Instagram Has Fixed One of Its Most Annoying “features”
What do you like most about Instagram ? Is that when you open an app, start browsing a post you’re interested in, but before you’re done, something new loads in its place and you lose your first photo or video forever? Yes, this is also my favorite thing.
Oh wait, no, I actually hate it – the constant updating is just annoying. But I have news: Instagram doesn’t do that anymore! Hooray. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, recently announced in a story on his page ( saved in threads here by user _blunderchief ) that the company has stopped this not-so-refreshing practice.
Why is Instagram constantly updating?
According to Mosseri, the app’s tendency to reload after you returned to it was not a bug, but a feature internally called “rug pulling.” It was designed for two purposes: first, Instagram is constantly loading content, which takes time, so it decides to show you something that’s already loaded first – say, a video you started watching as soon as you opened the app. . . Once the new content is downloaded, the app will push it out instead. This is not only good for Instagram load times, but also for engagement, which is the second reason why the company has maintained this practice for so long.
This makes sense from a pure numbers standpoint: if you watch a video, that counts as one view. If your app suddenly reloads when you visit and presents you with a new video, that’s now view number two. Multiply that by Instagram’s half a billion daily active users and you get even more engagement.
However, this extra involvement comes at a cost: the sanity of the app’s users (which, let’s be honest, these days probably isn’t exactly on solid footing anyway). I don’t know about you, but when I open an app and see something worth doing, I, um, want to do it . So when a new post or video appears instead, I instantly feel furious . Since Instagram doesn’t have a simple watch history, if you don’t catch which account it was from, that post or video will likely be lost forever.
Things should get better in the future, but Instagram isn’t the only social media company that has worked (or works) this way. If you’ve ever used X (even when it was called Twitter), you know how painful it is to constantly lose the message you were reading due to a random update in the middle of your feed. This behavior makes these apps, which should be somewhat fun to use, frustrating: you’re always left behind, never sure if you’ll be able to interact with everything that pops up in your feed.
As for Instagram, let’s also hope that the feed stops refreshing so frequently when switching between apps. Just as I hated losing a video right after opening an app, I also hate how often I lose what I was watching because I went to reply to a message in another app before finishing it.