Instagram can take its double standard and **** off

[captaincaed]

I don’t want to tag people I don’t know personally in an Instagram post, but I want to offer up a bit of venom if others want to help fan this flame a bit. I’m not sure what others see, but I see a blatant conflict of interest, and moral casuistry fueled by cash. Share if you desire, ignore if you find me obnoxious. In any case, this got my goat this morning.

 

[HumbleHomeCook]

Total BS for sure!

 

[samjj234]

all we can do is keep buying knives to do our part!

 

[captaincaed]

I agree financial support for independent makers is the ultimate goal. We can also bother the perpetrators of the double standard, and inform them in no uncertain terms that their content is what we want to see. In my case it’s the sole reason to be on the platform.

It’s far too easy to let an issue die without a fight, in silence. When Silence is what the company’s representatives hear, how can they be blamed for carrying on with conviction that shutting down a cottage industry reliant on their platform is alright?

They’re within rights to promote and downplay various contributors. But let them know we are aware of the double standard and don’t take kindly to it.

Speak up now or have it done to you next time.

 

[Jaeger]

This thing goes all around the makers out there (me included). It's a shame...but we'll find ways to keep on, I'm sure

Thank you

Fabian

 

[bsfsu]

I had my old Instagram account hacked last year, I literally got access to it this week and deleted it.

Because of the hack and the kitchen weapons I sell, all advertising was blocked. After I appealed the decision they permanently banned me and any associated accounts from advertising on Meta.

Before my account was hacked I had good growth and sales on Instagram and the website but it's been a struggle this year. I'm looking at going back to cooking after 6 years to make money.

If you have a local knife shop you should support them.

 

[captaincaed]

And this is what I mean, ladies and gentlemen, if you allow, about the tangible impact on working salaries this type of flippant, unserious action can have. I don’t know how many podcasts say “yeah I couldn’t have gotten started without social media, Instagram in particular.” I would like to see them have some sense of nuance on this matter.

You work for yourself? We deem you dangerous. Never mind we’ll lend our imprimatur to a Chinese factory selling the same product. (At least when viewed though squinted eyes and frosted glass in profile).

@bsfsu thank you for sharing the experience.

 

[Jaeger]

I got an update. they revoked the ban...
We'll see for how long....

 

[brimmergj]

I got an update. they revoked the ban...
We'll see for how long....
View attachment 282948

I've been seeing that some makers have appealed and the the banned revoked, but, like you said, for how long

Hopefully the robots get recalibrated and this goes away for good

 

[esoo]

It's a stupid Meta thing. I've tried selling knives on Facebook marketplace and unless you hit the right category with the right words, they won't even let you post as they're weapons.

 

[Bensbites]

I was shadow banned during this. I clicked appeal and was back in the recommended zone in 12 hrs.

Option one. IG AI messed up. It's free ... how can I complain.

Option two. This was intended as way to create buzz and traffic.

 

[blokey]

Instagram just pushed this ad to me, is this a threat?

 

[Barmoley]

So it sounds like this was a glitch of Instagram algorithm, but Instagram/meta and YouTube are notoriously anti weapons, whatever they deem weapons to be. They are private companies so it is within their rights to set standards. On a side note I wish makers didn’t sell on Instagram, to me it is one of the worst platforms for it. The only reason I am on it is because of knife makers selling on it. I guess for them this is the easiest way to reach their audience, but I so wish there were other alternatives.

 

[mahwen]

It is so messed up. The double standards of companies advertising and selling on fb and insta are infuriating where as all these makers are being restricted. There have even been leatherworkers and musicians reporting same issues. It does look to be improving with appeals etc but it is becoming increasingly difficult to post anything and social media is where 90% of customers come from. These algorithms have the ability to wipe out a majority of knifemakers businesses overnight and it is terrifying.

 

[user 16756]

You all simply need to put yourselves in the shoes of Zuck.

If you were a loser sociopath who was made into one of the richest people of all time turning a "rate college chicks' attractiveness website" into the worst public square in the history of the world, wouldn't you also make exceptions for people who give you money?

 

[user 16756]

More seriously, Facebook should simply have never been allowed to buy Instagram in the first place.

Concentrating the advertisement market into two companies was always going to end up this way. But nooooooooo we can't ever have anything nice can we.

