Are We Witnessing the Death of Instagram?

Media outlets, especially in the photography world today, are busting at the seams because of the newly announced Instagram changes to the feed system. Their latest decision is changing what photographers love about it: being able to see images as they’re uploaded, instead of the new algorithm being used to ‘curate’ our feeds.

Your Instagram feed will no longer be in this same chronological order, and in fact, they say it will be curated “to improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.”

This means, just like Facebook (who owns Instagram), is making your photo feed exactly like Facebook’s timeline. So, instead of just scrolling and seeing an image that was just uploaded, it will automatically decide or ‘curate’ what and who is the most valuable content creator that will show up.

Why Mess With Success? Instagram Changes Are Perplexing…

This is annoying because social media networks often find a formula that works and change it. Why? What’s the point? If users are not wanting it, then why change what we like? I haven’t heard any uproar about from the Instagram community of photographer on hating the chronological feed, in fact, that is the reason why I and many others photographers liked it in the first place because you could just scroll for hours to see everyone’s work you followed.

Facebook’s already seems to have a waning social influence and ubiquity and are losing young people to new social media outlets like Snapchat and the like. If this is a move to monetize their profits more, it’s just going to piss everyone off and have them find something better…

Instagram’s Reasoning

“The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. As we begin, we’re focusing on optimizing the order — all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.”

If something isn’t broke, don’t fix it until it becomes an issue… Just because you came up with a new way of working the API, it will probably alienate more people who love this social platform. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

They also made this statement on the blog:

“We’re going to take time to get this right and listen to your feedback along the way. You’ll see this new experience in the coming months.”

I bet they won’t…