Today, Explained - Instagram’s identity crisis

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

If you think Instagram sucks now, it’s by design. Vox's Rebecca Jennings and Platformer's Casey Newton explain.  This episode was produced by Victoria Dominguez, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Hady Mawajdeh and Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember early Instagram? When you just scroll through cute pictures of your friends, see their dogs, see their travels, quietly appreciate or judge their lives? To like or not to like? That was the only question. But now, things are different. Now Instagram has all these videos. Went out and got my new nails today.

Stop it. Go away. Do you smoke, drink, any recreational drug use? Never. Never. Never. Wow. I don't even follow you.

Oh my God. It's Timothee Chia Omelette. Did you just steal that from TikTok? That poor obese dog. Who put my new Yeezy 700s in the trash? These are exclusive! What happened to Instagram? Coming up on Today Explained.

Ah! Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today is gonna be... Explain. To you. Everyone's mad at Instagram, which isn't really saying much because everyone is kind of always mad at Instagram.

But in the past few months, Instagram has made some pretty major changes that just really prioritize on your feed video and posts from people who you do not follow, you do not know them. They're just random videos that show up in your feed and that it thinks you might want to watch. But this is a big departure from the Instagram that I think a lot of people know and love, which is, you know, a customized feed of people you have chosen to follow versus, you know, something like TikTok where it just shows you random people and you don't really get a say, which is kind of the joy of it.

But in the past few weeks, that chorus has grown much louder and a lot of Instagram's biggest power users are kind of joining in. Rebecca Jennings writes about the internet for Vox. We asked her to tell us the story of Instagram's identity crisis. I think this starts when TikTok becomes a really, really big deal, and I think we can see a big spike in TikTok's popularity right at the beginning of the pandemic. Guys, there's a really cool app that I've been getting into lately called TikTok. We know that, you know, Facebook had an interest in TikTok as its former self musically years ago

and was even exploring maybe buying it. But then, you know, kind of it was either turned away or, you know, decided not to. It's kind of blurry. But for the most part, you know, Instagram and Facebook kept on kind of like being Instagram and Facebook. But now that TikTok is such an unavoidable force in our culture. TikTok had 13 million downloads in 2019 alone.

It's really just done what Instagram has always done, which is copy its most, you know, prominent features and try to replicate it on its own platforms. And, you know, since TikTok is mostly known as a video platform, that means that it's kind of changed the way people's feed looks when they scroll Instagram. So instead of, you know, pictures that your friends or family or, you know, an influencer that you like are posting, you'll see a lot more video content. And a lot of that video content is either, you know, videos that creators think they have to make because of Instagram's priority of video or videos that are just ripoffs of TikToks that went

viral a couple of months ago. And it's just a lot of crappy content that people don't really seem to like. Anyone that uses Instagram really can't avoid Reels now because, you know, Instagram has decided to just put Reels in our feeds. It looks exactly like TikTok, except for it's in your Instagram feed and the videos are worse. So people started noticing, you know, how prevalent videos were around this time last year. And with a couple

of more tweaks, you know, the Instagram updates all the time, whatever. But over the past year, it's just gotten more and more, you know, recommended videos, like recommended in quotes, because like, who is recommending them? Like some weird algorithm that clearly doesn't know us very well, because no one seems to like the content. And this summer, Instagram started this test to a pretty small number of users where photos would start to show up as if they were sort of added to a video screen and they would show up, they would take up the whole screen, but there were black bars on the bottom and the top of the photo. So they just looked really weird, really out of place. They looked like, you know, this platform isn't for photos anymore.

You know, we hate photos now. And people really, really didn't like it. The app is no longer a photo sharing app that we once knew. It's now an e-commerce app. But Instagram, what the f*** is this? I posted a picture and you have to click on it for it to expand. And then you start scrolling and it's like, it's TikTok. You're not TikTok.

Let it go. According to Instagram's own data, you know, people were using the app less and just didn't engage with any of it. So coinciding with that this summer, a photographer on Instagram named Tati Bruning. My name is Tati Bruning, also known as Illumitati, and I'm a photographer and content creator. Went viral. It was a black text on white background. I posted a silly little meme that said, make Instagram, Instagram again. And people ran with it. Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, everyone. And I was surprised with how so many people resonated with it. And I also attached a petition to it, half jokingly. Now it has over

