Instagram’s Latest Middle Finger
The dark design of Reels replacing the creation button
10 years. A full decade. That’s how long I’ve loaded up Instagram and hit the button in the center of the bottom bar in order to post an image. While the overall UI of Instagram has changed — many times over — this fundamental interaction has not. Until now.
Multiple times in the past couple of weeks I’ve gone to post an image to Instagram the same way I always have, by hitting that post button in the middle of the lower nav, and boom: I find myself like Alice in Wonderland, tumbling down the rabbit hole that is Reels. You know, the TikTok clone which clearly wasn’t getting enough usage so they had to literally put it front and center. Where the posting button used to be — again, for a decade.
This isn’t just user hostile, it’s infuriating.
And yes, it’s a cynical take. But that doesn’t make it wrong. I mean, come on. Why put Reels right there in prime real estate — perhaps the most prime real estate — unless no one was using it? This also doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do for Instagram — if they feel like Reels, the format, is the future of the company (just as Stories was before it, just as static filtered images were before that), they probably should put it there. Heaven knows it was completely buried in the UI before. This is the 180-degree version of that decision, I guess.
You could certainly argue that at least part of the reason why Stories worked in Instagram was its prime placement atop the feed. I think it was about more than that, but without question, without that placement, it would not have been as successful, as quickly for Instagram. Which is why it was surprising that Reels, which Instagram clearly spent a lot of time copying and perfecting tools from TikTok, was relegated to the recycle bin of IG: Explore.
Yeah, yeah: a lot of people use Explore. We all heard the stats touted on launch day. Doesn’t matter. No one was going to use Explore to find TikTok-style content. It made no sense. It makes a lot more sense in this prime placement area of Instagram — again, if they feel like this is the format of the future. I’m still mildly skeptical of the feature inside of IG at all (versus as a standalone app with a new network that siphons off of the IG one), but it certainly has a better shot now.
And that makes me all the more angry. Because Instagram is now nearly completely unrecognizable from the app that I fell in love with. The feed of images is still key, but with posting now shoved into a corner, how long until that feed becomes a secondary part of the service?
This both is and isn’t an old man yelling at the kids from his front porch situation. The world isn’t as it was in 2010 — to say the least — and Instagram, like all services, needed to evolve. I’m mainly worried that it’s sort of a bloated mess of stuff these days and less that my beloved static images are fading. A service which exploded out of the gate thanks in no small part to its simplicity is now a Cheesecake Factory menu: they have anything you could ever want, but nothing is particularly good, and everything is hard to find.
And here’s where I’ll insert the new monetization layer joke for IG: let me pay $10/month to just have the feed of images from my friends. Maybe I’ll take Stories, and its increasing ad load, if you knock the price down to $5/month. But I don’t want Reels. And what I really want is my trusty creation button back, front and center.¹
¹ At the very least, allow me to re-arrange (and hide from) the bar, as you can on Facebook’s own app… I would kill off shopping right away.
