MILLENNIAL DIARY
MILLENNIAL discontent with social media has been brewing for some time — but last week it bubbled over, with the meteoric rise and crushing fall of a pretender to Instagram’s throne, Vero.
The Insta-honeymoon has well and truly ended and we’re sick of its ads and algorithms, but we can’t seen to quit.
Like a controlling partner, Insta has manipulated us into thinking we can’t live without it — but when a sexy younger model turned up last week, promising that it was different, our heads were turned. Vero essentially claimed to be Instagram, but without the things we all hate about Instagram.
While new social media platforms are ten-a-penny and generally barely make a ripple, Vero landed at the perfect time in the internet’s frustrated history.
In recent weeks, complaints from influential Instagrammers about a drop in likes and engagements have been gathering steam.
Just the other week Kylie Jenner tweeted: “Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me?” Snap Inc’s stock value tanked the next day.
Facebook continues to creep everyone out. Instagram changed the way its timeline was organised in 2016, and people are still livid. It went from being ordered chronologically — so the newest posts showed up first — to a “smarter” system which tried to anticipate what you would want to see. Posts that got more likes and comments now showed up first, even if they were a few days old.
It meant that we were not seeing much of the content the people we followed were posting. Paid ads suddenly dominated our feeds. For the many small businesses and influencers who rely on Instagram to make a living, the update was a disaster. Posts were barely reaching 10pc of their followers.
Then Vero came along — it was ad-free, with a chronological timeline. In its manifesto, Vero said that its customers are users rather than advertisers. It said it was “true and authentic”.
We thought it was the promised land. We flooded on to Vero in our hundreds of thousands.
The problem was, Vero is a bit s**t. It couldn’t handle the massive influx of new sign-ups, so the user experience was glitchy and riddled with bugs. It turned out to be basically unusable.
You can say what you want about Instagram, but it’s always there for us.
We were willing to stick with Vero as a symbolic F-you, until it emerged about 24 hours after everyone signed up, that its billionaire chief executive Ayman Hariri had been linked with some seriously unethical business practices.
It was reported that after taking over the family’s billion-dollar construction firm, Saudi Oger, after his father’s death, Ayman apparently shut down the company last year due to mismanagement. Thousands of unpaid migrant workers were reportedly left without food, water or medical care in cramped cockroachinfested dormitories.
Hariri has denied any involvement in the company under these circumstances.
Then there’s the fact that the names on the Vero team’s page were oddly Russian. While half of the internet expressed dismay that we were willingly handing over our information to the Russians after their shenanigans with Trump’s election, the other half argued that getting your knickers in a twist over Russian-sounding names was a bit, well, racist. Those remaining — because what would the internet be without its pedants — pointed out that it’s xenophobia, actually, not racism guys. Soon the app that had exploded to the top of the app store was the victim of a viral hashtag campaign, #DeleteVero.
Naturally, it turned out that deleting it was trickier than it should be — you have to submit a request. But if there’s one thing that millennials love more than jumping on bandwagons, it’s hopping off them again.
We used our Instagrams to complain about Vero and had a ball. Sometimes it’s better the devil you know.
******* There’s one person the Irish influencers don’t have to worry about missing their content — me. I’m not defeated by the algorithms, and like to check in with the girls every morning to see what they’re up to, what leggings they’re wearing, what’s new in lipsticks and toners. Luckily, the snow didn’t disrupt service.
Watching them pretend to be panicking about not being able to get hold of a sliced pan, as if they actually eat refined carbs, kept me warm and cosy during the cold snap.
But for a few of them, the storm was an opportunity to use their influence for good, instead of the evil that the industry as a whole has been criticised for in recent weeks. Holly Carpenter and Thalia Heffernan repeatedly encouraged their followers to text to donate to Focus Ireland to help people who don’t have a roof over their head in the brutal conditions. Holly reminded us to feed the birds.
It served as a timely reminder that the internet isn’t all a terrible hellscape of horror and vanity. I think it was what we needed.
******* There’s nothing us millennials love more than when our parents act just like us. Our favourite hobby is leaving cryptic and provocative comments on social media. Personally, I like to drop at least five before I go to bed.
So when Ewan McGregor’s estranged wife Eve Mavrakis left a bizarre note under a very sexy picture, we were hooked.
Her daughter is said to have posted an image of photographer Helmut Newton’s Office Love, Paris, which depicts a graphic scene between a couple sprawled across a conference table. Eve commented: “Me too ???? ”
Was she suggesting that she had found herself in a similar situation? Was she proving that she’s still got it? She knew Ewan would see it. Did she also know that he’d reportedly just split up with the woman for whom he left her? Whatever the meaning, it was a masterstroke in petty, a concept invented by millennials, and one that we live by. There’s a certain pride, like sending your kid to their first day in school, in watching your mother learn how to be salty on the internet. Especially after The Speech.
In January, Ewan left the gleeful world reeling when he mentioned both his wife and his girlfriend in his Golden Globes acceptance speech. “I want to take a moment to thank Eve, who always stood beside me for 22 years, and our four children,” he said.
As we picked our jaws up off the floor, McGregor, almost unbelievably, went on to thank the woman he left his wife for.
When asked by the Daily Mail about her feelings on Ewan’s speech, Eve reportedly said: “No, I did not like his speech.”
It’s truly incredible stuff. Watching Ewan’s midlife crisis implode as his scorned ex blossoms into a millennial icon has been kind of beautiful.
We await, with baited breath, more sass from Queen Eve.
‘You can say what you want about Instagram, but it’s always there for us’