Instagram versus VERO for photographers

VERO – the new social media platform for photographers?

VERO has been around since 2015, so it’s no longer brand new to the market, but it’s much younger than Instagram (initial launch here was in October 2010). As of 2022 (and that may well change in the future), VERO does two basic things differently: the feed is sorted chronologically and there are no ads yet.

That is, you simply get displayed in chronological order the posts that have appeared since your last visit to the platform (from the accounts and people you follow). Nothing else. There is no algorithm that pre-sorts or filters, and the positioning of your posts doesn’t depend on whether you’ve dutifully used VERO for at least three hours a day. There is no way to promote your posts via paid ads. The likes or even comments always come from other users who like your posts.

In addition to some post types that are especially relevant for photographers, which I will discuss further in a moment, there are the categories Music, Movie/TV, Book and Place. Even here, there are significantly more options than is the case with Instagram, for example.

VERO offers a few more advantages, especially for photographers:

• On VERO, if you turn your smartphone sideways, you’ll see the fullscreen version of an image, and images can also be displayed full-screen in the desktop app. This is especially nice for photographs, as you can view the image in an acceptable size and quality and not just in thumbnail format like on Instagram.
• Besides the post types mentioned above, you can share images and videos, but also links. Instagram, however, does not allow sharing links in posts, but only in the profile description – which means that almost every second post contains the note “Link in bio”. Not very user-friendly, but the user should not leave the app, but continue to use Instagram. VERO does a much better job of that. You can simply post a link in your post or directly use the “Link” category, which then also displays the link preview.
• Verification via the mobile number during registration creates another hurdle for fake profiles. This step may be viewed somewhat ambivalently from a data protection perspective, but anyone who uses Instagram or Facebook can regard the mobile number as peanuts. After all, this has so far reliably prevented VERO from registering tons of fake accounts. Accordingly, the number of followers even of the better-known accounts is within a realistic range, which cannot be said for the five- or six-figure followers of a mediocre Instagram account.

Especially on Instagram, there are the specialists who follow your account, only to unfollow you a few days later, hoping that you will follow them in the meantime. The background to this behavior is another tidbit of the Instagram algorithm: the ratio of the number of your followers to the accounts you follow plays a role in the relevance of your posts on Instagram. So if you put a lot of time into creating posts (and you’ll struggle to continuously publish high-quality landscape photography, remember Ansel Adam’s famous statement about twelve good pictures per year) and generate new followers with them, you’ll be rewarded by the Instagram algorithm.

But the bottom line is that there is no need for these games on VERO, because due to the chronological sorting, it doesn’t matter what the ratio of followers to following looks like. Unfortunately, this behavior is already spilling over from Instagram to VERO – a typical example of the fact that social media is often not social at all and that one’s own ego is all too often in the foreground.

Perhaps it can be summed up like this: there are tons of tips, apps, do’s & don’ts circulating on the Internet on how to generate more followers or likes on Instagram. At the end of the day, they all lead to the same behavior: you spend more time on the social web. And there are probably really better things to do….

Instagram vs VERO – a personal résumé

For me personally, social networks have always had a very manageable value, as all too often the extroverted noise with irrelevant and content-less content gets out of hand. Likewise, I’m personally not willing to spend a significant amount of my time scrolling through timelines and trying to influence an algorithm with my behavior so that my own posts are rated accordingly. That’s different for a network that displays posts in purely chronological order, and it’s a step in the right direction for more quality and less nonsense.

In the context of VERO, there has also been repeated criticism of the founder of the social network. Lebanese billionaire Ayman Hariri has been criticized in the past for the treatment of construction workers at the construction company Saudi Oger, of which he was a member of the management board for a time. You don’t have to be personally behind either the founder of VERO or Facebook, but you should certainly look into both people and decide for yourself whether they can be reconciled with your own personal values.

For me, the switch to VERO was primarily due to the fact that I consider the purely chronologically sorted timeline to be a fairer approach, which ultimately puts the focus more on the content of the posts. There is also a lot of nonsensical content on VERO, and not all that glitters is gold on this platform either. Nevertheless, users have so far been able to gain the impression that they can concentrate on the important things in life and still remain part of the community on VERO.

Of course, VERO doesn’t have the user numbers of Instagram by a long shot, but there are so many deadbeats among the users on Instagram that the sheer number of users isn’t particularly meaningful. Perhaps the motto “small but mighty” is the best way to describe VERO at the moment – whether that will remain the case in the future remains to be seen, and how VERO will be financed in the future is also still up in the air. But even with a paid membership, as it has long been the case with the photography platform 500px, I could live, as long as you are not spammed with irrelevant content.