Users are not happy with Instagram's most recent changes to the way it handles videos. More than 200,000 people have signed a Change.org petition asking the company to "Make Instagram Instagram Again" by rolling back the majority of the most recent updates. The Kendall-Jenner family has expressed its displeasure with the moves as well.
To give you an update on what's been going on: Instagram stated last week that it was implementing some significant improvements that had nothing whatsoever to do with TikTok and were in no way a replica of its capabilities. It expanded its Remix function, which lets you create new films by mixing your own images and videos with those of other people, much like TikTok.
Additionally, it stated that any movies under 15 minutes will be automatically posted as Reels—the fullscreen video format akin to TikTok that appears in the main feed—instead of as ordinary video postings. If you had a public account, this would also make them eligible to be suggested to unfollowed people at random in their feeds, which would modify how they appeared to your friends and followers as well as how they appeared in the central Explore tab (yes, just like TikTok). All of this comes after Instagram said it was experimenting with a full-screen feed akin to TikTok, provided a means to bring back a very condensed version of the chronological feed from a few months ago, and clogged the main feed with a ton of "Suggested Posts."
Basically, Instagram is swiftly turning into a TikTok clone to attempt and keep younger users on the platform—or grab them back from TikTok—much way Vine introduced video after it launched and Stories after Snapchat.
Users seldom disregard significant changes to the functionality of social networking programs, and this time is no exception. The "Make Instagram Instagram Again" campaign was started by photographer Tati Bruening, who urged the platform to stop attempting to mimic TikTok, bring back the chronological timeline for everything, and pay attention to artists.
The second-most followed Instagram user, Kylie Jenner, liked Bruening's post pushing her petition and added a large "PLEASEEEEEEE." Her sisters Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, who are ranked seventh and sixteenth in terms of followers, likewise posted it and added similar requests.
Even though it might not seem like a huge problem, it's important to remember that Instagram's business model does not include alienating its most popular and engaged users, and, more importantly, Jenner's social media ire can affect markets. In 2018, she posted her objection to a Snapchat upgrade, which caused the parent company Snap's market valuation to drop by $1.3 billion, or nearly 6% of its overall value.
While Jenner's fury hasn't yet reduced the market capitalization of Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, by a few billion dollars, other reasons have. The pivot to the metaverse is an expensive gamble that shows no signs of paying off anytime soon, and whistleblowers continue to paint a picture of a company in chaos. In addition, Facebook lost more users than it gained for the first time ever this year, Apple's privacy-focused iOS updates cost it $10 billion in ad revenue.
In a lengthy report published just last week, The Verge described a June 30 Q&A session with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during which he said that some of the business's present employees shouldn't be there and a leaked document stating that the company was facing "difficult times" and "fierce headwinds."
While Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri might not be able to resolve every issue plaguing Meta and Facebook, he might at least make an effort to allay the Kardashian-Jenners' worries. He recognized that "there's a lot going on on Instagram" in a Reel that was uploaded on Tuesday. Mosseri acknowledged that the full-screen stream was "not yet excellent," but said that it was still being tested on a small number of people.
On the other side, the transition to video is here to stay. Instagram will "continue to promote photographs," but more and more video content will eventually replace photos, according to Mosseri. Although The Verge claims that this signals the end of Instagram as we know it, he contends that this is occurring naturally regardless of any changes made by Instagram.
Despite defending the vast amount of suggested postings, Mosseri acknowledged that if people were seeing content that wasn't of interest to them, they were "doing a horrible job" with it.
Mosseri then refuted the notion that Instagram will pull back any changes. "The world is changing swiftly, and we have to go along with it," he asserted.
