As a symbol: Within a few hours, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, two of Instagram’s biggest stars with 360 and 326 million subscribers respectively, spoke out against the Facebook group platform, now called Meta. The two shared a message originally broadcast by photographer Tati Bruening, directed at Instagram executives and criticizing her strategy of removing her friends’ photos and content from the platform.
“Make Instagram Instagram again (stop trying to become TikTok, I just want to see my friends’ cool photos,” reads the caption, the initial post of which garnered 1.5 million likes in three days. It is associated with a petition that has so far collected 130,000 signatures.
“Recycled TikTok Videos”
The text makes several criticisms of the recent developments of Instagram, an application in which young American Internet users spend three times less time than on TikTok. To rectify the situation (and Meta’s stock price), Instagram has decided to replicate the core functions of the Chinese platform identically. The company has thus presented Reels, a vertical video format inspired by TikTok, which is now imposed on users in the vast majority of cases.
Above all, the photographer returns to Instagram’s choice to make its platform a video tool and no longer a photography tool (like explained it his boss last May), for example, by imposing a full-screen portrait display, which is not conducive to viewing most shots.
The request also returns to the gradual disappearance of content published by their friends, replaced by videos sponsored or suggested by the Instagram algorithm in the vast majority of cases. Here again, Instagram goes against the operation that made its initial popularity, based on sharing photos between family members.
Like many users, Tati Bruening also regrets the abandonment of the chronological display of content, in favor of everything algorithmic. In fact, Instagram allows you to open a window that offers a view ordered by publication date, but that is deactivated every time the application is closed.
Source: BFM TV
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