Instagram accidentally reveals feed changes 🤳
An accidental change replaced swiping with a tap to see the next post, and users were not happy about it.
Instagram confirmed today that a bug accidentally activated a major change to the feed, replacing traditional scrolling with a tap to advance, just like Stories.
Back in October, TechCrunch reported that the social network was testing “tap to advance” between posts. What happened was that a large number of users, including people in Portugal, woke up to what was described as a nightmare: vertical swiping no longer moved through feed posts.
Many immediately complained, calling the change “annoying” and “weird”.
“Due to a bug, some users saw a change to the way their feed appears today. We quickly fixed the issue and everything is back to normal. We apologise for any confusion,” the platform said on Twitter, and in a reply to the same post.
Watch the video showing the radical change to the app here.
The company also confirmed that it is still testing this style of navigation on the Explore page.
Apparently, Instagram was trying to test the new feature with a small percentage of users, but the bug rolled out changes on a much larger scale than expected or planned, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
Users could then restart the app to return everything to the previous system.
In any case, this new way of browsing posts makes things simpler: posts remain fully in view, which really is better than scrolling, where you may need to adjust the position to see the top or bottom of a photo.
But scrolling shows us the photographer first, then the content and finally the caption, making it an engaging and intuitive way to browse. Tap-to-advance could become rather tiring on users' eyes. More importantly, people have spent the past eight years getting used to scrolling through Instagram's home page. Suddenly changing that pattern of behaviour is very likely to leave users unhappy.
It is still possible that the world's second most-used social network could bring this feature to the main feed in future. However, given the fierce responses seen today, the company should think twice before introducing this change, unless the data shows it makes people spend more time in the app, of course.
