The review of "Topics" on Instagram Reels that no one asked for

I need to talk about this.

Why has no one mentioned how totally insane and nonsensical Topics are?

When Topics showed up on Reels with no official explanation from Instagram I experienced a profound sense of global gaslighting. I think this feature is bizarre, non-sensical and designed to give me an eye twitch. It breaks my heart with its lack of logic and it succinctly demonstrates the conceptual gibberishing of the molds that the AI-fueled internet is forcing artists to dissolve our content into.

Many of you are not regularly creating reels and posting them to Instagram, so you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. And I hate that I’m about to put this useless info into your brain now, but also, I need it in there. I need you to know what I’ve been dealing with, what the cultural workers of our time are dealing with, as we’re asked to carve up our works and offer them up to the algorithm meat grinder. It’s pure insanity. More than anything, it’s intellectually offensive. And you guys need to understand. So, let me explain.

When you create a reel, you edit the video, and then you see a screen like this:

That’s where you can add your caption, tag people, change the cover that appears on your feed, etc… And you’ll also notice at the bottom is a section with a hashtag symbol that says “Add topics.” This is the section I have a grievance with. Or at least, the biggest grievance. Let’s start with the hashtag symbol. Why is that there?

Well, as some of you know, hashtags are a way of categorizing your content. The use of hashtags arose organically on twitter during the 2007 San Diego fire and then in later social movements like the Iranian protests, BLM, MeToo, and more. Twitter started hyperlinking to trending hashtags and it helped people who were writing about and looking for info about different things to find each other. Hashtags are now used in all social media platforms. It’s essentially a way of labeling your stuff for people who might be looking for it. For my songs, I often use the hashtags #feminism #feministhumor #comedymusic #singersongwriter and others that seem relevant to what I’m doing, and that I can already tell are being used by others.

It’s clever! It’s not perfect. But it’s a way for people to find the content they’re looking for in the mess of infinite crap, and sure, it’s not especially helpful to my creative process to have to think about trending hashtags while I’m creating, but at least it makes sense, and at least there’s some logic to how this could help my content get seen by the right people.

But now Instagram Reels wants everyone to use Topics instead of hashtags. At least, that’s the message we got from this new button that showed up on the page above. The hashtag symbol is right there, and though hashtags still work, many creators believed that the algorithm had been tweaked to favor reels that use Topics instead of hashtags, though no official statement on this was ever released by Instagram. (If anyone knows different, please show me when/where this happened. I’ve looked and I can’t find anything.) Why wouldn’t Instagram just tell us whether they’ve deprioritized hashtags in the algorithm? Because they want us guessing, like fiending addicts, or anxious fuckboy obsessives.

Alright, come on this journey with me. Let’s get into it. I’ve just created a reel, a cute little video of one of my songs, say, and now it’s time to pick some Topics. So I click that little button and here’s what I see next.

“Select up to 3 topics to help match your reel with viewers” it says. And then it’s got the following topic categories, complete with emojis for clarification:

Fashion & Beauty
Animals
Transportation
Food & Drink
Visual Arts
Travel
Sports
Science & Tech
Relationships
Performing Arts
Games
TV & Movies
Home & Garden
Business
Education

I have some major bones to pick about these umbrella categories. For instance, why isn’t Health or Health & Wellness a category? Why are Books or Academia not a category? Why are Politics or News not categories? I know for a fact these are all very popular topics for Reels. So, why aren’t they here? Why is there Business but not Economics? What about Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Fan Fiction, etc… Those are all huge communities online. Which topic would they pick for their reels?

Now, you might defend Instagram here and say, “Well, it’s hard coming up with all the categories for all the things humans might want to talk about” to which I would respond, “Yeah, it sure is, so why even attempt it?”

But at this stage, my complaint is merely about why some topic categories made it on the list and others didn’t. And I’m not saying that this complaint is a small one. I think there are censorship implications here. I think these topic categories encourage frivolity and discourage deep, meaningful discourse. I’m upset about it. But at least there’s some discernible logic so far, right? We can kinda understand what Instagram was trying to do here, even if they were incompetent (or nefarious) in their execution.

Now we’re about to look at the topics themselves, inside of these categories, and this is where all discernible logic flees the scene, and I’m left alone with my eye twitch and real questions about whether there is actually a human steering this ship at all anymore. Let’s just look at a few of these categories.

⚽️ Sports

I can choose from the following…

Gym Workouts
Strength Training
Soccer
Cricket
Tips
Bodyweight Workouts
Basketball
Water Sports
Weightlifting
Cycling
Home Workouts (activity)
Running
Yoga
Football
Wrestling
Boxing
Baseball
Winter Sports
Volleyball
Golf

Those are the options for Sports. That’s it. No explanation for why these are the options. I have questions that will never be answered. Questions like… Why would you have Gym Workouts, Strength Training, Bodyweight Workouts, Weightlifting, and Home Workouts (activity) but not “Baseball”? Or “Tennis”? Or “Rock Climbing” Or “Surfing” or… I don’t know, any of the other sports? The Olympics are happening. Why not “Olympics” Why not “Gymnastics"? I’ve seen probably 5 videos of Olympic gymnasts per time I’ve logged onto Instagram in the past few weeks. Why wouldn’t you provide a way for those to be gathered under one Topic?

And why does Home Workouts (activity) have that (activity) as part of it? That’s weird. Do we need it spelled out that Home Workouts is, in fact, an activity? Or is this meant to distinguish this Home Workouts from the Home Workouts topic that is NOT an activity? But if that’s the case, wouldn’t we find something like “Home Workouts (aspiration)” somewhere else on the list?

