Instagram is bowing to Kylie Jenner and scrapping the rollout of its new video-centered feed after the makeup mogul became the face of the short-lived #MakeInstagramInstagramAgain campaign.
Last month, the Meta-owned company started testing out a new version of its app that featured a full-screen feed emphasizing short-form videos on Reels. The redesign also included more recommended posts from random accounts that users weren’t following. In other words, Instagram was trying to be TikTok.
By Thursday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri had pulled the plug on the whole effort, admitting to the Platformer newsletter that users were “frustrated” and vowing that the company would “take a big step back and regroup.”
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So what happened?
It all started on Monday, when Jenner and her sister Kim Kardashian shared an identical post on their Instagram Stories that linked to a petition calling for the platform to return to its roots.
“Stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends,” the image read. Other influencers and content creators chimed in with their own posts, calling out Instagram for “forcing” them to publish videos and straying from its original mission (deep-fried pictures of lattes?).
As any astute social media historian will remember, Jenner basically killed Snapchat back in 2018 with a throwaway tweet about how uncool the app had become. By then, she had amassed a huge following on the tween-favored platform, where she gave fans an inside look at everything from her private jet to her blinged-out SUVs and her sunny California terrace lunches under the moniker “King Kylie.” The day after her tweet, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, lost more than $1 billion on the stock market, and its cultural cachet never fully recovered.
Perhaps hoping to avoid the same fate, Instagram went into damage control almost immediately.
On Tuesday, Mosseri responded to the controversy with an explainer video complete with all the accouterments of a TikTok: jump cuts, zoom-ins, and on-screen captions. He promised that the new changes were just a “test,” but cautioned that videos are by and large what audiences seem most interested in consuming.
“I need to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing,” he warned. “So we’re going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos.”
On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reassured investors that its photo-sharing service was on a good path. He announced plans to double the amount of recommended posts that pop up on users’ feeds by 2023, calling the plan “pretty unique” because of the combination of links, photos, and videos that people post on Instagram, according to The Verge.
By Thursday, the national nightmare was over. Mosseri told Platformer that the new test feed will disappear within the next couple weeks while the company figures out the best way to keep pushing relevant content to its users.
“When you discover something in your feed that you didn't follow before, there should be a high bar—it should just be great,” Mosseri said. “You should be delighted to see it. And I don't think that’s happening enough right now.”
Of course, virtual tantrums over social media redesigns are common; some of us are old enough to remember the meltdowns spurred by Facebook changing up its wall or introducing a real-time news feed similar to Twitter. Mosseri, however, simply chalked up this week’s knee-jerk criticism to growing pains.
“In general, it’s not surprising to us that there’s a lot of anxiety around changing Instagram,” he told Platformer. “I think that’s always been the case. One positive way of looking at this is if people are passionate enough to get spicy on Twitter, that means they care about Instagram.”
There’s precedent for this kind of negative reaction in the “pivot-to-video” craze in 2015 and 2016, when news outlets increasingly focused their resources on hiring production teams to pump out short-form videos to keep up with social media sites like Facebook, which was starting to prioritize video at the time, and newer video-based platforms like Snapchat. The pivot has largely been deemed a failure for news outlets, most of which have since redoubled their commitment to traditional, written reporting.
In the end, people don’t like being told what to do or what to watch. That feeling was best encapsulated this week in a comment by RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Violet Chachki.
“It’s truly awful-scrolling through endless loud half-assed videos from people who have no interest in creating videos just so they can try to [be] seen by people who literally clicked a button to see them- it makes no sense!” she wrote under Mosseri’s video about the recent changes.
While it’s not a great feeling to watch your favorite app turn into something you didn’t sign up for, videos really are becoming more popular, as Zuckerberg and Mosseri have reminded us time and time again. And with TikTok leading as the app of the moment, Instagram will eventually have to refocus if it wants to survive.
But that doesn’t mean everyone will like it.
Suzy Farmar, a food vlogger known as @sooziethefoodie, has been posting recipe videos on Instagram for years and now boasts 134,000 followers on the app. In between filming videos about exotic tropical fruits or how to season beef carpaccio, Farmar also posts promo clips for restaurants and other businesses in the Orlando area. She got the new full-screen Instagram layout earlier this week, and she’s not exactly sad to learn that it’s going away.
“I don’t scroll through my feed a lot, but I think the way the photos are placed is not aesthetically pleasing,” she tells The Daily Beast. “A lot of time I would prefer to look at a cool photo, or a meme or something like that,” she explained, adding that the new feed is “not really photo-friendly. It’s more for short-form video, which I think is what, moving forward, Instagram is going to be.”
It could just be a matter of time before we all get used to it.
“When I first started doing videos, people were like ‘that’s stupid,’” Farmar said. “Now it’s cool.”
