Yellowknife residents’ obsession with showing off to family and friends on Instagram has been busted by an Expedia study.
The PR stunt from the travel company is actually entitled “The Most Instagram-Worthy Places in Canada” – with Yellowknife listed in third place, behind winner Sherbrooke, QC, and second-placed Thunder Bay, ON.
However, any resident will know what we’re really saying here is people need to put their phones down and use that paddle board for actual paddling, not as a prop in their glorious, airbrushed northern lives.
“Yellowknife is the best place for you to discover what the frontier spirit really is,” gushes the Expedia article, which advises taking “cute woofer photos on a dog sledding tour” while nimbly overlooking said woofers’ contributions to Tin Can Hill during May thaw.
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The brewpub is mentioned as being “also found in this quaint town,” a description literally nobody who lives in Yellowknife has ever used for it.
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According to Expedia, there was some actual grasping-at-straws science behind the decision to place Yellowknife third in the list.
“To find the most Instagrammable places in Canada, we turned to social listening,” said the article, referring not to the practice of running out of things to say at a party, but to the art of searching hashtags until a story idea emerges.
Expedia’s writer used hashtags like #nofilter, #instagramworthy, and #instagrammable to see which parts of Canada appeared most often.
It’s not clear what date range was used for the search. Clearly nothing from June onwards, for which the Yellowknife hashtags would have read #allthefilters, #wet, and #whereissummer.
An honourable mention is reserved for the only people more obsessed with Instagram than Yellowknife locals: Yellowknife’s aurora-hunting visitors.
A solid 50 percent of all search results for #yellowknife are aurora photos exhibiting varying degrees of expertise and success.
Examples of the genre include:
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Hmm.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bmarr0tAuaY/?tagged=yellowknife
Excellent work from “Flying Travel Banana.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bme31WgBLU_/?tagged=yellowknife
Oooooooh!
The remaining 50 percent of images tagged #yellowknife on Instagram are, in no particular order, fish, dogs, and softball teams.
