If you’ve opened Instagram recently and noticed more Reels on your feed or less engagement on your posts and felt the platform was beginning to look a liiiittle too much like TikTok, you’re not alone. The app’s second most-followed person agrees.
Kylie Jenner shared a screenshot of another user’s post on her Instagram Stories today, longing for the good old days of Instagram as a photo sharing app.
“Make Instagram Instagram again,” the post says. “(Stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends). Sincerely, everyone.” Her sister Kim Kardashian also shared the same post, which has over 1.1 million likes. The associated Change.org petition has nearly 100,000 signatures.
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Instagram’s steady creep into TikTok territory isn’t new — Meta, which owns Instagram, has been pushing Reels for months, which itself is a TikTok clone product. The company has incentivized creators making Reels by rewarding them with cash bonuses and has said it downranks videos that are reposted from TikTok.
Up until this point, it seems Jenner has suffered in silence. But more recent changes like a full-screen effect on videos — and last week’s news that nearly all new videos posted to Instagram will automatically become Reels — seem to have hit a nerve.
With 360 million followers, Jenner is second in followers only to soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. A billionaire bemoaning app updates is certainly on the low end, priority-wise, of things going on in the world — the Kardashians’ many businesses flourish on Instagram, but even with an algorithm or product tweak, they’ll be just fine.
What’s more interesting is whether Instagram cares about the feedback, especially given Jenner’s history of weighing in on social platforms. In 2018, after a Snapchat redesign gave the company grief, Jenner tweeted that she doesn’t open the app anymore. Snap’s stock lost roughly $1.3 billion in value over the following day. Jenner isn’t alone in her dislike for a short-form video-heavy Instagram: when Instagram posted a TikTok video announcing a test of the full-screen video feed, the post was flooded with negative reactions, many of which are some iteration of “NOOOOO.”
Instagram didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
wazup.