 

[HSC /// Knives]

So it sounds like this was a glitch of Instagram algorithm, but Instagram/meta and YouTube are notoriously anti weapons, whatever they deem weapons to be. They are private companies so it is within their rights to set standards. On a side note I wish makers didn’t sell on Instagram, to me it is one of the worst platforms for it. The only reason I am on it is because of knife makers selling on it. I guess for them this is the easiest way to reach their audience, but I so wish there were other alternatives.

I’m getting tired of selling on Instagram and often think about just saying goodbye to it…

 

[MSicardCutlery]

But where else is there? Facebook is even more antagonistic to knifemakers, bladeforums bst, to quote one of own members "is run like a prison camp", reddit is frankly a mess, and while KKF is wonderful it just hasn't got a high enough volume of traffic to support makers just on its own. Not that I'm not open to ideas, but we very much seem to have our backs up against a wall

 

[Gshep91]

But where else is there? Facebook is even more antagonistic to knifemakers, bladeforums bst, to quote one of own members "is run like a prison camp", reddit is frankly a mess, and while KKF is wonderful it just hasn't got a high enough volume of traffic to support makers just on its own. Not that I'm not open to ideas, but we very much seem to have our backs up against a wall

Such an unfortunate situation, honestly. I’ve never personally bought something from seeing it on IG recommended page (usually it’s via other people in the community posting something about a maker I haven’t seen) but I guess even 1-2 people willing to pull the trigger on something they wouldn’t normally buy helps you guys out tremendously.

 

[Barmoley]

But where else is there? Facebook is even more antagonistic to knifemakers, bladeforums bst, to quote one of own members "is run like a prison camp", reddit is frankly a mess, and while KKF is wonderful it just hasn't got a high enough volume of traffic to support makers just on its own. Not that I'm not open to ideas, but we very much seem to have our backs up against a wall

Yeah, it is unfortunate. I don't really have a good solution. Just dislike IG as a selling platform, it just sucks for it. I do understand that this is how it is right now, just don't like it.

 

[captaincaed]

But where else is there? Facebook is even more antagonistic to knifemakers, bladeforums bst, to quote one of own members "is run like a prison camp", reddit is frankly a mess, and while KKF is wonderful it just hasn't got a high enough volume of traffic to support makers just on its own. Not that I'm not open to ideas, but we very much seem to have our backs up against a wall

You need some normies along with all us dorks.

 

[JB1]

I don’t want to tag people I don’t know personally in an Instagram post, but I want to offer up a bit of venom if others want to help fan this flame a bit. I’m not sure what others see, but I see a blatant conflict of interest, and moral casuistry fueled by cash. Share if you desire, ignore if you find me obnoxious. In any case, this got my goat this morning.

I don't like insta for many reasons. Not least that the developers are aware that the algo serves vulnerable teenagers with content that depresses them, but drives engagement.

However this was almost certainly *not* done on purpose. The knife community is tiny. It feels very big and important to those in it, but it's not going to be worth a second of thought to the people at insta. The most likely explanation was an update of some kind of algorithm that auto suspends accounts selling weapons. The algo found some correlation with sellers of kitchen knives and did this automatically en masse. With data as big as instas there's no way to predict these things happening on their part.

When they receive, review and see that many 'challenges' to this are upheld, either the algo will learn or they'll tweak it and it'll go away.

It's not a conspiracy, it's not Zuck deciding he doesn't like kitchen knives, it's just an unintended consequence of running something at that scale with a lot of automation.

Before you say 'people's livelihood depends on this and they shouldn't make these mistakes' - development would grind to a halt if they adopted that approach. If nobody drove cars there'd be no road deaths. And insta has massively expanded the reach of knife makers. It's been a net positive for many of them.

It sucks this happened, it surely wasn't 'fair', but there's no attack on the community in the name of profit (their quarterly revenue is 32 billion dollars ~350 million a day, probably more than the entire custom knife transactions in a year, they really dngaf about manipulating the kitchen knife community for extra profit).

You should still hate Meta, just not for this.

 

[Jaeger]

Well said. But at first you feel excluded because it not only affected individuals, but the entire community. At first the anger is great and targeted. Let's hope the algorithm has learned and leaves us alone.

 

[mengwong]

I wonder if it would make sense for online knife shops – the incumbent channel alternative to social media direct sales – to set up a “bespoke boutique” section which features indie makers and provides a sales front-end even for customs.

