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While there is no denying that TikTok's popularity is soaring high with every passing day, some platforms like Instagram have their own charm. However, users have now started to feel that the platform is no more “Instagram,” instead, it is becoming more of a TikTok-like platform where people share short videos.
Users have launched a campaign where they are asking to “Make Instagram Instagram Again,” and now Kylie Jenner has also joined the movement as she also recently reposted the same message.
What is the “Make Instagram Instagram Again” trend?
Users of the gram are calling for the app to stop trying to be like TikTok by running a petition which has currently been signed by more than 140,000 people. The number of people signing this petition is growing by the second. With the title of the petition being:
“Make Instagram Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, Everyone.”
The goal of the petition is to get it signed by 150,000 people. The petition was started by Tati Bruening, who mentions:
“There’s no need to overcomplicate things, we just want to see when our friends post, the beauty of Instagram was that it was INSTAntaneous. Back in the dawn of the app we were all living in the moment, seeing our best moments in real time. STOP TRYING TO BE TIKTOK! We have TikTok for a reason, and let’s face it, the only reels uploaded are recycled TikToks and content that the world has already seen.”
The post has also been shared by Kylie Jenner, who also wrote a “Please” on her stories while sharing this message. Being one of the most influential personalities on social media, Kylie has already made her endorsement of the petition, which has also sparked thousands to sign the petition to support Tati’s movement.
With 360 million followers, Kylie is the second most followed celebrity on the gram after Cristiano Ronaldo. Back in 2018, Kylie voiced her opinion on Snapchat. Her tweet criticizing Snapchat caused the parent company Snap Inc. to lose $1.3 billion in market value in a day.
Kim Kardashian too joined her sister in supporting the trend. She shared the same post in her stories with a "Pretty Please" added to it. Both sisters enjoy immense popularity on social media. Kylie has 360 million followers, while Kardashian has 326 million. So it is safe to assume that their opinion does hold some sway, as is evident with the Snapchat share incident.
Many people agree that it is becoming frustrating to see the app following in TikTok's footsteps, and users are clearly becoming more inclined towards the trend of making the app a photo-sharing one, rather than a short video sharing application.
Basically, the app regularly changes its algorithm based on the users' likes and dislikes. Users recently noticed that the application has been showing a lot of reels, rather than pictures of the people that they follow. This also results in less engagement with your photos and other videos that one shares.
Many people are sharing this post to help change the algorithm of the application back to sharing more of the picture updates. People are also not happy with the fact that Meta recently announced that any video a user posts which is under 15 seconds will automatically become a reel. This is purely to increase engagement and video recommendations.
The gram users can hence clearly sense the intention of Meta to make the application more of a video sharing application, rather than a photo sharing one. This fact is upsetting netizens, including Kylie Jenner.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri responds to the criticism
Adam Mosseri posted a video earlier today addressing the increasing concerns about changes to the app’s feed and its increasing emphasis on video.
Mosseri touched on some of the issues that users have been talking about, including the full-screen feed. He confirmed that it was just a test run for a small percentage of users and agreed that the full-screen feed isn't really great.
“I want to be clear, it’s not yet good. And we’re going to have to get it to a good place if we’re going to ship it to the rest of the Instagram community.”
Mosseri also added that while the app will continue to focus on and support photos as it's “part of our heritage,” the app will “continue to become more and more video over time.”
He also mentioned that users too are sharing more video content on the app, users are consuming more video content on the app and although Mosseri himself loves photos, the app will continue its trajectory towards video based content.
He also spoke about recommendations and said that if users are seeing content in their feeds that they're not interested in, Mosseri said “that means that we’re doing a bad job ranking, and we need to improve.”
He further mentioned that users can snooze out recommendations for up to a month.
But he said that these recommendations will continue appearing in feeds as he believes this is the best way to help smaller creators reach more people.
Now it is a waiting game to see if Kylie Jenner's endorsement affects the shares of the app's parent company as it did for Snapchat. Going by Mosseri's video, video content is here to stay.