300,000 signatures. And obviously, this is a really strong sentiment that so, so many people, users, creators alike agree with. It was almost unusable. It felt like I was on a completely different app. And I wasn't seeing any photos of my friends. So while I was scrolling, I was either seeing promoted content or sponsored content. And it went viral. It got, you know, more than two million likes. And even people like Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner were posting it on their stories. And those are two of the most popular Instagram users. Yeah. So we're talking like, you know, major, major Instagram influencers who, you know, you would think would be very pro-Instagram or, you know,

just really happy with whatever Instagram does. But those are actually the people that, you know, Instagram is really terrified of losing because they get engagement, they make news, they make Instagram relevant. And so it kind of amounted to like a PR disaster. How does Instagram respond? The head of Instagram, Adam Masseri, made a video a couple weeks ago where he said, we're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you. But he also acknowledged that video is kind of where social media is heading. If you look at what people like and consume and view on Instagram, that's also shifting more and more to video over time. Even when people say that they prefer photo, he assured users that Instagram will never just, you know, forget about photo. He assured users that Instagram will never just, you know, forget about photo.

It's part of our heritage. But that the numbers were showing that people were more interested in video despite what they said. So he basically says, I hear you. I see you. But... You're wrong. One of the big things that, you know, they claim about recommended videos from people that you don't follow is that it's a way to help smaller creators get more of a following. And that is true. Instagram has never been a really great discovery platform. That's why TikTok is so good at surfacing people you wouldn't otherwise know.

Whereas Instagram is where you go to follow the people that you already know about. And I think this is Instagram's way of kind of catching up to that discoverability that TikTok is so good at. But the point that people are making who love the way Instagram used to be is that they just want to see the stuff from their networks, from their friends, right? And Adam Aseri basically just blows right past that criticism. Exactly. And I think that's because the people that matter more to, you know, an Instagram CEO are the people who are going to help grow followers and grow the amount of money they can make out of this.

Facebook is betting on the idea that its most, you know, loyal users are going to keep using it regardless, where while they can also help, you know, grow the amount of time spent on the platform by smaller creators who are, like, building their brand. This isn't the first time the platform has introduced some dramatic changes, right? I'm old enough to remember when Instagram just started completely trying to be Snapchat. Yeah, it completely stole the idea of stories,

which are disappearing posts that they're up for 24 hours and then they're gone, they're ephemeral. I think if I remember properly back then, it was sort of just looked upon as so shameless. It was like, oh my gosh, like seriously, Instagram is just copying this. Like no one's going to use Instagram for that. And look what happened in a couple of years. I just remember thinking that it was so lame that like Instagram was copying Snapchat and how I would never use Instagram for that. And then obviously I, you know, never use my Snapchat anymore because it successfully stole that idea.

Right. So is there a chance that Adam Masseri is right and that this is what people want, whether they realize it or not? These changes are going to be good for certain kinds of Instagram users, people that are really trying to like build these viral creator brands for themselves. If you think that that's a good thing, then it will be good.

But if you think that's, you know, not maybe where you would like to see Facebook and Instagram putting their efforts, then that's not a great thing. And I think most people on Instagram are following to the latter category. Is there a chance, though, that Instagram's constant aping of TikTok blows up in their faces and that people just bounce? that they actually lose the Kardashians and the Jenners and the influencers and the moneymakers to another new, sexier, more original, more predictable platform.

I think the reality is that Instagram is just so big and has such a strong history of, like, being part of this creator economy that it's never going to, you know, like, completely hemorrhage its main users or anything like that but i do think that people maybe spend less time there and more time on you know more interesting more niche apps a lot of the newer apps that have been kind of buzzy lately have nothing to do with getting famous which i think is really interesting and you know when tiktok came out it was like okay well if we can't make our users famous then what what are we giving them? How do we get that kind of engagement? I think there's going to be less of an interest on that because the creator economy already is just so crowded. And it's just so hard to break in as it is that like, why even bother? What this really

boils down to is that Instagram, whose parent company is Facebook, now Meta, wants to just be everything for everybody. This is an economy based on extreme growth and like infinite growth. And the way that Instagram sees it is that if it can't be everything to everybody, then it's failed or that it's destined to stall or plateau. In a minute, what's going on at Instagram is just a little mini-me version of what's going on at Instagram's parent company, Facebook. I mean, Meta. That's the point. More on Meta in a minute on Today Explained.

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Today Explained, Ramasphirm, we're back and we're joined by the venerable Casey Newton from the Platformer newsletter, who's going to tell us about how the whole Instagram thing is really just the whole meta thing. The company is responding to basically the greatest series of threats it has ever faced, and they are kind of scrambling to keep pace with some very real changes in the market that they're in. And because their base is so big of their base of users, a lot of people are angry. We heard about this challenge that is, you know, TikTok from Rebecca, but you'd argue it's not just bad for business, but that this crisis is more existential. How come?

