Have you noticed that Instagram has been looking a little, well, un-instagrammable?
It seemed that gone were the days of artfully curated dumps and #inspirational photos that were once the app’s bread and butter. Instead, in recent months the feed became littered with lo-fi meme accounts, non-stop ads and reels from people you don’t follow.
Many disgruntled influencers and social media lurkers were outraged by the recent changes, and called out the platform for trying to copy its rival TikTok. One user, photographer Tati Bruening, shared her frustration through an infographic that read: “Make Instagram Instagram again” that has since had 2.2 million likes. “Stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends. [sic].” The post continued, before signing off “sincerely, everyone.”
When Bruening meant everyone, she meant everyone. Billionaires Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, the 3rd and 7th most followed people on the platform respectively, re-shared the infographic. And considering Jenner wiped off $1.3 billion off of Snapchat’s stock after tweeting “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad” in 2018, Instagram took notice.
The platform has now responded to the pressure and confirmed it’s rolling back the re-design. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told the website Platformer yesterday: “I’m glad we took a risk — if we’re not failing every once in a while, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough. But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup.”
A similar Change.org petition to change Snapchat back to its original format acquired over 1.2 million signatures back in 2018. And it worked, kind of. Snapchat reverted back some features, and moderated its approach to appease user demand.
Earlier in the week, Mosseri had addressed the criticism on a reel.
“I want to be clear. We’re going to continue to support photos – it’s part of our heritage. That said, I need to be honest. I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.” Mosseri then pointed out that there is a societal shift to videos at the moment, and that the app is simply keeping up with the trend.
He then proceeded to address the new recommedations feature, which shows posts on your feed from accounts you do not follow. “The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you do not even know exist,” he explained. “Now if you’re seeing things on your feed that you’re not interested in, that means that we’re doing a bad job ranking them and we need to improve. But we’re going trying with recommendations because we think it’s one of the most effective and important ways to help creators reach more people.”
He has since said that Instagram will limit the number of recommendations people are shown but it remains to be seen how much.
Small wins.
