BP’s Introduction

I used to run a youth poetry/literary arts non-profit in Seattle.  We used to do slam competitions locally, regionally, and nationally.  I’ve been able to get the team to the top 3 in the nation 3 of the 6 years (I was with the organization) we went to compete.  The thing about slam poetry is it’s based on a point system. BUT it’s not the point system that makes a great poet.  The point system and judging is the gimmick.  It’s the pull of the mainstream crowd to be able to hear poetry performed on stage that isn’t typical to the readings in local coffee houses.  It’s performance poetry.  Message still the same.  Very powerful.  It’s just really performed and polished, to get points.  Well, when you hear a poet spit (recite) on the mic their heart and soul and recieve a low score, the crowd goes wild chanting, “THE POINT IS NOT THE POINT, THE POINT IS THE POETRY.”  I liken that a bit to the whole idea of followership and popularity and now, the ridding of ghost or zombie followers.

We’ve all seen it on IG.  I have poked around and asked a few Juxters to ask around and to get some quotes for this article.  The majority of folks agree that it has helped them feel good about their feed, their IG experience, and at the very least, help them manage their IG feeds.  There are those who are still wondering if it truly is something that is worth it.  Those in the minority don’t disagree with the fact that IG has turned into a land of monster egos, popularity seekers, Justin Beiber lovers, tasteless self portraits, and stolen pictures.  I think they are just wondering if it is possible to really reverse where Instagram is headed (as far as the “old school” folks are concerned).

So before I lead into this article, let me tell you, THE POINT IS NOT THE POPULARITY, THE POINT IS THE COMMUNITY AND THE ART! or better yet, Michael says, “IG is about people, not about numbers.”

B:  BP M: Michael

B:  Tell us about yourself, where you’re from; what go you into mobile photography/ art.

M: I’m a forty-something living in Sydney, Australia. Been here all my life. I’ve always enjoyed photography, but for most of my life I’ve used it to retain a memory rather than as a medium for art. The mobile side of it started from incredibly mundane beginnings. I remember waiting in a park, with my only recently aquired iphone suddenly realising that this device I had in my hand could capture the beautiful moment. From memory it was a terrible shot that I deleted almost instantly, but it set me on the path.

B:  What do you do? What’s you’re daily grind?

M: I’m a programmer in a small, old school, software house. I do a very small amount of web work there, but most of my grind is split between back end server applications and some comms work for handheld devices. I think I’ve been a programmer from the day I touched my first computer – an Apple II back in the 80’s.

There was an ill fated attempt to go into the world of civil engineering, but fortunately I managed to derail myself from that plan and fall into a couple of nice programming jobs that set me right.

B:  When did you start getting into Instagram and can you describe the journey for you thus far?

M: I picked up Instagram quite early – October 2010. At the time I was trying various services to find a place for photography and I enjoyed the simplicity and directness of it. I was never really a social network sort of a guy, so I didn’t have a raft of friends to bring with me. I think for my first couple of hundred shots I had no followers at all.

While I’ve always enjoyed ‘taking pictures’, I’ve never thought of myself as a photographer. While I still don’t consider my work ‘good’ in any objective sense, I know I’ve improved over time. Almost all of the photography knowledge I have, I’ve learnt through Instagram. @homework was a big help early on, as were all the lessons I gathered from the people I followed.

B:  Tell us about the IG Exocist. What gave you the idea?

M: It was somewhat backwards. I didn’t see the problem and then look for a solution, but rather I saw a solution (the Instagram APIs) and went looking for something to do. A while ago I started collecting stats on my own account, just to play with the interface. At about the same time statigr.am became popular and did most of what I wanted, and far more attractively, so I never thought of progressing it any further.

I collected stats on all the people I was following and who were following me and originally was just using those stats to assist in managing the people I follow, but ultimately I found managing those by hand more than adequate. The problem of ghost followers was in the back of my mind but not something I felt too strongly about, but looking at the data I was surprised to see just how many users there were that seemed to be doing nothing.

So I somewhat fell into it rather than rushing in as a crusader against the ghosts, but once I’d culled my own account and spread the word a little the exorcism concept took off far more than I had expected. For the first few people there was no web page interface, I had to run the scripts semi-manually, but it quickly become obvious that I had to make a service.

