What’s your favorite thing about Instagram? It is that thing where you open the app, start looking at a post you find interesting, but before you’re done, something new loads in its place, and you lose that first photo or video forever? Yeah, that’s my favorite thing, too.
Oh wait, no, I actually hate it—the constant refreshing is beyond annoying. But I have some news: As it happens, Instagram is no longer doing this! Huzzah. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, recently announced in a story on his page (preserved on Threads here from user _blunderchief) that the company has ended this not-so-refreshing practice.
Why did Instagram constantly refresh?
According to Mosseri, the app’s tendency to reload once you returned to it wasn’t a bug but a feature, internally called “rug pull.” It was designed to do two things: First, Instagram is constantly loading content, which takes time, so it decides to show you something that’s already downloaded first—that would be, say, the Reel you started watching as soon as you opened the app. Once the new content loads up, the app would then push it out instead. Not only is that good for Instagram’s load times, it’s good for engagement, which is the second reason the company kept the practice in place for so long.
It makes sense, from a pure numbers perspective: If you’re watching a Reel, that counts as one view. If your app suddenly reloads upon your visit and presents you with a new video, that’s now view number two. Multiply that by Instagram’s half a billion daily active users, and that’s a lot of extra engagement.
That extra engagement came at a cost, however: the sanity of the app’s users (which, let’s be honest, probably isn’t exactly on firm footing these days anyway). I don’t know about you, but when I open the app and see something worth engaging with, I, um, want to engage with it. So, when a new post or Reel presents itself instead, I feel instant rage. Seeing as Instagram has no straightforward watch history to speak of, if you didn’t catch what account it was from, that post or Reel is then likely lost forever.
Going forward, things should be better, but Instagram is not the only social media company that worked (or works) like this. If you ever use X (even when it was called Twitter), you know the pain of constantly losing the post you were reading to a random mid-feed refresh. This sort of behavior makes these apps, which are supposed to be somewhat entertaining to use, an experience in frustration: You’re always on your back foot, never confident you’ll be able to engage with everything that pops across your feed.
As for Instagram, let’s also hope the feed stops refreshing so much when switching between apps. Just as I hated losing a Reel right when I opened the app, I also hate how often I lose something I was watching because I went to respond to a message in another app before finishing it.