Well, because the more time people spend on TikTok, the less time they spend looking at ads on Facebook and Instagram. And that brings us to the second challenge that this company is having, which is that last year, Apple rolled out a feature called app tracking transparency, which for most people choose not to allow themselves to be targeted by personalized advertising and the apps that they look at. Some people thought that this would be a relatively minor blow to the sort of ad-based social network ecosystem. In reality, it was a huge blow. And Facebook, I think, is expected to lose about $15 billion in revenue this year due to that one change alone. So the combination of fewer people looking at ads

and ads being less effective on Facebook has created real problems for them. this year due to that one change alone. So the combination of fewer people looking at ads and ads being less effective on Facebook has created real problems for them. I want to talk about two things next, which is one is aping another app to avoid losing out to that app. And the other is doing something that's actually new and interesting. Let's talk about the first. We talked with Rebecca about how it seems to have kind of worked with stealing stories from Snapchat. That didn't result in this revolt as much as it feels like making everything real and video is currently on Instagram. I think stories was a really natural evolution of Instagram as it existed at the time. By the time that Instagram cloned stories, most people had

stopped sharing to Instagram more than a handful of times a year, right? It had just become this feed of highlights of your life. Stories unlocked this new set of things that you were willing to share, these sort of more mundane, everyday moments. And so I think people just felt like it belonged. What TikTok is doing here is really quite different, right? Because you're going from seeing, you know, your friends and family, things that you've chosen to follow to just a bunch of suggestions. And, you know, some of this stuff is very like America's funniest home videos level,

like man gets hit in the crotch by a baseball bat type of stuff. So set it up. You got to set it right to the ball. Bend your knees a little bit. Wait, hold it. Don't swing yet. Oh, God!

And if that's not what you opened up Instagram looking for, you are going to feel like an alien parasite has taken over the app. Yeah, and you actually spoke to Adam Masseri himself about this. You presented him with all these complaints. Did you get anything out of him? Didn't you even tell him that someone had called him, like, a minion? What happened? Well, when he was trying

to explain these changes, he wore a yellow sweatshirt. There's a lot going on on Instagram right now. We're experimenting with a number of different changes to the app. And so someone photoshopped minion eyes onto him and said that he was in his minion era. That was Rusty Foster in the Today and Tabs newsletter. Very good newsletter. And, you know, I mean, out of said, I think a lot of interesting things and really did kind of fill in the context for why they're doing this that this is not a series of experiments designed to torture instagram users this is stuff that by and large they feel like they have to do and i think one big trend that is worth bringing up that adam talked about is just the fact that even before tiktok people were just sharing more and

more video on instagram. Makes sense, right? If you look at your Instagram stories today, my guess is you'll probably see a lot of video in there. And so they have been thinking for a while about how do we bring more video into this app? I don't know if you remember IGTV. That was kind of the last big initiative that the founders of Instagram had rolled out before they left the company. Hey guys, it's Eli Pons, and this is a new episode of my cooking show. That didn't really go as planned, but then TikTok came along

and figured out a better way to do it. So now they have to figure out, okay, how do we make this thing feel at home, given that the marketplace is sort of voting with its eyeballs, and all of the eyeballs are on TikTok. Can I offer a solution? When you talked to Masseri,

did you ask him why he doesn't let people just opt out of the changes? Because Twitter has more recently realized that that is a potential solution to people being very disgruntled with their changes to the timeline, right? There was this era where Twitter was just this chronological timeline of tweets, and then they changed it where they started showing you very popular tweets first, a bunch of junk you didn't follow, and then maybe if you scrolled for like three hours, something from a friend that they actually said 20 minutes ago. Why doesn't Instagram just try that? They will let you turn off recommendations in your feed

for up to 30 days. You can X out a recommendation. You can even snooze all recommendations for up to a month. And they've also just said that they're going to reduce them generally for a while like while they make them better so i think they're trying to do what they can to let people kind of control that a little bit but at the same time like people kind of tweet one thing and do another and when it comes to video like people really are just consuming lots of video you know reels which is like their version of TikToks, which you can find now all over Instagram and Facebook. There's not a lot of like heart or craftsmanship in it. It really is just, you know, TikTok on Instagram, but it's doing pretty well. People are watching them, right? Like they are growing. And so, you know, we might look at that and just think it feels really cynical, but it's working for them well

enough that those things are not going away. Okay, so that's one side of it. The other side of it, to me, feels like what Facebook's doing with meta, which is making this enormous gamble on the metaverse. This is called Stefan's Quintet. This is pretty wild. So far, all I see are really awkward videos with like Mark Zuckerberg interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson about the telescope photos that NASA published. And it looks corny as hell. Oh, yes. And so now this is the gas sloughed off in the dying stages of a star. How is the Meta gamble going for Meta?

