Have you hovered over the Instagram app recently, too exhausted at the mere thought of all the notifications, widgets, inboxes and posts awaiting you to open it?
It wasn’t always this way. Until recently, Instagram’s success had always come from its relative simplicity. It didn’t even let you post photos from your desktop until 2021.
In July, after the platform announced plans to pivot to a more TikTok-like interface, users, including the all-powerful Kardashians, revolted; the swift backlash of fury prompted Instagram head Adam Mosseri to release a video on Twitter effectively admitting how unpopular the redesign was and halting its further rollout, although he maintained that it would eventually arrive. Just last month, Instagram announced a slew of new features including group profiles, BeReal-style candid stories and 60-character notes you pin to your profile.
THE TAKEAWAY
BeReal and TikTok are siphoning off Instagram users in part because they both know something Instagram forgot—that simplicity sells.
Instagram now feels less like one coherent user experience and more like an awkward assemblage of semi-random features begging you to use them in sometimes contradictory ways. It wants you to be a public-facing content creator, making highly produced video content, but it also wants you to spontaneously take dual-camera photos on the spur of the moment and update your friends with ephemeral story content. And somewhere in there, you’re still meant to share regular old photos. It’s a lot. And it flies in the face of what has made Instagram stand out among all the other social networks.
The current one-app-fits-all state of Instagram is especially ironic considering that it began as an antidote to social media maximalism. The platform we know today launched in 2010 as a Foursquare-like app called Burbn and pronounced “bourbon.” Creator Kevin Systrom quickly scrapped the check-in gimmick, realizing it was too complicated for users, and focused on sharing photos instead.
There was something subversive at the time about an app that asked its users to just share one photo at a time. Young urban millennials—aka hipsters—looking to distinguish themselves from users on already mainstream social networks like Facebook were Instagram’s first demographic. The bloated post-night-out Facebook album was suddenly lame. The single, filtered square Instagram post was cool.
Once Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, it started to support a few basic social networking features like hashtags and photo filters; a year later it would add the ability to tag other users in posts, a feature lifted directly from Facebook. Within a month, it also allowed the uploading of 15-second videos. Each of these new features worked incredibly well. Over the next five years, Instagram launched its boomerang looping video tool, changed its feed from chronological to algorithmic, added direct messaging, introduced Stories, and, in a full-circle moment for the app, in 2017 brought back the photo album in the form of a carousel of 10 pictures and videos. During that time, it grew from 100 million daily active users to over 500 million.
Looking at those first five years of Facebook ownership, you might assume that regular feature additions are what helped Instagram grow into a cultural juggernaut. But no internet service exists in a vacuum. As Instagram was adding one or two Facebook-lite features a year, Facebook itself was changing a lot more, adding stand-alone messaging and news apps, trending topics, instant articles, emoji reactions, GIFs and live video, plus cycling through a handful of fundamental changes to the algorithmic news feed. The Facebookesque features Instagram added were also comparatively pared down. Instagram videos were only a few seconds long. Its carousels maxed out at fewer than a dozen photos. It didn’t have groups or hyperlinks. For the bulk of the 2010s, Instagram was an intimate experience compared to other platforms.
Of course, this general overloading of things to do is also true for other apps. Over the last decade, all of our social platforms have accumulated a glut of widgets. But it’s Instagram that seems the most lost. For years, it remained the social network most focused on a single central experience: posting curated photos and videos of your life. Those photos and videos may have arrived via Story update, direct message or your main feed. You may have caught up on some influencer drama or consumed some very effectively targeted ads (Away suitcases, you know where I live), but posting was ostensibly what you were there to do.
Now Facebook is Meta Platforms and Instagram is trying to be everything at once. It even briefly looked like Instagram might try to fill the void Twitter’s chaos has left in the social media landscape—The New York Times reported that Meta was considering adding some kind of real-time text feed to Instagram. The notes feature has been called “Twitter-like,” although in practice it feels more like an AOL Instant Messenger away message than anything else.
Meta’s revenue forecast is not nearly as optimistic as it once was, which means the company now needs more out of Instagram. It plans to add more ads and—despite a major push early last year toward more creator videos—it cited Reels as especially difficult to monetize. A bigger problem, perhaps, is that Instagram isn’t driving culture the way it used to. In fact, users seem to be craving the exact opposite of the glossy Instagram-friendly experience. TikTok has become the internet’s main hub for fashion and entertainment; U.S. users are spending more time on the short-form–video app than on both Facebook and Instagram combined. The well-lit, algorithmically optimized food photo that was once an Instagram hallmark has now been replaced, according to Eater, by the “messy meal photo dump,” led largely by apps like—you guessed it—BeReal and TikTok.
So far the company seems unable to see what’s driving the popularity of these scruffier upstarts, which is funny, because it’s the same thing that pushed Instagram past Facebook all those years ago—we know what to do with them. You can’t beat a focused, easy-to-handle, cheeky social app by loading on endless features. By continuing to do so, Instagram risks becoming the very thing it was meant to subvert—a clunky portal.
It’s possible Instagram’s longtime users will stay no matter how busy the app gets. But keeping users is only half the battle for a social network. At a certain point, Meta will have to find a way to grab new users or else resign itself to going the way of America Online and all the portal companies that came before it—into irrelevance.
My thoughts：
The article discusses how Instagram’s increasing complexity is causing user dissatisfaction and how its simplicity, which was the key to its initial success, has been compromised. Instagram’s recent decision to pivot to a TikTok-like interface has not been well received, and users, including the Kardashians, have revolted against the platform’s new features. Instagram now feels less like a coherent user experience and more like an awkward assemblage of semi-random features, and it has lost sight of what made it stand out among all the other social networks. The article also explores Instagram’s history and how it evolved from a simple photo-sharing app to a cultural juggernaut. However, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram led to the addition of several features, and Instagram started to support some basic social networking features. The article highlights how Instagram’s current one-app-fits-all state is ironic considering that it began as an antidote to social media maximalism.
Citation：
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/is-instagram-going-the-way-of-aol?rc=ixubfq
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