B:  It has been well received by a lot of IGers. Initially when you started out it was mostly for friends and wasn’t really public. The service is a great idea and is working to help those who really want to have more of a meaningful experience on IG. What do you foresee happening with the Exorcist in the future?

M: I’m incredibly thrilled with how well it has been recieved. Not only are there huge numbers of people using the service, but I get many personal messages of thanks which really make the effort worthwhile. I’m also very grateful for the donations I’ve received – I was happy to cover the costs of running this for a while if needed, but the donations will mean I can continue to run igexorcist without it costing me anything other than sleep.

While there is a fair amount of buzz about it right now, I think it will calm down significantly. People will continue to use regularly, but the excitment of the last few days will probably go away. While there are many IGers highly enthusiastic about it, I think it’s still a fairly niche product, and as you don’t need to cull the ghosts too often (for most of us, this is removing a year or more of ghosts) the return visits won’t be huge.

I do plan to add features in the future. Obviously it needs some work artistically, but also changes such as the ability to ‘whitelist’ users, or the ability to manage those you follow as well as the ghosts. But all of that is well down the path. I’ve also been just starting to look into iOS development and this might be a project that I could develop for use on the iphone directly without the need for a server – but that’s only a seedling of an idea at this point.

B:  In an email you provided me with pros and cons for using this service. Can you reiterate those thoughts again?

M: The pros and cons depend heavily on what your goals are in IG. For some the number of followers is an important number, and for those people I can’t say that there is a single positive reason to cull. A ghost user is a user that doesn’t interact with you, and therefore you could argue that, by definition, they don’t affect you, but there are a number of reasons that people may want to remove them.

Finding new people to follow. One of the ways to find new people to follow is to look in your own back yard. The people following you often have many treasures to offer (chances are there are similar tastes in some cases, if they’re following you). Trimming down the number of followers lets you sort the wheat from the chaff.

Truer sense of worth. While it was nice to pretend that my original number of followers were enjoying my work, I certainly know I was lying to myself (or that Instagram was lying to me). Getting rid of the dead wood gives a better idea as to who is actually looking at and enjoying your work. There’s something comforting about knowing the number of followers you have may be an indication of the number of people actually looking.

Don’t like them. These social networks are analogous to our real world interactions. There’s something slightly creepy about someone inserting themselves into your social circle but then ignoring you. Maybe it’s like breaking a social contract. When you interact with people it’s supposed to be give and take. These ghosts are taking but not bringing anything.

Fame is not always a good thing. I find the larger the number of followers someone has, the less likely I am to try to interact with them. If I turn that around, I figure people are more likely to want to interact with me if I don’t have a huge following (not that that’s likely). So by cutting down the ghosts, you not only improve the quality of your existing followers, but hopefully improve the quality of new ones.

B:  I know for myself, I have many friends and family members who are using the service who do not have IG etiquette and surpisingly enough engage with me outside of IG on my own work. This is what’s held me back in using the Exorcist. I still also have many questions regarding it. I know a lot of folks have loved the fact that it has deleted many ghost followers on their feed. Why do you attribute this emotion of happiness, sense of lifted burden amongst so many IGers?

M: There are two main types of ghost, I find. The first are the users who joined IG and used it for a while but have now moved on. The second is the mass followers who follow others in the hope they will be followed back. I don’t think the removal of the first group brings any joy, but the second is where the happiness and lifted burden comes in.

I think the broken social contract I mentioned earlier is the most likely reason for this strong emotional response. To me, and I assume to the users using IGExorcist, a real follower is something important. I want to please my followers and I put effort into doing so, not in a ‘selling myself out’ sort of a way, but in a ‘doing the best I can’ way. But to the mass follower ghost, I’m just a number. That person is asking something from me with so little care for me that they barely know they are doing it. I know that sounds terribly dramatic and it’s not like I lie at home at nights weeping, but the hundreds or thousands of little broken promises add up.

At least that’s my armchair psychiatry.

As to the connection with people outside of IG, the small number who view me within IG and are important, I follow to keep in touch with, and to the larger community of people like that, I always push my work out to both flickr and facebook, where I find those sorts of people are more at home. But I would never say this process is for everyone.

B:  My biggest worry is that it’ll delete many ghosts from my followers but then it also may attribute to changing the algorithm of getting on popular, THUS leading to even more ghost followers. Recently I think the buzz was that IG had changed their pop algorithm, and it lessened the pressure of my own stuff getting to popular. I was able to get some meaningful dialogue with folks. What do you think about this? Do you think that there is a way to combat this?

