This is Instagram’s most failed and short-lived attempt

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Text/Du Chen

Source/Silicon Star (ID:guixingren123)

Meta has been pretty bleak lately. At the performance level, the company experienced a year-on-year decline in revenue for the first time in its history, and it also reduced expenses and slowed down recruitment/onboarding.

However, the house leak happens to rain overnight: even the company’s most popular product, Instagram, has been scolded by loyal Internet celebrity users and ordinary netizens…

Recently, many users have found that Instagram has been redesigned, and it has become a “familiar and unfamiliar” look:

A remake of TikTok.

In order to promote the Reels short video function, Instagram has “do everything possible”: after this product update, whenever a user uploads a video, as long as the length is less than 15 minutes, Instagram will automatically use it as Reels! (The following figure)

In this way, the product team easily revolutionized the way users use the app, solving Reels’ unpopular conundrum.

Instagram has finally changed from an app where users spontaneously upload content to share their lives, to what Meta’s bosses expected: a data/ad/revenue milking machine that heavily uses algorithmic recommendations and continuously stimulates users’ dopamine secretion.

As a result, the users who had no way out finally rose up, and the whole network boycotted and scolded. So, in just the past week, Instagram couldn’t stand the pressure and failed, not only announcing the cancellation of the revision. Even the person in charge of the business was “distributed” to the UK…

This is simply the shortest and most unsuccessful “redesign” in Instagram’s history.

Forcing the top-tier tuba into an enemy

In recent years, Instagram has significantly strengthened its algorithmic recommendation. As a result, the user experience has fallen into the sewer instead of making much more money.

Now the entire user interface of Instagram is imitating, and even some interaction details are directly copied from TikTok/Tiktok. For example, the timeline used to scroll infinitely, and two pieces of content could appear on the same screen; now it has become a full-screen timeline exactly like TikTok, with only one short video Reels content on the screen at a time; The release button in the middle at the bottom of the screen was also changed to the entrance of Reels last year. And when you click into someone else’s account, the first thing you see is Reels, and you have to swipe left to see the photo collection.

After this revision, the situation has gotten even worse: because now basically all videos have become Reels, and Reels will also appear on the timeline, the result is that there are at least three or four intervals between the content that users really want to watch. A full-screen short video, plus “relevant” recommendations discovered by other algorithms but hated by users.

What’s more outrageous is that if the phone itself is not in the [completely silent] mode, the Reels you brush cannot be muted, even in vibration mode. Because now tapping the screen is not mute, but a pause. This incomprehensible interaction design change caused a lot of annoyance to users who swiped Instagram in public (but didn’t want to affect others).

The American technology media TechCrunch even directly commented that this revision was a “dark pattern” (referring to doing some “gimmicks” that are not the original intention to mislead users).

Meta often used grayscale testing (gradually expanding the scale of test users) to push new features, designs, etc. However, this time I don’t know if Instagram chose the wrong group, or if there is no grayscale at all – including the “tuba” with hundreds of thousands of followers, and even some “super-tuba” with over 100 million followers and a high amount of interaction, All received the push of this revision at the first time…

Just the day after Instagram announced its redesign, Tati Bruening, a well-known internet celebrity photographer with 330,000 followers, launched an initiative called “MakeInstagramInstagramAgain”, hoping to make this product he loves so much back in the memory of himself and countless other ordinary users. the original appearance.

“If I want to see a friend’s post, I have to go through three Reels and a recommended post that has been posted for 6 days.” (Note: The recommended content may be discovered by the Instagram algorithm, but it is usually bought by the account owner. traffic results.)

“Stop copying TikTok, I just want to see cute pictures of my friends,” Bruening told CNN.

Kim Kardashian, who has 330 million followers, and Kylie Jenner, who has 360 million followers, also shared the post. Fueled by two of the Kardashians’ top celebrities, Bruening’s initiative has garnered more than 2.25 million likes.

You must know that Kylie Jenner is very well-known among young netizens, and can even have an unpredictable impact on the market. And this is not the first time she has played an “Internet analyst”. A few years ago, she sent a tweet complaining about Snapchat’s revision, which directly caused Snap’s stock price to plummet by about 8% that day, erasing $1.3 billion in market value.

