Josh, I have never had an Instagram account. But I am hearing the app is quite rubbish at the moment?
I can’t believe you’ve held out this long, Nino! Impressive. Yes, people aren’t really happy about it. People (mainly ageing millennials and those around our cohort) associate Instagram with the place you go to see what your friends and family or just general acquaintances and thirst traps are doing.
It used to be a place for pictures of food, travel, maybe short videos in stories, but it’s also become a place where people post memes and screenshots of tweets.
Like Facebook, your Instagram feed was mostly filled with people you know or brands or influencers you chose to follow. That’s all changed now, though.
Sounds as if I’ll continue my abstinence then. So what’s going on, and why do we think Instagram is doing this?
It seems Instagram is trying to be TikTok.
It’s probably due to the company noticing a demographic shift on the app. Younger people are shunning Insta (not to mention Meta’s other platform, Facebook) for TikTok, and Instagram wants to get a slice of that pie.
The upshot is that people are getting way more videos in their Instagram feeds, and it’s going full screen for those videos, so it scrolls like TikTok. But that’s not all: people are now also seeing “suggested posts”, which works in a TikTok-style algorithm that brings in random posts from people you don’t follow into your feed.
The app will also launch a “remix” style feature for videos that will be like TikTok’s “duet” feature, which allows people to make response videos side-by-side with the original video.
Does this basically mean everyone on Instagram now hates Instagram? Or is this not happening to everyone?
Well, Kylie Jenner expressed her discontent with it, sharing a story on Instagram that it should stop “trying to be TikTok” because she just wants to see photos of her friends. The last time she took aim at a social media company, it wiped AU$1.4bn off the value of Snapchat.
And if you look at some of the replies to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri’s tweet about it, you can see lots of people are unhappy.
But some aspects of the change aren’t hitting everyone everywhere all at once. I had the full screen change about two months ago and then it went away. You can also snooze suggested posts for 30 days to get things back to normal.
Snoozing can be pleasant, but then you wake up. Has Instagram given any sign it will permanently shift back to normal?
Mosseri said this week that the company has heard the concerns, but has argued video is the future. So as much as you might hate it – soz, they’re not going back to how things were.
He did, however, say he thinks much of the concern over how it has been rolled out is to do with how the suggested posts algorithm is working, and once that is fine-tuned, people will be seeing much more of what they want.
It’s too early to say if it will last. Sometimes when companies make a change very deeply unpopular, they revert. But all these companies generally care about is engagement: so if the changes ultimately keep and grow the time people actually spend on the app, it’s hard to see Instagram backing down.