M: Whether or not this changes the likelihood of getting on the popular page certainly wasn’t part of my thinking at any point. It does seem likely that the number of followers would factor in to the likelihood of popular, but my gut feeling on how some of the data Instagram has makes me think that having been a follower in the past may also count. It’s all just speculation. I’ve had no anecdotal evidence that it has increased anyones chances of popular.

But I think if users are culling to try to get popular they have missed the point. As you say, the primary take away from achieving popular is a minor influx of new followers who are most likely to become ghosts.

B:  EyeEm is another great social photo app sharing program. They have had many very artistic shots make pop as it seems that it isn’t based on “likes and follows” algorithms. What would be your suggestion to IG on a better “popular” algorithm?

M: Ultimately the fact that “popular” and “good” are not synonyms is going to be the downfall of any global popular page. People who want to be popular are going to game the system, whether intentionally or just by trained behaviour (I do X, I get popular, so I’ll keep doing X). The only reason I would (theoretically) go to the popular page now is for discovery of new people to follow, so perhaps what would work is a personalised popular page built similarly to the Following News feed, with just photos that are popular amoungst those only a couple of degrees of separation from you.

But there are smarter minds than mine working on the problem, I’m sure. A top notch popular page is a big draw card to these sorts of networks.

B:  Lastly for the service, I love the fact that you’ve created a service that is community related. What other things can we see come from @mykel in the future?

M: I’ve no specific plans at the moment, other than improving the site. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for itches that I can scratch – I’m big on automating tasks (my inherent laziness, I guess) so anywhere larger tasks can be simplified is likely to be where I land. But often it’s the challenge of something different that leads me to these projects.

The last public project before this was more than 10 years ago in a completely different field (visualizers for a now defunct music player), so who knows what will be next. Hopefully a little less of a gap.

B:  Tell us about Michael as the mobile photographer. What are your favorite styles of mobile photography? Who are your favorite IGers and why?

M: As mentioned before, I *try* not to limit myself to a favourite style, but time after time I find myself drawn back to moody black and whites and strong greens – graveyards and park benches. I regularly develop a almost debilitating Hipstamatic habit that I have to cure (I think it’s about time again now). I love playing with light in my photography, and because know I have such a long way to go, look forward to that journey.

Favourite IGers is a slippery slope. If I start listing them off I’m going to offend someone when I stop. My favourites are only ever partly to do with the photography – it’s the people behind that I admire. I happen to be fortunate that the beautiful people also happen to be able to take beautiful shots. But rather than completely dodge the question, I’ll offer up @annacox as a favourite. Needless to say her photos are spectacular, but I learnt so much about how to act, how to be a photographer and to have confidence in my work from her.

Bench: Benches are a bit of a thing (thanks to my friend @tephi), and while I visited this one regularly, on this particular overcast day I found it particularly serene. Nothing but a little clarity for the edit.

Muse: Playing with composition. Clarity, maybe twice, and punched up the colour.

Portrait: I love this photo of my neice. Heavily edited. Big Lens for DOF and some serious use of Noir.

Sparkler: My daugher last New Years Eve. Originally taken with Hipstamatic. Big Lens’ed and Photoforge 2 for crop and levels.

TeensyTinyFlower: One of quite a large series of macro flower shots I’ve done with the PhotoJoJo macro lens. This one Hipstamatic then cropped/coloured/leveled in Photoforge 2.

B:  Tell us more about your own feed and the messages you would like to come through on your feed.

M: I’m sure I have a photographic voice, but I don’t like to pin myself down. Certainly I’ll trend towards a style in my feed from time to time, but I like to look at what I’m posting and try to push myself out of that comfort zone whenever I can. I don’t think I’ve been doing such a great job of that of late – there’s an element of consistancy creeping in that I’m going to have to do something about shortly.

First and foremost, however, it’s about having fun. I certainly don’t take my photos seriously at all, and I don’t want anyone else to.

B:  What inspires you?

M: Some days it seems like everything, and others almost nothing. Always my family. I don’t think I can pin it on anything – sometimes things just pop up, often completely unexpectedly, and give me direction. What a non-answer that is.

Juxt thanks you for your work and your art.

To run the IG Exorcist go to www.igexorcist.com.

