Everybody's mad at Instagram again, and honestly I get it. The last week or so my feed has turned into an algorithmic soup of recommended Reels from accounts I've never followed, sandwiched between the two or three posts from actual friends that made it through whatever sorting logic decides what I'm allowed to see. It's not subtle anymore. It used to be a photo app with people you knew. Now it's a video app with people you don't, occasionally interrupted by a photo.
The backlash finally got loud enough this week that it turned into an honest-to-god meme. Somebody made a plain black-and-white graphic that just says "Make Instagram Instagram Again," and it got reposted by, of all people, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, which is the kind of thing that used to be unthinkable — celebrities with hundreds of millions of followers publicly grumbling about the platform that made a chunk of their fortune. When the Kardashians are annoyed enough to post about it, you know the complaints have gone mainstream, not just tech-blog mainstream, actual mainstream.
The core complaint is simple: Instagram has spent months quietly pushing toward a more TikTok-shaped experience. Full screen recommended content, more video, less "here's what your friends posted in order." Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, has been pretty open in interviews that they're testing this stuff on purpose, chasing the same recommendation-engine magic that made TikTok addictive. I don't doubt it works, in the sense that it keeps people scrolling. But keeping people scrolling and giving people what they actually asked to see are two different products wearing the same icon.
What gets me is the flattening of it all. Instagram grew out of being a place for your own circle, curated by you, chronological, dumb and simple in the good way. Every app eventually wants to become an infinite content faucet because that's what makes the ad numbers go up, and I understand the business logic even while I hate the result. There's a version of this complaint that's just nostalgia and I'll cop to some of that. I'm old enough to remember rearranging my Top 8 on Myspace like it was a diplomatic exercise, so obviously I've got a soft spot for platforms that let you actually curate something instead of getting curated at.
The funnier side effect of all this is what it's done for BeReal. If you haven't run into it yet, it's this tiny app that sends you one random notification a day and gives you two minutes to post an unfiltered photo from both cameras at once, whatever you're actually doing at that moment. No algorithm, no filters, no discovery feed to speak of. A few of my younger cousins have been obsessed with it for weeks now and I finally installed it myself out of curiosity. It is, on paper, a much worse product than Instagram. It does almost nothing. And that is exactly the appeal right now — it's the anti-Instagram, showing up at a moment when a lot of people are visibly tired of being fed content instead of shown their friends.
I don't think Instagram is going to reverse course in any real way. Mosseri more or less admitted the direction is intentional, and the underlying incentive (compete with TikTok or lose the youngest users entirely) isn't going anywhere. A billion-dollar-plus ad business doesn't back off a strategy because a few celebrities posted a black square with white text on it, cute as that was. My guess is they'll dial the ratio back a little, make the transition less jarring, and keep pushing the same direction over the next year anyway. Companies almost always do the quiet version of the thing people are yelling about.
For now I've turned off as much of the "suggested for you" stuff as the settings menu lets me turn off, which is not much, and I've been checking BeReal more than Instagram most days this week, which says something. Not that BeReal is going to replace anything long term, these novelty apps rarely do, and I'd bet real money most people drop it within a year once the notification stops feeling fresh. But it's a decent reminder that the appetite for something small and unpolished hasn't gone away just because the big platforms decided otherwise.