#PoetsOfInstagram: Navigating The Practices And Challenges Of Novice Poets On Instagram

Commencing as a photo-sharing platform, Instagram has since become multifaceted, accommodating diverse art forms, with poetry emerging as a prominent one. However, the academic understanding of Instagram’s poetry community is limited, yet its significance emerges from its distinctive utilization of a primarily visual social media platform guided by recommendation algorithms for disseminating poetry, further characterized by a predominantly novice creative population. We employ qualitative analysis to explore motivations, experiences, and algorithmic influence within Instagram’s poetry community. We demonstrate that participants prioritize conforming to algorithmic constraints for visibility, yet maintain their community’s values of integrity and originality, illustrating the tension between algorithmic growth and participant authenticity. We introduce the concept of Algorithmically Mediated Creative Labor, a phenomenon specific to non-monetizing creative users who are impacted by the prioritization of professional creators and continually adapt their creative endeavours to align with platform logic, thereby affecting their motivation and creative outputs.