Some users accused Instagram of mimicking TikTok after recent changes that the Meta-owned platform has been through. Furthermore, Instagram supposedly did it at the expense of some of its loyal users.
As a result, surprisingly or not, Instagram decided to roll back some changes to the app, such as toning down the algorithm that caused the users to see a lot of videos from accounts they weren’t following. The information about Instagram’s decision is brought by The Guardian.
Taking a risk was a good move
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said the following during an interview for Platformer, and as The Verge quotes:
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.
Mosseri believes that seeing videos from unfollowed accounts in your feed is not necessarily bad, but the way the feature has been perceived might not have been the right one.
He also said as The Guardian quotes:
“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.”
It seems that Instagram will still keep the “Reels” videos, meaning a way to publish footage that seems to have been inspired by a TikTok feature. That seems to work very well for Instagram until now, as there are many people using Reels.
