Adam Mosseri confirms it: Instagram is over!
On Wednesday’s newsletter I talked about how Instagram is becoming a graveyard for old posts and unwanted video content. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do it here.
Since then, a number of celebrities and long-time Instagram users have expressed their thoughts on Instagram’s drastic change to compete with TikTok. The post was titled “Make Instagram Instagram Again…” and was shared by celebrities such as Kim Kardashian. This prompted Instagram’s CEO to respond. With a response that did not help to calm the users down. The CEO basically stated that the platform will become more video-focused and that users will see more unwanted and non-followed accounts in their feeds. He basically said deal with it.
The Kardashians once expressed their dislike with how Snapchat had changed, causing the company to lose more than $1.3 billion in a single day. Should Instagram see the same?
The Kardashians, who have stated that the new Instagram sucks. These women make money on Instagram; in fact, the platform courted them and built itself around influencers like the Kardashians. They are important Instagram contributors, as the platform’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, responded.
Mosseri, who sounded like an exhausted parent, agreed that Instagram’s new feed sucked and its recommendations were probably bad, but then said it wouldn’t get any better. Instagram is no longer interested in photos.
Instagram users, according to Mosseri, are shifting to video. That could be correct! Certainly, I did not want to switch to video and, as a result, I stopped using the platform as frequently. Meanwhile, people who use Instagram to make money have been forced to post more videos in order to remain visible in people’s feeds. If you ask me, it doesn’t seem very organic.
It’s fascinating to watch Instagram Facebookify because no one wants to use Facebook. (I left in 2006, briefly returned to post Verge stories before we automated our social process, and then left again.) People complain about Facebook, and it’s becoming more common to complain about Instagram.
So the changes are bad, and Mosseri is letting us all know that Facebook doesn’t care. It’s simply trying to get as much growth-hacky engagement out of its legacy platforms as possible. High-quality photos, Instagram’s original value proposition, are less important than scammy ads for weight loss, speed (oh, sorry, “ADHD treatment”), and ketamine. What a drop from that first Michael Kors commercial! Instagram appears to be coming to an end in some ways.
The main question is where will Instagram users go. BeReal could be the solution.
Now comes Zuck…
Simply put, the future of social media appears to be less social.
If you already have strong feelings about your Instagram feed increasingly showing Reels from accounts you don’t follow, just wait until next year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that by the end of 2023, the company will have more than doubled the amount of content from recommended accounts that people see while using Instagram and Facebook. According to him, such recommendations currently account for about 15% of all content on Facebook, and the percentage is even higher on Instagram.
The push, dubbed “Discovery Engine” by Zuckerberg, is a radical departure from Facebook and Instagram’s traditional focus on showing posts from a user’s social graph, or list of friends. The change is intended to compete with TikTok’s heavy use of AI to serve up videos from anywhere. TikTok quickly became one of the most popular apps in the world, spawning a whole new creator economy.
To be honest, I believe I’m done with Instagram. Any time that I spend on the app it’s just to respond to messages. Maybe it’s a good thing they bought WhatsApp; maybe it’ll save them! What’s your thoughts on this?
