Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said the social network will temporarily walk back some recent changes to the app that have led to intense criticism from users. Mosseri revealed the news in an interview with reporter Casey Newton. Instagram will phase out a test that turned users’ home feeds into a TikTok-like full-screen experience that prioritized video in the coming weeks and will also temporarily reduce the number of recommended posts that users see, as it plans to improve and rework its algorithms.
“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,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told Newton in the interview. “But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. [When] we’ve learned a lot, then we come back with some sort of new idea or iteration. So we’re going to work through that.”
Mosseri noted that users’ concerns about the changes were reflected in Instagram’s own internal data, which is why the company plans to take a step back and figure out how to move forward. The change comes as users have expressed frustration over the app’s gradual transition away from being a place where users could post and see photos of their friends and family, and more towards chasing TikTok.
The news comes a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that about 15% of content in our Facebook feeds are served by Meta’s AI and that number is even a little bit higher on Instagram. Zuckerberg went on to note that the company expects these numbers to double by the end of next year. Mosseri told Newton that Instagram will temporarily reduce the number of recommended posts that users see, but didn’t specify by how much, in order to get better at ranking and presenting recommendations to users. Once Instagram improves its recommendation algorithm, it will start to grow again, Mosseri says.
