Instagram is finally fixing an annoying quirk in its app that has frustrated users for a long time. Now when you open the app, it will wait for you to scroll before showing you new content.
Regular users of Instagram will know the frustration. You open the app, see an interesting piece of content, only for it to quickly disappear as Instagram refreshes the feed. It’s all the more worse because it’s basically impossible to find anything, especially videos, using Instagram’s search function, meaning whatever interesting thing you were watching is probably gone to the wind.
It was long suspected that this behavior was a bug—maybe Instagram had been frozen as a background process by iOS, and it was merely restarting. It turns out that’s not the case.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in an AMA earlier this week that the “rug pull,” as it’s called internally, was designed intentionally “because we were trying to load new content, and it was taking a while, so we showed you something that was already downloaded in the meantime, and it is generally good for engagement.” Once again an example of our lives being harmed by algorithms tuned for maximum engagement.
Thankfully, Mosseri conceded that the behavior was “really annoying,” so Instagram is going to stop doing it and wait for you to start scrolling before refreshing the feed. A minor change that is sure to make many people very happy.
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