When RSS and Google Reader went away, this was the future the decentralistas were frothing about. Ten years later it’s here.

 

[JB1]

Well said. But at first you feel excluded because it not only affected individuals, but the entire community. At first the anger is great and targeted. Let's hope the algorithm has learned and leaves us alone.

Absolutely. It sucks. Just because it wasn't on purpose, isn't any less scary for those who thought their livelihood was under threat. You had every right to be scared and upset.

It does help to try understand the how and why. Because it allows the people affected to take the best action they can to fix it.

 

[Jovidah]

But where else is there? Facebook is even more antagonistic to knifemakers, bladeforums bst, to quote one of own members "is run like a prison camp", reddit is frankly a mess, and while KKF is wonderful it just hasn't got a high enough volume of traffic to support makers just on its own. Not that I'm not open to ideas, but we very much seem to have our backs up against a wall

I think this might be why we've seen some smaller markers start working with retailers. But that also has its drawbacks, since adding another chain in the process either means higher prices for the consumer or lower margins.

 

[user 16756]

Before you say 'people's livelihood depends on this and they shouldn't make these mistakes' - development would grind to a halt if they adopted that approach. If nobody drove cars there'd be no road deaths. And insta has massively expanded the reach of knife makers. It's been a net positive for many of them.

Well yes, but no.

As in, that's the line we keep be fed, but it's not really the point, and it's not really true. Facebook would not go out of business if they had to have some real accountability for their machine learning systems.

All the money isnt even going into making the systems better or the sites more workable, it all went into Zuck's vanity metaverse project. From my perspective, them having less money has been categorically demonstrated to not even matter as such.

Aren't we tired of all this "but the innovation!" talk? I've been hearing this **** my ENTIRE life and it's never felt more hollow than it does in 2023.

 

[Delat]

IG has always been a bit hit or miss with makers in terms of auto-flagging their posts as violating TOS. But I agree the recent screwup was likely unintentional.

I suspect it’s an image recognition algorithm that’s both too smart and too dumb at the same time. I guess (?) they’re trying to catch knives promoted as weapons, and the algorithm is insufficiently trained on fancy kitchen knives because seriously what’s the venn diagram intersection of image recognition software engineers and kitchen knife nerds?

Somebody probably pushed a new release that tightened up (or widened, depending on your perspective) the image recognition, with unintended consequences. I assume it’s unintended as I thought I saw a post that some makers were getting un-shadowbanned without having to do anything, combined with how quickly they’re accepting appeals as valid.

Anyway, my personal take is one of unintended consequences / bug in the software vs anything intentional. All of that aside, knives of any kind seems like a weird thing to worry about. They’re so ubiquitous that you might as well try to ban baseball bats which can just as easily be used to assault people (and often are).

If IG is running a sophisticated operation, they’re taking the validated complaints and running those images back through the software as valid examples. However that’s probably giving them (or any company) too much credit and this will probably happen again in the future. BTW Meta has had 4 rounds of layoffs over the past 12 months, so no doubt some of this is due to understaffing.

“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

 

[Rangen]

I wonder if it would make sense for online knife shops – the incumbent channel alternative to social media direct sales – to set up a “bespoke boutique” section which features indie makers and provides a sales front-end even for customs.

When RSS and Google Reader went away, this was the future the decentralistas were frothing about. Ten years later it’s here.

Wow, I have a new word for myself. "Decentralista." I think I like it.

The centralizing impulse seems to be part of human nature, most humans, anyway. It's great for, say, defending your tribe from attacks. But it is terrible for communities. Suddenly your fate is determined by the whim of the Central Authorities, or their supremely indifferent AI bots, both of which are going to have a bias for groups large enough to get on their radar.

That has even extended to decentralized online communities, because centralization has taken over online advertising, too.

It sucks, and the only thing to do is make noise about it.

 

[captaincaed]

Intent and neglect are usually the two options on the table. You can be fired for either. Saying “I didn’t see your dog” before running it over doesn’t make it less dead.

The issues I see are
1. No communication. People’s business depends on the platform. For shame.
2. A clear double standard between user content and the ads it allows to be served. On the same day.

It’s fine to manage content with an algorithm. Algorithms are human designed, with intent.