Contact Michael at igexorcist@gmail.com or on Instagram:  @mykel

Here are some quotes from users who have tried and their experience with removing ghost followers and a couple folks who don’t have plans to use IG Exorcist:

Because creativity isn’t fueled by numbers.  It’s influenced by an interactive, supportive community which acts as a source of inspiration and who encourages you to grow by allowing you the opportunity to experiment and scribble outside the lines

IGexorcist… Narcissistic attention whores need not apply. This site will destroy the illusion of you and your great following. You’ll find in fact, that you’re not that “popular” after all. I thank God that Mykel created this site. IG was meant for networking and relationship building; not the bloated, selfish, narcissistic crap that it has become. So take a step in the right direction and get rid of those people following you, that don’t really follow you at all.

IG can be viewed a few different ways. One view is that IG is rich and creative and we use each other to learn and spring board our own creativity. It’s like a 24 hour gallery show and everyone is invited. On the other hand, it’s viewed as a tumblr or other social networking sites: Repost, repin, retweet. It’s all the same.  The difference between the two is artistic integrity. Some of us strive to create and explore our world through a lens, others are content copying the images they see around them.

I did it because I’ve put a lot of work building the relationships I have on IG.  So yes I’m against people follow a massive amount of people hoping to get a follow back instead of just getting involved with the community.  Bottom line is I don’t want anyone following me that doesnt want to build and get involved with the community I’ve come to love. Period.

The total number of followers I have does not affect the way I use Instagram and it doesn’t matter to me if people follow me but don’t interact.  I feel that if I used this program and got rid of my followers who don’t interact, they would just come back in the long run so it’s a bit of a vicious circle. I won’t use it but do find the whole process interesting.

If these ghost followers bother you, I’m all for going though with the culling process. It does makes it simpler. If they don’t, keep them. That’s it. I have decided to wait until a more selective way to eliminate some of them from my list after I went though the list and saw some people there that had been kind to me in the beginning of my IG life. Some people are on a break or have something going on on their lives that impede them from being present. Others prefer to just see pictures and not interact, etc…It’s your call.  I’m very active on IG. I check every single person that starts to follow me now. If I see a red flag, like they follow too many people or any other suspicion that they may be interested only on numbers, I click the block button and then unblock them after. This way you are removed from their list of FOLLOWING.  Me, I follow without “following” a lot of people. I’m present and give encouragement.  I’m more interested on the exchange. And after a while if I like their images and I see they are present enough in my feed, I may follow them.  It’s about a PERSONAL choice.  All choices are valid and only you can determine what’s best for you. 

BP Update

So it took me about a week and a half until I finally ghost rode my IG feed.  At first i had some hesitancy as stated above.  I went as far as even asked some of my trusted IG homies.  I exorcised almost 3000 ghosts and found that it was burden lifting.  The issue now is do I gatekeep to make sure it doesn’t happen again and do I have the time?!? Michael definitely has given a space for folks to gain control of their feed again and in essence taken control of their artistic expression.  I understand it to be about maintenance.  Will I be able to maintain it? I don’t necessarily know.

As I ready this for publishing, I’m running it again.  I personally have gotten a lot of users with the “follow_everyone” or “shout_out” or “popular_maker”.  it’s really disconcerning what has happened.  I wonder if IG HQ will address these issues as I foresee a lot of folks wanting to jump ship.  It would be unfortunate if this happens.

This is the most commendable thing I’ve seen so far on IG.  Sure you have the features a day, the interviews a day, the shots for a day, the shots and groups to make things popular…but this makes it a bit easier to swallow. Instead of trying to control the bull riding and shooting for more time on the clock, Michael has let mobile artists on Instagram feed the bull, groom the bull, and ultimately become better friends.  OOOOH you know I had to throw in something like that.  This article can’t have me writing it without having a BP analogy that makes no sense. =)

With that, try it out if you’re interested in ridding of dead weight on your followings.  Donate to Michael and the program and services he’s giving us.  Exorcise those demons. Ghost ride the whip. Holla at ya boy, Let Michael know he’s done a good thing for folks. AND even more importantly and it’s the moral of the story for us – HAVE FUN, LIKE/ COMMENT – ENGAGE! PARTICIPATE! ain’t that really why we are to this point on IG.

**Big thanks to those who provided quotes and especially to Anna Cox for helping in looking through this article. Michael you’re an inspiration. Thank you.