Instagram is a photo and video sharing social network founded in 2010, and acquired by Facebook in 2012. Instagram is also the realm of influencers, people whose job it is to look pretty and live perfect lives.
Why am I telling you this?
Well, within 10 years of it's founding, Instagram became possibly the most widely used place to publish glamour shots of Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar miniatures. It supplanted the older web forums, like DakkaDakka and CoolMiniOrNot, that had been around in the decade prior. It also supplanted Games Workshop's own publications, such as Warhammer Community, White Dwarf, and the faction Codexes. The latter two were the de facto publications to find show-quality miniatures, and also published glamour shots of Golden Daemon minis (which were ostensibly the best-painted minis in the world!); while the former presently publishes content curated partially from Instagram.
While Games Workshop still authorizes what a "cool" or "good" miniature looks like to some degree, nowadays the wider miniature-making community's decisions about what constitutes "cool" or "good" model now come primarily from content hosted and judged on Instagram.
What does this mean for you?[edit | edit source]
Well, gentle neckbeard, it means that you need to have a Facebook account to participate in the largest community of Warhammer/AoS model makers and painters. Instagram won't even let you peruse someone's account via a web browser, unless you sign in first. Regardless of what you think of Facebook's aggressive spying personal data collection practices, the shift in platform away from the more open and accessible public web forums has added a gatekeeper to the hobby's community.
This shift in platform brought about some changes in the way the community is shaped, and is not confined to Instagram. The rise of tabletop gaming YouTubers and Dungeons and Dragons podcasts over the turn of the 2020's coincided with the platform shift toward Instagram as a place to showcase models. All of these phenomenon are together propelling certain people into Tabletop Gaming Influencer status, with cross-platform reach and the ability to shape the community as a whole.
4chan at large doesn't like influencers (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), and lionizes anonymity. While /tg/ at large isn't livid about influencers, it's fair to say that our side of the community isn't fond of certain people's opinions or status dominating that of the group. No Egoboos is a rule here, after all. Thus seeing influencers rise in the tabletop gaming space is concerning to some of us. If the primary mood of the online community becomes nothing but pretty perfect people posting pretty perfect models, then ugly people with imperfect models will be unwelcome by default.