This week, the audience simply had enough of Instagram, demanding the platform reverse course on recent changes. The feedback was so intense that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri had to make a public statement (on Twitter, no less) to address the outcry and explain why the changes were happening. Now it looks like Instagram has finally caved to the pressure.

Speaker with Platformer, Instagram stated that they would make changes over the coming weeks, removing fullscreen photos and videos from the app. Instagram will also reduce the number of recommendations being pushed to its users. While app users had been watching more videos before the full-screen update, Instagram's data showed that people were not fans of the new feed design. During an earnings call this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg shared that recommended posts on Instagram are currently sitting above 15 percent. He also suggested that recommendations on the platform would be close to double by the end of 2023. Looking at Instagram's current situation, it's hard to imagine what 2023 will be like.

Mosseri stated:

When you discover something in your field that you didn’t follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great. You should be delighted 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 the percentage of feed that are recommendations, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then — if and when we do — we can start to grow again.

While the reversion is undoubtedly welcome, Mosseri clarified that the changes wouldn't be permanent, which could mean that Zuckerburg's vision for the future is still on course. Instagram will need to continue to move forward and make changes in some manner as it tries to combat competitors like TikTok. TikTok has been aggressive in its expansion, introducing a subscription service for content creators, safety tools for users, and APIs to add more transparency. These are only a small handful of additions introduced to the platform over the past few months.

In the future, Instagram will have some deep questions to answer if it wants to try to grow its user base. While it has borrowed many ideas from other apps, it's clear that some aren't what users are looking for.


Source: Platformer