As photo-sharing app Meta continues to relentlessly copy TikTok’s approach to video, its leader is justifying ditching Instagram’s photo roots.
- Instagram has been shoving Reels, its TikTok clone product, down our throats for months now, and some of the biggest celebrities are now fighting back.
- Kylie Jenner, the second most followed person on Instagram, and her sister Kim Kardashian hate the new Instagram interface that favors videos over photos.
- The head of Instagram says the platform relies more on video because that’s apparently what people want. Either our way, or on the highway!
Instagram moves to video
During the pandemic, Instagram parent company Meta began experimenting with full-screen video content on Instagram. When full-screen videos started showing up in users’ feeds, including featured videos, disgruntled users started to take notice. The company has been pushing videos too aggressively as the dominant video format lately, which hasn’t escaped the attention of some of the biggest celebrities on the platform. Kim Kardashian, for example, shared a post imploring the Meta to “make Instagram Instagram again”and stop trying to be TikTok. There is also a related petition on Change.org with nearly 100,000 signatures.
There’s a lot going on on Instagram right now.
I wanted to talk about a few things we’re working on to make Instagram a better experience.
Please let me know what you think 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/x1If5qrCyS
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) July 26, 2022
But Instagram chief Adam Mosseri took to Twitter to respond to those concerns with the video shown above, in which he justifies his decision to become more like TikTok. “I need to be honest. I believe more and more Instagram will become video over time,” he said. “If you look at what people share on Instagram, it shifts more in video over time,” Mosseri continued.
“If you look at what people like, consume and view on Instagram, over time it shifts more and more towards video, even as we stop charging.” The manager justified his decision by saying that people have been refusing to take pictures for some time, which is what prompted the change. “We will have to rely on this shift,” he added. In terms of photos, Mosseri said Instagram will continue to support photos because “it’s part of our heritage.”
All things considered, Instagram seems surprisingly happy with improving TikTok’s features as a way to increase users and retention rather than come up with an original idea of its own. What happened to risk?
Instagram jealous of TikTok’s success
TikTok has had a user interface from the very beginning, specifically designed for watching funny short videos in full screen mode without meaningless interactions. You only had to swipe up to watch the next video, or swipe down to go to the previous one. Instagram doesn’t have a kid-friendly product, and it knows it — all the cool kids are on Snapchat and TikTok, so Meta felt compelled to just copy TikTok’s interface. Instagram recently merged the “Reels”and “Videos”sections into one tab. In addition, he made almost all the videos on the reel platforms. And all these videos are fully available for anyone who wants to remix. But there are some issues with Instagram rotate to video.
Problem with bringing up the TikTok interface
First, not everyone likes the vertically scrolling story feed. It feels like a forced decision to make Instagram even more like TikTok, not an improvement. In addition, Instagram will now downgrade any videos that are posted from TikTok. There are also usability issues. As you scroll through the feed, you can no longer mute or unmute videos by clicking on them. And the removal of the classic infinite scroll means you can no longer scale ads. As if that wasn’t enough, Instagram even borrowed the post-post-scroll from TikTok.
TechCrunch posted a great headline to highlight these points: “Instagram gets worse with dark templates taken off TikTok.”
“Inspired”by TikTok (as well as Snapchat and any successful competitor)
Moseri can talk all he wants about improving the experience and whatnot, but Instagram is well aware of the danger TikTok poses to its business. Similar insecurity seems to haunt Meta, which recently split the Facebook feed in two and tweaked the algorithm to work like TikTok.
Mosseri also responded to the backlash caused by the new interface: “We’re experimenting with a number of different changes to the app, and so we’re hearing a lot of concerns from all of you,”Mosseri said. “I want to be clear, it’s still not great,”he said of the app’s new interface, before saying that Instagram is going to bring the new interface to the rest of the community anyway. This begs the question: Does Instagram care about what its users want?