I never thought I would type these words out, but thank god for Kylie Jenner.
It seems kinda off that someone from the Kardashian clan would actually get my approval. But Kylie Jenner just made a lot of people around the globe happy by posting a story on Instagram.
In the past few weeks, Instagram increasingly started pushing video content on its platform and moving towards a format like TikTok. These changes included a full-screen feed, for example. Fans weren't all too happy about the changes and started a campaign, demanding for Instagram to primarily stay a picture focused platform. We really don't need a second TikTok! No one does! How would I get anything done?
The last time the internet was that unified against something, they had to redo all the facial animations for Sonic, in the Sonic the Hedgehog movie!
Kylie Jenner, One Of Us
The first post criticizing the new changes already got a whole lot of traction. But things completely blew up when even Kylie Jenner joined in on the fun. The popular influencer openly supports the campaign against the Instagram changes on Instagram itself.
She did this by posting a story on Instagram where she said that she just wants to see cute photos of her friends. I guess excessively photoshopped bikini pictures count as cute now.
If Kylie Jenner speaks it, your platform is in trouble. Never forget snap losing over $1 billion when she said she didn't open Snapchat anymore (in 2018) bc of the redesign pic.twitter.com/jkmAuWoFen
— Ashley Carman (@ashleyrcarman) July 25, 2022
Her support sparked a new wave of Twitter posts, referring to the last time she criticized a social media platform. Snapchat lost $1 billion when, in 2018, she publicly spoke about never opening the app again.
After Kyle made her statement, even her sister Kim Kardashian followed up, posting the same picture in her story.
Ladies And Gentlemen, We Got'em
Under all this pressure by the public and the Kardashians, Instagram had no choice but to revert the changes. Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, responded to the criticism by saying:
I’m glad we took a risk — if we’re not failing every once in a while, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough.
So, it seems he realized that they failed big time, but kinda sees it as a part of the process. I guess that's fair enough, but he seems to be mistaking copying TikTok as some kind of big revolutionary idea, nobody has had before.
He also gives us hints on how they plan to move on now.
For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn’t great, So there I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup, and figure out how we want to move forward
He seems to be good at talking without giving a lot of information. This just sounds like the typical CEO apology, right before they do something stupid again. He didn't say that they will quit trying to force the focus on videos in the future, he just said that the next time they're gonna try to be smarter about it.
So let's see what they will do in the future, I personally bet they are gonna try something stupid again. Let's just hope we don't have to get saved by the Kardashians again. Maybe Elon Musk will save us next time, by simply buying Instagram or something, who knows.