Thank the social media gods because Instagram, shaking in its boots, is reversing some of the new shithouse changes made to the app after massive backlash from the public, influencers and celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Kim K. Remember when Kylie tweeted about hating Snapchat’s redesign in 2018 and the company’s market value plunged $1.3 billion? Yeah.
The new Instagram update basically turned the app into TikTok despite billions of loyal users coming to it for fkn photos. The new design and algorithm preferenced reels over all else and flooded people’s feeds with videos from accounts they don’t follow.
After intense online backlash Instagram announced on Friday it would scale the update back so home pages aren’t so clogged with random reels.
“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,” head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in an interview with Platformer.
“But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. [When] we’ve learned a lot, then we come back with some sort of new idea or iteration. So we’re going to work through that.”
Mosseri also said Instagram would reduce the number of recommended posts in general and fkn good.
“When you discover something in your field that you didn’t follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great,” he said.
“You should be delighted to see it and I don’t think that’s happening enough right now. So I think we need to take a step back in terms of the percentage of feed that are recommendations.”
Moressi previously defended the update as a way to make the app “more fun”.
“The idea is that a more-full screen experience — not only for videos but for photos — might be a more fun and engaging experience,” he said in a video posted to Twitter on Wednesday.
“But I also want to be clear: it’s not yet good. And we’re going to have to get it to a place if we’re going to ship it to the rest of the Instagram community.”
But people were not happy.
Kim Kardashian, the platform’s seventh most-followed user, shared a meme that said “Make Instagram Instagram Again” and “stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends.”
The new Instagram update really understood what I was looking for:
– none of my friends’ content
– reposted TikToks from meme accounts I do not follow
– 100x more ads
– everything played at full volume against my will— Meg Watson (@msmegwatson) July 14, 2022
There was even a petition to “Make Instagram Instagram Again” — which collected more than 172,000 signatures in its first 48 hours live.
The power of the people!
