What Even Is Instagram Now?
In her classic novel Frankenstein, author Mary Shelley imagines a monster that's reanimated with its piecemeal body sewn together, tendon by tendon. "The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials," Shelley writes.
That’s exactly what scrolling through Instagram feels like right now—an ungodly morass of features stitched together. It’s an AI search tool! It’s a shopping app! It’s getting on my last nerve. Instagram is having a full-blown identity crisis, and I’m exhausted.
Mimicking features from other social media platforms and grafting them onto existing apps has long been the modus operandi for Meta, the owner of Instagram. Three years after Snapchat popularized the idea of “stories”—ephemeral posts only your friends can see that disappear after a day—Instagram launched a similar feature that was also called Stories and looked almost identical. As time passed and TikTok became the hottest app in the US, entertaining younger users with its endless scroll of vertical videos, Instagram reacted again by adding its own version of an algorithmic video feed, called Reels.
As Instagram has continued to add new features every time the social winds blow in a new direction, the user experience has become a jumbled amalgamation of popular ideas from other platforms. As ecommerce rose in popularity, the app leaned into online shopping. When generative AI went mainstream, Instagram's search bar morphed into a chatbot. What started as a place to share photos was already a sprawling mishmash of engagement-maxing features.
This week, Instagram decided to throw a few more into the mix. Most notably, the platform added a map tool that lets your Instagram friends see your precise location every time you open the app. It’s something you have to opt into, but it’s still oddly creepy. This feature arrives almost a decade after Snapchat released its similar mapping feature that does the same thing. Instagram’s version sparked backlash online from users who, despite the opt-in aspect, are uncomfortable with the ease that the app could potentially broadcast wherever they are with just a few taps.
Instagram also just released its Friends Reels tab for users globally. So now you can see what your friends have been liking and commenting on, as well as the Reels they choose to repost. These types of public reposts have long been part of the online culture, from Tumblr to Twitter. The reposts don’t bother me; it’s the active pushing of my liked videos to friends that feels invasive, similar to the map tool. I’m a saint and would never tap that heart button on some steamy Reel from an OnlyFans model, but my friends aren’t so cautious. And after less than 10 minutes scrolling through this newer feed, I saw multiple interactions instigated by my friends that they would likely be quite embarrassed to acknowledge the next time I saw them in person.
The original Instagram concept of an app for sharing softly glowing Valencia-filtered photos with your circle of friends is a distant memory, even though the app’s stewards still see it as a platform for intimate connection.
“We want Instagram to be not just a lean-back experience that is fun and entertaining, but also a participatory one,” CEO Adam Mosseri said about the features in a video post. “One where you actually engage with and connect with people that you care about.”
People I care about? My Instagram feed has long been chock-full of professional influencers hawking the latest fast-fashion trends, home cooks sharing their high-protein recipes, and random comedians doing stand-up bits. My actual friends are buried under a mountain of sponcon and memed-to-death dross.
By piling these new features on top of the old ones, Instagram is trying to make the app feel chummy and personal again. But it's too far gone from that ideal, and the attempt to shift the feed’s focus from influencers to your IRL friends just feels awkward and ultimately unconvincing.
This new version of Instagram reminds me of a meme about the “landlord special.” Where, rather than fixing the actual issues in a rental unit, everything just gets slapped with another layer of spackle and white paint over and over again—until it's unrecognizable and the hidden wood is likely rotted. The original Instagram, which had a distinct purpose and identity, has been globbed over with new feature after new feature so many times that even if you stripped everything away, it can never really revert back to what it was.
