What is Instagram?

Adam Mosseri on the gap between what users say they want and what data shows they actually prefer.

“One that comes to mind is kind of this transition everyone eventually goes through to this broad global feed. everyone it always feels like people think I just want to see chronologically everyone I know and follow and that's going to be my favorite feed and it continues to be proven wrong. No, you actually engage a lot more a lot more when it's this algorithmic feed of things we think you will love.”

Why social media algorithms are less semantically sophisticated than users assume: they rely on illegible embedding vectors, not detailed models of user interests.

“One of the most common misconceptions is actually in the opposite direction. I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is.”

Ido Portal on how Instagram has hollowed out real movement skill.

“This is the Instagram reality. Another problem. It has destroyed the real deal. Now I can put a camera on and I can practice here for two hours until I get one good rep. I capture it and I put it online. But when I meet these people and it's time to move, no it's not happening.”

Instagram's new 'product staff' role (an evolution of the traditional PM) can perform design, data science, and research tasks using internal AI tools, signaling a structural collapse of specialist roles inside large tech teams.

“One we call product staff which is sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does and some of what a research does leveraging the latest tools that we have for them.”

Instagram is restructuring from teams of roughly 13 people to pods of 4 to 6 engineers plus a product staff generalist, a shift initiated in 2026.

“This year it's changing we've adopted what we call pods which are just mini teams where it's call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists.”

Reels' first version was built on top of Stories, a structural mistake because Stories have low readthrough rates, meaning most Reels content disappeared before users ever saw it.

“The first version of reels was built on top of stories.”

Instagram's Reels was a direct redo of the failed IGTV, not a TikTok clone. Success came from identifying and discarding wrong assumptions baked into IGTV, not from building a new product.

“I worked on IGTV which was like a huge flop and then we shipped reals and reals was like we and I mean that's a good example cuz like we had we just like kind of baked in some wrong assumptions and we held on to a few constraints but then we learned from that quickly and we were like okay actually let's change that and then we sort of redid it and then it became a really successful product.”

It may be more practical to label camera-captured content as 'non-AI' than to label AI-generated content, inverting the current industry approach to AI disclosure.

“I actually think we might be might be more practical to label camera captured content like basically non-AI content as opposed to labeling AI content long term.”

Instagram's heavily protested feed redesign was never actually planned for launch, it was only an early internal test, meaning the backlash was directed at something that was never going to ship.

“We were never going to launch that. That was an early test.”

Users who quit Facebook and Instagram saw their Net Promoter Score shift from positive 35 to negative 35.

“When people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35.”