Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go
This is endemic to Metas culture though, they’re a metrics driven company so metrics drive their design decisions.
No one important at Instagram is fighting for the vision of what IG is. They’re just fighting to try and claw eyeballs away from emerging platforms and their success is being judged on how many people they get to push on these new formats. They don’t care if it’s at the detriment to what made their product great to begin with, because all they’re looking at is “how many reels are they watching. How many stories are they posting”.
Thing is with this strategy because there is no overall vision and no one standing up and saying “we shouldn’t add this” you get the equivalent of a burger restaurant serving sushi and tacos too but their burgers just suck now.
Crazy seeing it happen as the competing experiences encroach on screen space. IG now has Snapchat at the top and TikTok “ad breaks” in the feed. Twitter now has Clubhouse at the top. Etc.
Algorithmic feeds are the harbinger of doom for social media. They all get immediately and progressively worse when it's implemented (and it always will be because that's the business model).