Also, why is “Tips” in the Sports category and in no other category? Isn’t that more of a genre than a topic? And isn’t that genre applicable to all topics? Wouldn’t people in every category be offering tips?

But the bigger, more relevant questions to me come in the categories I’d be more likely to choose for my videos. Here are the options for the category entitled

💖 Relationships

Friendships
Birthdays
Friendship Humor
Relationship to Self

That’s it. Those are the relationship topics that Instagram is offering. So we’ve got Friendships (plural, mind you, why are things plural sometimes?) and Friendship Humor. And Birthdays? How, precisely is “Birthdays” (plural again.) a relationship topic? Like… I’m really stretching here, and coming up with absolutely nothing. I guess… you invite the people you have relationships with TO your birthday? But also, how often is “Birthdays” a topic for a video. What is there to say about “Birthdays"? What is that doing there?

And obviously, there’s a glaring absence of romantic relationships. Why isn’t Dating on the list? Or Partnership? I get that Instagram is so freaked out about sex that they would never list “Sex” or “Polyamory” or “Queer Relationships.” I have major qualms there but at least I understand why they wouldn’t put it on the list. But, Dating? Are we pretending that all romantic relationships don’t exist? I think even very small children are fully aware that people form romantic relationships. I think we can talk about it. I also think it’s something people are DEFINITELY talking about on reels. And it’s, like, the first thing people think about when they read the word “relationships.” When you say you’re in a relationship, people assume you’re talking about a romantic partnership. The emoji on the umbrella category has a sparkly heart. So why is that sparkly heart energy absent from this list?

Why is Friendships and Friendship Humor on this list? What even is Friendship Humor? What the hell does that mean?

Relationship to Self is a surprisingly heady option. Is your relationship to yourself a relationship? Feels a little metaphorical to me. I suppose it’s there to capture all the Mental Health reels, of which there are millions, and as we already stated, there’s no Health & Wellness category, so I guess those have to go somewhere.

Moving on to the 🎭 Performing Arts category. Here’s what we’ve got.

Dance
Lip Syncing
Performances
Instruments
Singers
Comedy

And that’s it. Despite the emoji for “theater” in the title, there is no Theater, Drama, Acting or Directing option. No Mime. No Clown. No Slam Poetry. No Costume Design. No Stage Makeup. No Drag. No Improv. No Music.

But Lip Syncing! That’s there. In the “Performing Arts” category. Cool. And Instruments. (Plural again.) That’s just covering all of Music, I guess? Singers (AAAAH WHY IS THIS PLURAL) has its own category, but not Guitar. And by the way, why is it Singers and not Singing? Why Dance and not Dancers? The inconsistency of the grammar is so strange to me. This plural thing is like a piercing pain in my forehead whenever I look at it. Are we describing the activity or what we would call the collection of all of these creators if they were in a room together? But back to Instruments. I guess that’s where you’d put any reel that discuss instrumental music of any kind… Banjo, Drum Kit, Jazz, Music Theory, Classical Violin, Conducting, Theremin, Synthesizers… it’s all “Instruments.”

And now we arrive at the biggest head scratcher of them all, in my opinion. The Education category.

The Education category has only one option.

Teaching Methods. That’s it. I know I can’t shut up about this plural thing but like… if “Teaching Methods” with an “s” were the topic of your video, you’d be discussing a variety of, or at least, more than one, teaching method. Is that a popular type of video on Reels? People getting together and being like “So, today we’re going to talk about Montessori, phonics, Suzuki and OTHER teaching methods!” I know that all of our feeds are different, but I just suspect that’s not a very common video.

I suppose there’s a sense in which Teaching Methods is just a replacement for the word “Education” or “Pedagogy” but then why can’t you choose one of those as your topic? Why give this umbrella Topic is own section and then list one thing… and it’s “Teaching Methods.”

Who approved this bullshit?

If I worked for Instagram, and my boss was like “Please come up with a list of topics that people can choose from to help categorize their reels” I can’t imagine, in a million years, turning in this list. I truly can’t. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to imagine spending hours, maybe days, MAYBE WEEKS working on this new feature, turning this into my boss, and saying, “Here you go, boss, I feel confident that this is great work and will totally be helpful to our global creator community.” This was someone’s job! And apparently, the Instagram powers that be have been happy enough with it that it hasn’t changed since it was rolled out in March 2023. Like, not at all.

If you look on reddit and other places where creators ask each other for advice, no one understands this feature and no one understands if it works or not. There are some rumors that it’s actually detrimental to your engagement because it “caps” viewership by silo-ing it into specific viewer communities. Other people say Instagram penalizes you for not using it. And again, there has been no official guidance from Instagram about what using this feature has actually been programmed to result in.

Why does this matter?

I mean… it doesn’t, really. Not compared to all the other things in the world that matter. But I hate it. And I think most creators hate shit like this. And I think it’s making us dumber, more dissociated, and less joyful when we make our art. When things don’t make sense, it encourages us to stop trying, to stop wrestling with it.

Deciding what your art is about is actually really, really important, and difficult work. It’s a soul searching endeavor. In many ways, I think understanding the question of what your song/video/essay/speech/political take/dance/painting etc… is about is a sacred and heroic journey. This Topics thing… it’s just one of the many ways that this form of sharing our work with the world, this platform of social media, belittles us and undermines our mission as artists, as well as our hearts and minds as audiences.

In debaucherous camaraderie,
🪶Rachel Lark

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