.<\/p>\n

Instagram Plus isn\u2019t just a sign<\/span> of what\u2019s gone wrong with social media, but also with modern romance. The app has become a quintessential cog in the dating machine\u2014especially in those liminal stages, the flirtations and the breakups. It provides yet another way to try to create narratives about one another, if mainly by providing meaningless data to back up our least logical hypotheses. If my ex views my story, it must mean he\u2019s still invested in my life. Right?<\/p>\n

Any single person who even passively uses the app can tell you that it has added a new level of torment to their love life. Since Instagram was founded, in 2010, the brokenhearted and heart-eyed alike have pored over which pictures to post to attract a particular person\u2019s attention. Things got worse in August 2016, when Instagram created stories to imitate its competitor, Snapchat, which offered users the chance to post any regrettable content for 24 hours before it vanished, filed away somewhere in the endless Internet annals of potentially blackmail-worthy content. Suddenly, Instagram went from a place to document \u201cwhat were you doing to what are you doing right now<\/i>,\u201d Caitlin Begg, a sociologist and the founder of the research lab Authentic Social, told me. \u201cIt was one thing to see a Facebook album pop up after a weekend, but now to be seeing all these everyday moments of people\u2019s lives definitely changes the way we\u2019re perceiving things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Courtney Tracy, a therapist known on Instagram as \u201cDr. Courtney\u201d who focuses on attachment issues, told me the surfeit of information about other people\u2019s behavior can make us jump to ridiculous conclusions. \u201cWe get overloaded,\u201d she said, and our brains try to take back control by coming up with our own explanations for that behavior. \u201cAnd most of the time, we\u2019re not right.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never been lovesick and delusional in the age of Instagram, let me fill you in on the crazy things people do. I have spent hours scrolling through story viewers to see if an ex had seen my post, as if having his eyes on an image of my breakfast might make him change his mind about me. One woman I know has memorized everyone an ex follows, and routinely checks to see if the count has gone up so she can try to figure out who he\u2019s added\u2014in case it\u2019s a beautiful woman. She wasn\u2019t even that excited about Instagram Plus. \u201cTell me when they let you view who someone follows chronologically,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A number of people I spoke with had fine-tuned the art of targeting their stories to specific viewers. Some of them post stories to \u201cclose friends,\u201d a feature that lets you narrow who can see a story down to a targeted group or even\u2014unbenownst to him\u2014one person. This is an especially helpful tactic for a hot photo. One woman told me that, although she has blocked her ex-boyfriend from seeing her Instagram, his family still follows her. She usually hides her stories from them, but not when she posts wholesome content, such as a photo of her holding a friend\u2019s baby. Maybe they\u2019ll see and tell her ex that she really would have made the best mother.<\/p>\n

Lots of people ask to borrow their friends\u2019 phones or create burner accounts to continue to look at the profile of someone they\u2019ve blocked or who\u2019s blocked them, or to avoid getting caught looking at their stories. I used to lend my phone to a friend so she could see who her ex was following. She\u2019d always pan the phone toward me whenever she saw a new woman who seemed like his type. \u201cYou\u2019re prettier,\u201d I\u2019d assure her, while questioning my feminism.<\/p>\n

Read more What the New AC Culture War Is Really About<\/a><\/p>\n

The Instagram-story obsession doesn\u2019t apply to only romantic relationships. \u201cI\u2019ve had entire hour-long sessions with clients just talking about why their ex\u2013best friend is viewing their Instagram story every day, but not liking any of their posts,\u201d Tracy told me. \u201cYou can start to ruminate or overthink about the actual relationship you have with that person, when sometimes, it\u2019s just really not that deep.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the people I spoke with<\/span> said they wouldn\u2019t bother subscribing to Instagram Plus. But a number of them said that they would feel differently if they\u2019d recently gone through a breakup. Both Tracy and Begg worried about the app preying on vulnerable people in exactly that situation, as well as those who struggle with attachment disorders, OCD, or sensitivity to rejection.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not good for anyone, Tracy said, to \u201cknow where people are, what they\u2019re doing, who they\u2019re with; it can create these obsessive tendencies where it\u2019s just a lot healthier to have some blank canvas in your mind.\u201d She predicted the features would \u201cincrease anxiety, stalking behaviors, and time on social media, which is obviously what the platforms are going for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Begg was particularly concerned about being able to peek at people\u2019s stories anonymously. The use of burner accounts, she said, at least creates a sort of shame ritual that encourages you to step back and think, Should I really be viewing this story? <\/i>That friction is an opportunity for self-reflection. It helps stop people from acting on behavior that could easily become compulsive.<\/p>\n

Exactly how much of this tantalizing material can you secretly access for $3.99? In an explanatory video, Adam Mosseri, Instagram\u2019s CEO, said that you can get \u201ca little preview of someone else\u2019s story\u2014not the full thing, but just a preview\u2014by long-pressing on it.\u201d (Here he raises one thumb to demonstrate the long-press maneuver.) This seems, if anything, deliberately obscure. Lots of stories consist of a single photo: How do you \u201cpreview\u201d that without simply viewing the photo? Regardless, Tracy summed the issue up: \u201cIf the purpose is to be social, why are we looking anonymously?\u201d<\/p>\n

The genius of social media is that these companies know all of the secret things we won\u2019t admit we deeply want to do. The danger is that they let us do them. \u201cThere\u2019s a pattern that we\u2019ve seen with these social-media companies saying, Let\u2019s find out what their behavior is, and let\u2019s make it easier for them to do it despite the psychological repercussions<\/i>,\u201d Tracy said.<\/p>\n

Instagram Plus is rolling out gradually, but it will surely expand. Maybe the price will go up. Maybe more options will be added. Maybe\u2014almost definitely\u2014we\u2019ll spend more time online driving ourselves insane.<\/p>\n

If that sounds good to you, then definitely sign up for what Mosseri called these \u201cfun little extra features.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Comfort Democracies Confront the Control States<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drive yourself crazy for the low price of $3.99 a month!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nInstagram Is Monetizing Humanity\u2019s Worst Impulses - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=938\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Instagram Is Monetizing Humanity\u2019s Worst Impulses - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Drive yourself crazy for the low price of $3.99 a month!\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=938\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-28T13:42:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Instagram Is Monetizing Humanity\u2019s Worst Impulses\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-28T13:42:18+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938\"},\"wordCount\":1511,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/cbfd71d9e370632f7966bba51b2eed57.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=938\",\"name\":\"Instagram Is Monetizing Humanity\u2019s Worst Impulses - 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