It has its like highs and lows. I think on the pro side, they've sold a lot of those Oculus Quest 2 headsets. Huh. So anecdotally, I went over to my brother's house for Christmas and all the kids in the neighborhood had gotten one. So there is kind of something happening there where kids are playing with this.

Reality doesn't believe in the impossible. It doesn't believe in moving without limits or breaking the laws of physics. I think the question is, is that part of a long-term shift that Facebook is really kind of the tip of the spear on? Or is it more of just kind of a novelty and eventually Apple or Google comes along or Microsoft with something that's even fancier and better and Facebook gets left behind? So they really want to own their own platform, like everything else be damned. So that's why they're going headlong into this. They're determined to own the next generation of computing, whatever it is. And so they're taking a massive bet on that. The thing is,

they're so, so early, right? Like you talk to anyone about this, and you know, including Mark Zuckerberg, and he will tell you, they have so many problems to solve with this just to make basically a working prototype, right? When you're talking about shrinking computers and displays down so that they can fit in glasses and have like decent battery life and not like literally burn your face because the glasses have gotten so hot. You not literally burn your face because the glasses have gotten so hot. You're just running up against the laws of physics. And so they will tell you, it's going to take three, five, eight years before they've managed to solve those problems.

And that's a long time. And they're already out there basically today telling you, hey, the metaverse is almost ready for you. So I think they've gotten kind of way ahead of the technology and I, and you know, they're, they're going to pay a price for it, which, you know, in, in jokes and other things. I mean, it seems like they're at once acknowledging the platforms can kind of stay the same and that platforms need to radically change. I mean, Facebook, if I ever check in over there, it looks more or less like it did 10 years ago when I kind of stopped using it. And then Instagram, of course, is in the middle ground where it's totally changing and doesn't

look like anything I used to see. And then, you know, the metaverse is something that's so advanced that I don't even want to see it yet. Is meta just betting on everything? Here's the thing you have to remember about social networks. They become popular because they figure out some novel mechanic that gets us all to share, whether it's like a square photo or a filtered photo or a six-second video or a 140-character sentence. And there's something about that that draws us all and says, yeah, let's all do that, right? But just like chewing gum, those things lose their flavor and people start falling away. And so these companies just have to continuously pull rabbit after rabbit out of a hat just in order to keep our attention. You know, I sometimes think that media is the worst business,

you know, for various reasons. But then you talk to these people running social networks, they actually do have it pretty tough because if they're not able to stay ahead of what people want and sort of constantly find, you know, this is maybe a bit of a tangent, but like, you know, have you ever seen like at the mall and like one of those photo studios and they're trying to like get the baby to smile? Come on, smile. Smiley Wiley. Like that's how I think of a social network. It's like Mark Zuckerberg with like a shiny little disco ball waving it in front of a baby's face saying like, will you smile at this?

That is what a social network is. So you can get mad at Instagram because it's not just like photos of your friend's brunch anymore. People had stopped smiling at that. And so we had to bring in a new shiny to get people's attention. I mean, should we just accept that all platforms must die? I think we have to accept the death of all things, Sean. And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about today. but it really seems that like meta with this instagram tiktok hybrid is not accepting that at all they're trying to instead just grasp at any last semblance of any last thing they can

throw in front of the baby's face well i i think you're hitting on something important here which is that i do think these apps are having an identity crisis and it makes sense right like this company became one of the biggest companies in the world by building a network out of your friends and family. And then they wake up 20 years later, and guess what? What if your friends and family don't even matter? What if you don't want to see anything your friends and family post in a public way, right? Or maybe friends and family have just stopped posting to these networks in general for a bunch of reasons. All of a sudden, you need a new reason for being. That is just super hard to do. And in fact, we should assume by default that this will not work, right? There are very few cases in the history of business where anybody

has been able to pull something like this off. So their back is against the ropes. Casey Newton, Platformer is his newsletter. Find it at platformer.news. You can and should read Rebecca Jennings at Vox.com. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. Our show today was produced by Victoria Dominguez, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, Adi Mawagdi, and mixed and mastered by Paul Mounsey. It's Today Explained.