Instagram will sideline features after users, including Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, complained that they look too much like TikTok.
Users posted messages on social media this week calling for the company to "make Instagram Instagram again" and stop trying to be like TikTok. The slogan sprang from a change.org petition that had received more than 229,000 signatures as of late Thursday.
"Lets go back to our roots with Instagram and remember that the intention behind Instagram was to share photos, for Pete's sake," the petition read.
On his part, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to the controversy with a video on Twitter in which he said the features were a work in progress and being tested with a small number of users.
https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065
"I'm glad we took a risk," Mosseri was quoted as saying Thursday in an interview with Platformer's Casey Newton.
"But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup,' he noted. "If we're not failing every once in a while, we're not thinking big enough or bold enough."
Mosseri argued that the shift to more video would happen even if the service changed nothing, as users increasingly share and seek video snippets.
"If you look at what people share on Instagram, that is shifting more and more to video over time," Mosseri said. "We are going to have to lean into that shift."
Recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook and Instagram feeds will double the content from unknown users by the end of 2023.
The new feature is intended to compete with TikTok’s heavy use of artificial intelligence (AI) to serve up videos regardless of where they come from.
During Meta’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg indicated that “Al finds additional content that people find interesting, that increases engagement and the quality of our feeds.”
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