Social Media: Instagram Continues to Face More Backlash

I don’t know about you, but we’re finding Instagram’s home feed, which is now littered with recommended posts from accounts that we don’t follow, less and less compelling these days.

As has been well documented, Instagram has been chasing the TikTok dragon, by trying to re-align its home feed around recommended content from across the app, which then gives it a far broader pool of compelling posts to highlight in each users’ feed. TikTok has seen great success with this approach, which expands the pool of content that it can choose from beyond each users’ immediate connections, with the top-performing content approach then facilitating a more compelling, engaging ‘For You’ feed experience.

Except, it hasn’t really worked that way on IG, with its shift to more recommendations sparking significant user backlash, which has since forced Instagram to scale back its approach.

And just last week, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri also admitted that it’s now also gone too far in pushing video in the app, which has turned even more users away.

So why hasn’t it worked – what does TikTok do better than Instagram in this respect, which makes its app compelling, while repelling IG users?

Part of it is expectation, and Instagram looking to shift away from what it once was. Instagram users have come to expect a certain experience in the app, and that makes it harder for IG to pull away from it – and thus far, the platform has been moving too quickly in its various pivots, which has annoyed users.

Instagram can still do this, it just needs to move more slowly. Which is what it’s now looking to do, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still expecting to see AI recommendations double in the app over the next year. That’ll likely still annoy many Insta users, but if Instagram shifts to a more gradual integration, ramping up its recommendations and video pushes over time, it could still work, and enable IG to merge into TikTok’s territory.

It’s just that TikTok is still growing, really fast, and you can imagine that Mosseri and Co. will be feeling the pressure to keep up where they can, which is being hampered by user backlash.

But there is another element that’s often overlooked in TikTok’s rise – though many studies and research reports have clearly highlighted this as a significant concern.

TikTok, for better or worse, utilises base human desires as a growth engine in the app. In other words, TikTok highlights a lot of half-dressed young men and women, as a means to maximise engagement, which Instagram doesn’t, at least not in the same way.