🟧 The disappearing Insta grid

It isn't just Instagram that’s changed, we have too.

A successful social product has a symbiotic relationship with its user base. It taps into users' latent desires and allows them to better connect with each other. However, how we connect and consume content evolves over time. Mosseri acknowledged these shifts in his video. "I do believe that more... See more

I think what is happening is people think of us as a feed app, because we started as a feed app. When we launched Instagram, there were no stories, there were no DMs. What's happened over the last decade is that how people share with friends has changed. It has shifted to stories, and it has shifted to DMs and to group chats. More photos and videos... See more

As with other social networks that grow, Instagram broadened its formats early on to head off several format-based asymptotes. Non-square photos and videos with gradually lengthening time limits have broadened the use cases and, more importantly, removed some level of production friction.

The move to copy Snapchat's Stories format was the next giant... See more

In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge... See more