Instagram boss 'needs to be honest' about changes coming to your feed

NEW YORK -- Is your Instagram experience feeling a little different these days? Maybe a lot different! The social media app, owned by Facebook's parent company Meta, is experimenting with changes in an effort to not only stay competitive with rivals like TikTok and SnapChat but also adapt to what it believes its users want.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri addressed the changes and the concerns he's heard from some users, in a Tuesday morning social post.

A transcript of his message is below:

Adam Mosseri

There's a lot going on in Instagram. Right now, we're experimenting with a number of different changes to the app. And so we're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you. So I wanted to take a few moments and clarify a few things.

One is, if you're seeing a new full-screen version of a feed, or you're hearing about it know that that is a test, it's a test to a few percentage of people out there.

And the idea is that a more full-screen experience, not only for videos but for photos might be a more fun, engaging experience. But I also 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.

The second thing I'm hearing a lot of concerns about right now are photos and how we're shifting to video.

Now, I want to be clear, we're going to continue to support photos, it's part of our heritage. I love photos, I know a lot of you out there love photos too.

That said, I need to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time we see this even if we change nothing, we see this even if you just look at the chronological feed, if you look at what people share on Instagram, that's shifting more and more to videos over time.

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 we start changing anything. So we're gonna have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos.

The third thing I want to talk about is recommendations. Recommendations are posts in your feed from accounts that you do not follow. The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not know even exist. Now if you're seeing things in your feed that are recommendations that you're not interested in.

That means that we're doing a bad job ranking and we need to improve. And you can X out recommendations, you can even snooze all recommendations for up to a month or go to your following feed. But we're gonna continue to try and get better at recommendations because we think it's one of the most effective and important ways to help creators reach more people.

We want to do our best by creators, particularly small creators. And we see recommendations is one of the best ways to help them reach a new audience and grow their following.

Now, this is a lot of change all at once. But know that a number of things about Instagram are going to stay the same. We're going to stay committed to creators more broadly, we're going to stay committed to supporting photos, we're going to stay in a place where we try and put your friends content at the top of feed in the front of stories whenever possible.

But we're also gonna need to evolve because the world is changing quickly. And we're going to have to change along with it. So please let me know what you think down in the comments and know that I'm going to continue to be here explaining there are changes as we come up with them, the reason behind them, and give you the latest updates about what's going on on Instagram. I'll see you soon. Peace.

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