Is Instagram Becoming More Like TikTok, or Something Completely Different?

What will the Instagram experience look like over the next couple of years, and will the answer to that question be, “Like TikTok?” Instagram began testing a new version of its application’s home feed in May, which featured full-screen photos and videos, much like TikTok, and reactions to the test were strong. Photographer Tati Bruening shared a post on Instagram last month saying, “Make Instagram Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by ▵✖️tati (@illumitati) Her online petition tallied more than 275,000 signatures, and social media powerhouses joined the fray, as Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian shared the petition. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared to stand behind the potential shift in focus at Instagram in remarks during the company’s second-quarter earnings call last week, but soon thereafter, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri pumped the brakes in a conversation with Casey Newton for Platformer. Zuckerberg focused more on the content mix of both Facebook and Instagram and the shift of both apps toward becoming discovery engines, again, much like TikTok. He said during his opening remarks on the earnings call, “Social content from people you know is going to remain an important part of the experience and some of our most differentiated content, but increasingly, we'll also be able to supplement that with other interesting content from across our networks. Reels is one part of this trend that focuses on the growth of short-form video as a content format, but this overall artificial intelligence trend is much broader and covers all types of content, including text, images, links, group content and more. Building a recommendation system across all of these types of content is something we're uniquely focused on.” He added that roughly 15% of content in a person’s Facebook Feed and “a little more than that” in a person’s Instagram feed is recommended by AI from accounts, groups or people the user does not follow, and he expects those percentages to double by the end of 2023. Zuckerberg concluded, “As we're building our discovery engine, though, I want to be clear that we're still ultimately a social company focused on helping people connect. One social trend that we're seeing is that instead of people just interacting in comments in their feeds, most people find interesting content in their feeds and then they message that content to friends and interact there. This creates this flywheel of discovery, and then social connection and inspiring those people to create more content themselves. In Instagram, for example, we see that Reels make up more than one-half of content reshared in messages. So, our strategy isn't about public versus social content and interaction: It's really about enabling a flywheel that compounds both.” Mosseri told Newton, “One positive way of looking at this is that if people are passionate enough to get spicy on Twitter, that means they care about Instagram. That's a good thing.” He explained the focus on content recommendation and how at applies to Instagram, telling Newton, “When you discover something in your feed 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, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then—if and when we do—we can start to grow again.” Mosseri discussed how the app has evolved from a feed app with no direct messages or Stories to its current form, with more photos and videos shared via DM, and more being shared in Stories than feed, adding, “Which then begs the question: What's the future of feed? And in a world where more of the friend content has gone from feed into Stories and DMs, I think that feed is going to become more public in nature. We want to steer it, to the degree we can, toward creators and individuals, and less toward publishers and institutions, although obviously, they will always be on the platform, too.” Instagram will phase out the test of full-screen photos and videos over the next two weeks, as well as lowering the number of recommended posts, and Mosseri told Newton, “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 … For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn’t great. So there, I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup and figure out how we want to move forward.” He concluded in his talk with Newton, “How people communicate with their friends and entertain themselves changes. The world is changing more and more quickly, and that's hard, because change is hard. I also want to acknowledge, if you spend an hour at your desk every day talking to your friends and reading or watching TV, and then I came by and I just rearranged everything without telling you, you'd be pretty pissed. So, I think we need to do a better job making sure it's clear why something is better and explaining something before it happens, so we don't surprise people.”

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Is Instagram Becoming More Like TikTok, or Something Completely Different?

Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri respond to backlash over recommendations in feed, full-screen test

David Cohen

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