Instagram has been the place that Facebook jams all of its cloned-app-features into for the last few years. When it copied Snapchat it jammed all of the features into Instagram. And now, as it clones TikTok, it is jamming those features into Instagram as well.
The Snapchat-like features are easy enough to ignore if you don’t like them. Stories can be muted by long-pressing on a Story and muting the user altogether. Simple. (Btw, I happen to like Stories.)
Reels, on the other hand, cannot be ignored as easily. When you open Explore/Search/Discover (or whatever it is called on Instagram now) you’re presented with a video that takes up around 1/3 of your phone’s screen and is usually some young teen girl “dancing”.
I do not like Reels. And I wish they could be turned off.
But there has to be a limit to how much Facebook can cram into Instagram before it bursts at the seams, and Reels feels like too much. TikTok just doesn’t feel Instagrammy at all, so I don’t think the problem with Reels is execution, I think it’s just the basic idea of using Instagram to host Facebook’s TikTok clone. It’s a bad fit, and Facebook doesn’t have the taste to know it.
The medium of Reels may very well be fine. And Instagram’s execution of creating and sharing that medium may very well be better than TikTok’s (I don’t know) but their use by the community is simply not for me. And the fact that IG forces us to see them stinks.
So, with that I’ll likely be sharing less on Instagram. If you’re reading this you likely subscribe to my blog already (thank you). I’ll be sharing my public photos here and perhaps Flickr.
Yes, I’m old. Get off my lawn. I just mowed it.