“I was seeing a post from my friend underneath three Reels and a recommended post that was six days old,” she said. As she put it in her post: “Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends.”
Meta’s stock fell nearly 3% Tuesday after the growing backlash from the Kardashians and others.
“The problem for Meta is that nothing is good right now,” said D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte. “Instagram is meant to be the Meta asset to exploit, to address the younger market, so it’s natural to me that they’re using Instagram as the way to respond to the competitive threat of TikTok.”
Meta has run this playbook before. In 2016, months before Snapchat’s parent company made its Wall Street debut, Instagram copied one of the messaging app’s signature features, Stories. Instagram, soon reached more users with its version of the feature than Snapchat did. But its efforts to copy TikTok with Reels have arguably proven to be more difficult.
“The viewpoint is that this is like mobile, meaning it’s an evolutionary change in consumption on the internet,” Forte said. “What choice does Facebook have? It would be nearly impossible to buy TikTok, which was the old playbook, so now they have to try to innovate.”
For creators like Breuning who built their livelihoods on Instagram, the changes feel especially painful, given its origin as a photo app that catered to artists and photographers.
“It feels wrong to switch the algorithm on creators that have made a living and contributed to the community, forcing them to change their entire content direction and lifestyle to serve a new algorithm,” Bruening wrote in a change.org petition calling on Instagram to “Stop trying to be TikTok!” It has garnered more than 150,000 signatures in four days.
Instagram did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. However, Instagram head Adam Mosseri addressed the criticism in a video post on the platform Tuesday.
“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,” he said, acknowledging complaints about the shift to video and the increase in recommended content. “We’re going to continue to support photos, they’re part of our heritage. … That said, I need to be honest: I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.”
Mosseri continued: “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 if we’re not changing anything. So we’re going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos.”
But that explanation wasn’t enough to silence the criticisms. Some users sounded off in the comments about feeling like they had no choice but to start making more videos if they wanted the platform’s algorithm to surface their content. Others suggested that if the platform became too much like TikTok, they’d be inclined to simply pick one of the apps to use rather than both.
“People do VIDEOS because we have no reach on our photos!!” fashion creator Alina Tanasa (@fabmusealina) said in a comment on Mosseri’s video. “As a content creator I need and want each and with photos you cut all the reach and you promote only videos. So it’s not us, it’s you that are changing everything and are afraid of TikTok.”
Makeup influencer James Charles, who has nearly 23 million Instagram followers, added in a comment: “I understand that every business has to evolve, compete, and please investors, but Instagram is losing the competition and has lost its identity along the way. … We’re upset because we CARE about this app and the communities we’ve been able to create/join on here, but I’m genuinely worried that if something doesn’t change, there will be no community left.”
If there’s a silver lining for Instagram, however, it’s that there are few other photo-first apps out there, making it easier to criticize Instagram than leave it, especially for those who have built a life and a livelihood on it.
“Me personally,” Breuning said, “I love Instagram and I don’t plan on leaving Instagram anytime soon.”
