Instagram is dead. An algorithm killed him (and the desire to become like TikTok)
Between government crises, unprecedented summer election campaigns, old and new epidemics, there are also those who are afflicted by the changes in Instagram. Armies of celebrities (and not only) are turning against the social network that has changed its nature to become the bad copy of TikTok
Years go by for Mark Zuckerberg too. If from his bedroom at Harvard in 2004 he had perfectly intercepted the wishes of his peers by inventing Facebook, today to reinvent himself and be current and captivating he seems to have no choice but to look at what others are doing.
Specifically, what does TikTok do. But users do not forgive and are clamoring for Instagram, the photo social of the Millenials, to go back to being what it has always been and not a bad copy of the service offered by ByteDance.
INSTAGRAMMERS CHAINED TO THE HEADQUARTERS IN HALF
On July 23, a group of creators, or minds behind the content that scrolls on the Instagram feed, chained themselves under the New York office of Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook. The reason for the protest, which has taken the name of Instarrection , is the change of the app's algorithm, which penalizes their contents.
WE WERE LOVED SO MUCH
Also on 23 July, photographer Tati Bruening, founder of the @illumitati page, posted an image that reads "Make Instagram Instagram Again" and Kylie Jenner, followed by her sisters Kim Kardashian and Kourtney Kardashian (which together could reach almost 1 billion of followers), publish it in turn causing a real virtual revolt.
Bruening's slogan is an invitation to go back to basics: “Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends). Sincerely, Everyone ”.
Bruening also launched a petition on Change.org, signed by nearly 300,000 people.
The discontent, however, is not only online but also within the Instagram headquarters. This summer, Vox reports, "Zuckerberg limited the company's spending, putting pressure on employees to 'operate more intensively' and threatening to cut lower-performing employees ."
THE ACCUSATIONS TO INSTAGRAM
Almost no more photos or videos of friends or followed profiles, but often content of little interest that crowd your feed. The Instagram of the 1910s died and an algorithm killed it. In fact, similar to that of TikTok.
This is the accusation leveled at the platform, which suggests many more sponsored posts and more and more reels (short videos) of accounts not followed. To this is added a new layout, which also recalls that of the competitor: black background, full screen video and scrolling element by element.
THE BATTLE OF THOSE WHO WORK ON IT
All this noise might seem like a Kardashian whim, but in the immense sea of uninteresting content there are also people who have built their work around Instagram.
As the petition reads: "It is wrong to change the algorithm on creators who have earned their living and contributed to the community, forcing them to change the entire direction of content and lifestyle to serve a new algorithm" which, through artificial intelligence replaces the very people behind the content.
THE PARABLE (ALSO FINANCIAL) DESCENDING OF GOAL
But the sentiment that pervades users and insiders is the same as that of the shareholders: Meta, and therefore Instagram, is getting worse. Earlier this year, Vox writes, “Meta announced that users were spending less time on its platforms and that it expected revenue growth to slow, plummeting its shares by 26%, losing $ 232 billion and becoming the strongest one-day drop for a single stock in US history.
On July 27, Corriere della Sera reads, "Meta's quarterly report recorded the first drop in revenues in the history of the giant: by 1%, from April to June 2022 compared to 2021, to 28.8 billion dollars . Net profit fell 36% to 6.7 billion. In February, another minus sign had sounded the alarm bell, and caused a decline in the value of shares by 40% in the last six months: the first decline in daily Facebook users ”.
THE REPLY OF INSTAGRAM
The response from Instagram could not be kept waiting and on July 26 Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram since 2018, posted a video in which he explains what has changed and what will change on the social network, perhaps making a mea culpa and asking for the involvement of users : “If you find any suggestions that you are not interested in, it means that we are not doing a good job, but we are here to improve. It is important to make contacts with content creators, especially for the smaller, younger ones. The world is changing fast and we are changing too ”.
But perhaps something is changing. The platform, as stated in another post by Bruening and many newspapers including New York Times , The Verge and Bbc , announced on July 29 that it will temporarily suspend all those changes that have made it more similar to Tiktok.
Is everything good that ends well?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/instagram-e-morto-lha-ucciso-un-algoritmo-e-la-smania-di-diventare-come-tiktok/ on Tue, 09 Aug 2022 04:57:15 +0000.