The more you want to be loved, the more no one loves you

Not only are celebrities anti-water, ordinary users also hate the way Instagram is now.

Erika Cazares, a user who lives in Texas, told the British “Guardian”, “I have now refused to swipe the timeline because most of what I see is video after video from accounts I don’t follow at all, and Not my family and friends.”

Content creator Stefan Etienne points to the embarrassing nature of the revamp scandal: the more you want to be loved, the less you love it.

“Stop pushing Reels. You’ve now put journalists, content creators, CEOs and celebrities — all on the same page. Instagram is now a pure advertising machine, not me and me anymore friends and something that everyone finds cool.”

Facebook’s user base is about to enter the soil, and Instagram’s user base is also entering middle age. There is no product in the entire Meta group that can capture Gen-Z young people. Under the impact of TikTok’s competition, the pressure is huge.

And Meta’s response is exactly the old road of “pixel re-engraving” that it is most familiar with.

Just because the past plagiarism failure records are too many and too painful, this time Meta did not fake a new product – but simply let Instagram, a phenomenal product that is enough to be recorded in the history of the Internet, lose its unique uniqueness that people love most. Sex, reduced to a lame copycat of TikTok.

In the face of overwhelming criticism, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram business, also responded at the end of July: the company will continue to support the content format of photos. But the product will only be more video-focused, as data shows that users watch, like, and share more videos than photos on the platform. So there is no way, change is inevitable.

“The current revision is just a test, and the current experience is really not very good,” Mosseri admits. “Algorithmic recommendation is our main way to help more content creators… If you don’t like the content, you can turn it off or pause through the options. Recommendations feature.” However, this option to suspend recommendations will only last for one month at a time.

Mosseri’s response did little to quell user anger. This tweet was also “ratio” unsurprisingly (more comments than likes, which means that users generally feel negative).

Within a few days, Instagram was completely defeated.

On July 28, that is, two days after Mosseri responded, Instagram announced that it would eliminate the revision function that had been pushed to a large number of users before, no longer turn almost all videos into Reels, and reduce the promotion of this short video function. strength.

Just like the previous push for Reels because the data told them they should do it, this time it was also determined by the data. “The new timeline design is frustrating for our users and using data is not good, so we need to take a big step back and rethink how we’re going to move forward,” Mosseri said.

As for this failure, Mosseri couldn’t help but be “hard-mouthed”. “I’m glad we took the risk. If we don’t fail every once in a while, it just means we’re not big enough and not brave enough,” he said in an interview with Platformernewsletter.

In the short term, Instagram will be a little more conservative in algorithm recommendations, reduce the proportion of recommended content, and continue to improve the accuracy of the algorithm.

However, even so, the general trend of algorithmic recommendation will not change. Mosseri’s boss, Zuckerberg, also said that by the end of next year, the ratio of algorithmic recommendations on Instagram’s timeline should reach about 30%—meaning that for every three pieces of content you swipe, there will be an algorithmic recommendation.

This time Instagram messed up and hurt users, and it is estimated that the internal evaluation of Meta is also quite bad. Just yesterday, Meta announced that Mosseri will not be working at the company’s headquarters for the time being, and will temporarily move to its London, UK office.

Although Meta said on the surface that there was no punishment for Mosseri – this adjustment is quite “send the frontier”.

Of course, the amount of information in this adjustment is still very large. For example, one possibility is that Meta will start from scratch to create a new competitor that directly competes with TikTok. Because if we want to do this, the cost of research and development will be very high, and we need to divide or even re-form new teams and recruit many new people. In this regard, the UK has a relatively good location advantage, and the tax policy in high-tech is relatively advantageous. What’s more, Meta’s recent performance is sluggish, and the financial pressure is great, and the company is about to embrace the “wolf nature”.

And another key factor is that TikTok has just “closed doors” in the UK. Because the promotion of live broadcast and delivery of goods had poor results, and the work culture within the company was criticized by local employees, TikTok just suspended the expansion plan of the UK-based live broadcast delivery business last month.

On the premise that competitors have already laid a certain foundation locally, Meta can use this foundation to accelerate its own benchmarking product development.

But anyway, this isn’t Instagram/Meta’s first, and I’m afraid it won’t be the last, at pixel level copying a competitor and tasting a miserable failure…

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