Why isn’t anyone tagging their friends on Instagram anymore?

No one wants to tag their friends on Instagram anymore.

Instagram is one of the most powerful leaders in the attention economy. Meta knows how much the eyes of its users are worth — a few billion dollars — and has taken virtually every step to cement its role in our social lives. You can post on your grid, like other people’s posts, comment on them, and send them to your friends. You can post a note or a song, comment on a note or a song, and respond to someone’s note or song. You can post on your Story, repost someone’s post on your Story, repost someone’s Story on your Story, like someone’s Story, respond to someone’s Story, and now, you can even comment on someone’s Story. You can send private messages, group chats, and make video calls in the DMs. 

Despite Instagram’s many faults — and this, too, may be one — it knows how to encourage users to stay on its app with near-constant changes to how we communicate on it. As one kind of action organically changes (people stop posting hashtags, for example), another feature (the explore page) takes its place. Tagging is no different.

Since its inception, we’ve seen a shift in how users tag one another in posts. Before disclosing branded content on Instagram was mandatory, influencers and wannabe influencers would tag the brands they were — or wanted to look like they were — collaborating with. That would change with the implementation of mandatory disclosures. The trend of tagging your friends or brands maintained its staying power for a bit, but now, no one wants to tag their friends.

A few months ago, Instagram changed how it notified users that they were tagged in a photo. Instead of simply sending a notification, it would send users a notification and a direct message to the tagged user from the tagger of the post. So, if you hosted a party, took a photo, and tagged all 48 attendees, you would have sent 48 DMs. There is no way to turn this feature off. The only way to avoid it is to stop tagging people. People hated it.

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In response to the change, or perhaps just in the typical way social media interactions evolve, users stopped tagging people altogether. As I scroll through my feed, I see dozens of photo dumps, each including five to 20 pictures of someone and their friends — but none of the friends are tagged. It’s unclear if implementing the DM feature spearheaded a new movement away from tagging friends in posts, but the timing can’t be denied. 

Beyond the DMs, there are plenty of other reasons not to tag your friends in a photo. Privacy concerns, for one. There’s also the age-old oversaturation problem; as Instagram shifts from a platform for casual social interactions to one focused on curated, aesthetic, and branded profiles, tagging could distract from a more clean and polished look. It has also been around for so long and has become so common that tagging might have lost its novelty and now leans toward feeling outdated or cringeworthy. Some users on Reddit worry that their posts are seen less if they tag too many people, although there’s no proof that this has any bearing in reality.

Or maybe it has less to do with engagement and more with a user’s intended vibe. Maybe people want a little mystery. Mystery is hard-fought and rarely won in the age of social media, but perhaps not tagging the people in your photos lends itself to an air of secrecy in a time of oversharing. 

It’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason for how and why social trends change — tagging included. But if Instagram’s history is any indicator, it’ll find some new way to steal your attention.