Instagram Like Siphon®

Instagram is a strange place. It’s also evolved a lot in the last decade. In the early days, people posted fun photos and didn’t put a lot of thought into their content. It felt like a photo reel of people’s lives.

Then the influencers came.

There was a big push from like 2012-2017 of aspirational outdoorsy content, people sharing their world travels, and way too many photos of food. People tried to signal status through what they posted. Sure, not everyone did this, but many did.

There are still a lot of accounts that do this, but with the rise of TikTok a lot of people don’t post much at all except for stories. If they do, they might post photo dumps once a month.

Part of this might be because you get so little engagement as a small account that stories are a better interaction pattern to spark conversations with friends. Messenger is also a well-designed app that’s a pleasure to use.

What if there was a way to boost the engagement of smaller accounts? There are accounts the Kim Kardashian and Cristiano Ronaldo who have millions upon millions of followers. They get so much engagement that they might not notice if it dipped just a little bit… The idea of redistributing engagement gave me the idea for Like Siphon.

Now, I don’t think this is a particularly good idea. However, people are dopamine-addicted and status-hungry creatures, so I can envision a world where people pay to artificially inflate their engagement. This exists in the form of buying likes or followers, but making it a game of extracting from other profiles creates a new and more cutthroat dynamic.

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