Pose, take a perfectly angled picture, spend minutes agonising about which filter to pick... Valencia makes the colours pop, but X-Pro II makes us more tanned... Hmmm, what to pick? Until finally, you press ‘share’, and your photo joins millions of ones just like it (except yours is better, obvs) on the Instagramsphere.
And then you wait what, five seconds before picking up your phone again and scanning for likes? Put it down, pick it up, refresh screen, and again. Did you pass that 11 likes mark yet? Believe it or not, there’s even a multitude of ways to buy likes – that’s how much we want them.
Now, thanks to researchers at MIT, there’s a website that can tell you how popular a photo will be, even before you share it. Yes, really. The team gathered data from 2.3 million pictures on Flickr to write an algorithm that can predict the popularity of a post on a scale of 1-10. Based on the content and social context, the algorithm takes into account a bunch of things, including colours, textures and objects present, and then scores photos by degree of ‘positive impact’. Bikinis, for example, have a ‘strong positive impact’. What a surprise.
The website is available to access for free right here – yikes! We’ll be spending the rest of our lives trying desperately to stay away from what is sure to be a vortex of Instagram-obsessed discoveries. While we do most certainly see the merits of such a creation, it’s more than a little bit scary that our competitiveness with both ourselves and say... every other person in the world has reached such a head.
But if the popularity of our posts all of a sudden skyrockets, well... we did say we’d try stay away.
Follow Alya on Twitter @moorizzla
Picture: Corbis
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.