Mark Zuckerberg Has Heard Your Pleas To Make Instagram Better, Vows To Ignore Them

Earlier this week, a collective of Instagram users had their hopes up that they might inspire the once-photo, lately more video-focused app to heed their calls to be less like TikTok once Kylie Jenner boosted a petition to Make Instagram Instagram Again. Then Mark Zuckerberg dealt members of the movement a crushing blow in what amounts to a long-form "lol no."

In a recent quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, the Meta CEO reaffirmed his commitment to features many on Instagram have been vocally protesting. In a prepared statement, Zuckerberg said:

One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram, even if you don't follow those creators… Right now, about 15% of content in a person’s Facebook feed and a little more than that of their Instagram feed is recommended by our AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don’t follow. We expect these numbers to more than double by the end of next year.

Those who count themselves among the many people that dislike how Instagram has gone from a platform exclusively for seeing pictures from friends to a more algorithmically driven hodgepodge of random content (especially short-form video content) felt that Zuckerberg essentially said he wants things to get worse for them.

Many have been loudly complaining about Instagram's experimentation with algorithmically driven home pages and its TikTok-like feature Reels to the point where Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri had to post a video attempting to assuage any fears about the direction of the app. In general, he largely didn't succeed in the eyes of the opposition, and cries against Instagram's direction only intensified.

instagram is so pointless now. The HOME feed should be for people you follow/want to see, and the EXPLORE page is for other shit. Stop with the merger!!!!

— mina le (@gremlita) July 27, 2022

instagram started forcing us to watch reels we didn’t ask for from people we don’t follow and then has the nerve to say “we’re prioritizing reels because that’s what people are watching!” mf YOU FORCE US TO

— matt (@mattxiv) July 26, 2022

Instagram is one major product feature away from being pretty irrelevant

IG has evolved into an app to please advertisers (video-based) and creators (not friends)

People want friends photos, not TikTok reels

— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) July 26, 2022

Of course, pushing unwanted changes onto his products' users has worked for Zuckerberg before. Facebook has a long history of moving its content away from simple, chronologically shown posts to the anger of its users essentially since its inception.

It's possible Instagram may survive the backlash as its users complain, as Facebook has several times. However, in a sign that Meta may be moving in the wrong direction, the company's Metaverse division just reportedly lost $2.8 billion in Q2.