Instagram is reverting some changes to the app after a user reaction that saw royal influencers Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian turn on the platform.
The photo and video sharing app has been accused of mimicking TikTok at the expense of its most loyal users after user anger boiled over a series of changes this week. Instagram announced on Thursday that it was reverting some of the changes, including a trial version of the app that shows posts in full-screen.
It will also mitigate changes to its algorithm that caused users’ feeds to be flooded with videos from accounts they don’t follow.
“I’m glad we took a risk — if we don’t fail every once in a while, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough,” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in an interview with Tech-Newsletter Platformer. “But we definitely have to take a big step back and regroup. [When] we learned a lot, then we come back with some new idea or iteration. So we’re going to work through that.”
The rumble among some of Instagram’s more than 1 billion users came to a head Monday when Jenner, the app’s third-most-followed user with 361 million followers, joined her sister Kim Kardashian, the seventh-most-followed with 326 million Sharing a meme which prompted “make Instagram back to Instagram”. The meme added, “Stop trying to be Tiktok, I just want to see cute photos of my friends.”
People who used the platform to interact with friends and family also complained that their feeds were flooded with unwanted videos. The backlash prompted Mosseri to do so Post a video on Tuesday — which he said was recorded before he saw the Kardashian posts — in which he said, “As time goes on, more and more Instagram videos become videos.” But on Thursday he had admitted that Instagram had gone too far.
“People are frustrated with the new feed designs and the usage data isn’t great,” he told Platformer. “So I think we need to take a big step back, regroup and figure out how we want to move forward.”
Mosseri added that Instagram would reduce the number of recommended posts after users complained about content being pushed from accounts they don’t follow. “If you discover something in your field that you haven’t followed before, the bar should be set high — it should just be great,” Mosseri said. “You should be pleased 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 percentage of recommended feeds.”
Daily Show host Trevor Noah was among the critics of the recommendation change, saying: “Everything is an ad and your feed is full of people you don’t follow.”
The emergence of TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, has challenged the established social media order. In a permanent, irreversible change announced by Instagram last week, it said that all videos posted to Instagram will become “Reels,” the app’s TikTok-style video feature.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Instagram’s parent company and also owner of Facebook, reported a 30 percent increase in time spent on Reels on Wednesday. However, it also reported the first year-over-year decline in quarterly earnings for the April-June period, a decline it attributed to macroeconomic conditions.
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