Instagram is walking back its controversial plans that would’ve changed the popular social media app to be far closer to TikTok. Instagram was once a pretty revolutionary social media platform as it was a great way to share photos with your friends and followers, giving glimpses into your life or your creative side. It was essentially a digital scrapbook with easy functionality, but as other social media apps were introduced, Instagram had to find new ways to compete. Eventually, Instagram began with the logical next step with videos before moving to stories, live streams, marketplaces, and “reels”, which were essentially just TikToks on a new platform.
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Instagram recently announced that it would be making photos and videos more “immersive” by creating taller, full-screen videos and pictures, essentially mimicking the TikTok format. People also noted that this push was seemingly deprioritizing images in an effort to put more videos on peoples’ feeds, something that angered a lot of people. Even mega super star Kylie Jenner spoke out about the matter on an Instagram story, sharing a post from another user that said “Make Instagram Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, everyone.” Instagram is walking back on these changes and will be scaling back the amount of recommended content Instagram pushes into people’s feeds. With that said, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told Platformer that the app still plans to make changes and do some kind of redesign, it just needs to reevaluate how it does it and also how it communicates it to people.
“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,” said Adam Mosseri. “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.”
As of right now, it’s unclear what the next phase of Instagram will look like. It seems like there will be a better emphasis on communicating how the changes will impact Instagram users and why they make things better. Nevertheless, when an app like Instagram has largely looked the same for a decade, any radical change will be met with some kind of significant response.
What do you think about Instagram’s changes? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.
