The internet rejoices, as Instagram has announced that they will be rolling back their most recent update, where users received an influx of featured recommended videos on their feed. And thank god because multiple people, including the Kardashians, have complained about the new update.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told Platformer that the feature will be phased out over the coming few weeks and that they’re glad “they took a risk”.
“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. [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.”
Instagram’s test was to see how they can introduce more video content as the app tries to compete with TikTok, known for its short videos and ranked by smperth.com as the fifth largest most-used social media platform with approximately over 1 billion active users.
Mosseri released a video on Twitter that tried to justify Instagram’s transformation and shift towards video. He claimed that Instagram is likely to become a video platform in the future. The app will continue to support photos but would lean towards a full-screen format rather than grids.
This led to a campaign started by Instagram user @illumitati and later shared by Kylie Jenner on her Instagram story. A Change.org petition was made, with over 200k signatures, where they demand the platform to “stop trying to be TikTok” and bring back the chronological timeline. This sense of criticism is similar to what former Nintendo CEO, Reggie Fils-Aimé, said about Instagram’s parent company, Meta, and how the company isn’t innovative enough.
Instagram was a photo-sharing app that was bought by Meta in 2012 for $1 billion. Since then, the platform has changed to rely more heavily on algorithms, and introduced “stories” in 2017 to compete with Snapchat. In 2020, Instagram introduced “reels” in the hopes of compete with TikTok and providing “entertaining videos” to its users.