Instagram plus is so creepy I want to quit Instagram

This past week I conducted a social experiment by upgrading my Instagram account to Instagram Plus. And I'm pretty much ready to never use Instagram again. So I wanna tell you a little bit about what has made me so deeply uncomfortable that I would be happy to never use the app again. There are three Instagram Plus features that I have really strong opinions about. The first one will get out of the way just because I think it's really stupid, which is get story rewatch insight. All this means is that they put a little rewatch glyph next to your story viewer numbers and they put a number of how many users rewatched your story. They don't tell you who and unless you're watching your story viewers in their time stamps, which I'll get to in a second. This really could be someone just swiping through Instagram Stories at a fast clip, seeing something that interested them enough to go back. So I think this conflates two things and it tries to manipulate you into thinking that this metric indicates the more valuable of those two things. First, regular story swiping behavior and someone just going back really quickly. The second is what they want you to think it is, which is that you have all these admirers who are constantly watching your story. I would imagine the bulk of that number are from usage behavior and fast swiping. But if you want to know what secret admirers you have, you can do that with see when your story was viewed. I will also give a disclaimer that this is the thing that made me the most uncomfortable in the last week and has made me not want to use Instagram ever again. Basically what this feature does is you can see the time stamp at which someone has first watched your stories. If you are watching that list all day, kind of like I was when I first posted, you will see a number of people whose time stamps change and they jump back to the top. Maybe someone watched your story one hour ago, and then some number of other people watch your story, and then they watch your story again one minute ago, and again and again, and again, and again, you can watch as certain people's names continue to jump to the top of your list. I did this on my personal Instagram account, so I know pretty much every person who is watching my stories, and the number of people whose names jumped to the top that I wouldn't have thought or wouldn't have liked to be seeing jump to the top made me so, so uncomfortable. And it wasn't just once, it was many times throughout the day. Instagram has created all these new social behaviors that exist only online and not in person, and we have all developed our own personal relationships with social media and with our phones and how we use the features that we have been given access to. Instagram Plus exploits these personal relationships we've all developed with our phones and gives them to someone else who's willing to pay for them. At the expense, by the way, of your own mental health. As you start to wonder why someone is jumping to the top of your list so much. And not to defend these people who I feel fairly creeped out by, but they don't know that I'm on Instagram Plus. So you are essentially paying to unlock access to a lot of user behavior that should be kept private. Also with this feature, I think it's encouraging you to spend way more time on your phone, once you start to develop this understanding that if you watch closely enough, you can observe changes in the behavior that other people who are consuming your content have. I was refreshing my phone way more during that 24 hour period than I usually do. Cause if you miss them the first time they watch your story, you don't see their name listed twice, you only see it as the most recent timestamp. I think that that is an intentional design choice in order to get you addicted to watching that story list all day long. Third one, which is previewing stories, makes me much more uncomfortable as a person who posts stories than it does as a person who has subscribed to Instagram Plus. For all of the time since Instagram Stories has been a feature that we as Instagram users have had access to. We have always been able to see all of our story viewers in list form, even if the order in which those story viewers was displayed to us was opaque. Now anyone on Instagram Plus, which again, we don't know who all of these people are, who are subscribed to Instagram Plus, can preview your stories without being listed as a viewer in your story viewers list. Again, I think this is Instagram taking these social paradigms that they have created and exploiting them for money. As a person who posts Instagram Stories, I'm quite uncomfortable that I no longer have access to this baseline understanding of how my content is being consumed, and by who on Instagram anymore in order for them to make a buck off of these subscriptions. So this entire experience has just created an additional level of distrust that I have with the Instagram platform. I no longer know how people are perceiving me as a user, both in their story views, based on that time stamp. Maybe I have gone back to someone's story a couple times in a day. Maybe they did have Instagram Plus and are now perceiving me in a new light. And on the totally other end of that spectrum, as someone who posts stories, I'm realizing I actually no longer have access to a comprehensive understanding of how my content is being consumed, even by people I know in real life. Maybe they're previewing my stories the way that I've been previewing some of theirs. I think this is Instagram getting into the fabric of social communication that they've created digitally, potentially creating interactions online that might bleed into weird personal interactions in real life. I did not need one more reason to distrust meta or Instagram, but I think this should add a level of paranoia to how we conduct ourselves on their platform because they are so willing to sell an understanding of you as a consumer to somebody else or mess with your ability for understanding who consumes content you post in a way that should rightly make us feel very, very uncomfortable with the access that they have into the ways that we construct relationships with people that we know but interact with often digitally and through Instagram. I would not spend your money on this. I'm on this because I'm on a free trial. I will not be renewing my subscription and likely I will start spending less time on this platform for sharing any access to my personal life or consuming anything about other people's personal lives.