Meta Shoves More Shit Into IG
Mia Sato
I had been holding off on writing about this because I don't yet have the Instagram Maps feature. But as it turns out, that's likely because I live in Europe – and the feature undoubtedly isn't rolled out here yet, and may never be. For once, this may be a feature and not a bug of living here. Anyway:
Starting today, users will have the ability to repost public Reels and grid posts from other accounts. And similar to TikTok, reposts will be collected in a designated tab on your profile and sprinkled into the feeds of people who follow you. It’s a small but meaningful shift from how Instagram currently operates: until now, the most efficient way to share other users’ content was to repost it on your Instagram Story. Now, you can essentially reblog it.
Thanks, I hate it. I mean, honestly, at first, I find it a bit hard to get too worked up about this simply because Instagram overall is now so far removed from the original picture-centric vision and version that I loved. Also, get off my lawn, damn kids. But the way this has been rolled out from a UX-perspective is just so stupid that I'm worked up about it again. Multiple times while scrolling the Instagram feed I've now hit the 'repost' button by accident and boom, nice and awkward. I would normally chalk this up to user error, but my wife reported doing the same exact thing the other day. And it's terrifying! Hopefully they wait a bit to notify others that you just reposted, so that you can correct the error without anyone noticing. But who knows! It just feels like a pretty awful user experience to make users afraid to use the app.
And yes, it further changes what Instagram was because you no longer have to "create", you can just "curate". Which at a high level is fine – it ended up working out well for Twitter, after some initial worries about what it would do to that network (though many might say it ultimately ruined Twitter at scale because of all the spam and dunking, etc). But to shove this into Instagram – and again, so prominently – years after that network is already at scale carries different risks. Clearly though, Instagram is looking for new avenues of growth. We'll see.
Instagram is also pulling from Snapchat and adding an opt-in location map that lives in your private messages. The map shows the last active location for friends who have opted in to the feature; it also pulls content from specific locations, such as a music festival, where many people are posting from. It’s the Snap Map but redesigned for Instagram.
Again, while I don't have this feature yet (thankfully), many of those who do are clearly being vocal enough about hating it that we're getting non-stop articles about turning it off and privacy concerns, etc. Yes, yes, everyone hates change, we know that. But this feels a lot more like the case of "if Instagram had created Snap Map, they would be the creators of Snap Map". While I'm sure some data pointed to Instagram further hurting Snap by shoving this into the messages area of IG, it's undoubtedly true that a massive number of users simply do not use Instagram this way – chatting with friends – nor do they want to.
And sure, it's opt-in, but the problem here is that they just shove all this shit in your face and just as with my reposts complaint above, it's not clear who can see what, etc. For example, if you've geotagged a regular old image well... boom! And while the AI social sharing stuff they've been doing is opt-in too – how's that working out for Meta?
Further, in trying to find the Maps feature today, I was just clicking around in the settings of Instagram and my god it's a nightmare. I consider myself pretty savvy when it comes to apps, and I have absolutely no idea what at least half of the settings are for and/or do and where to find almost anything. It largely seems to be Facebook's fault – i.e. security and privacy settings that carried over from the "Blue App" – but it's just a total mess. As is the general usability of Instagram as a whole now, with 50 different features and feeds shoved into one app.
It's old school Instagram, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and Messenger, and YouTube, and TikTok, and now all the stupid social AI chatbot nonsense that Meta keeps trying to make happen, even after tragedy...
I would just quit but much like Facebook before it, it remains the place where a sizable chunk of my social graph is found online. Mostly I lurk and use Stories to post some travel pics to friends. I still try to post to the main feed mainly as a log of where I've been since I've been doing that since the service started, but it's honestly increasingly hard to do and really just seems pointless (putting aside the new backed-into stalking concerns). I'd much rather use a service like Glass which is focused on that use case.
I really can't wait to be able to quit.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler