With competitors like TikTok and BeReal, Instagram needs to double down on its roots

By Mark Griffey 5 minute ReadIn a TikTok-centered world, I’m still a big fan of Instagram. In fact, I even have an account where I mainly post short videos and image carousels of New Age and ambient music cassettes from the ’80s, along with stories about the artists. Back when I started it, the appeal for me was creating a collection of content, just like a collection of tapes. But in the world of recommendation algorithms and since the mandatory conversion of all feed videos to Reels, my account seems to belong to an older era. A stranger stumbling on my videos from Reels would probably only see that single post and judge it completely out of context, even though that is not the intention of my account. Adding Reels is obviously not the only change Instagram has gone through. You’ve probably seen headlines about Instagram copying TikTok with its approach to video content and, most recently, BeReal by testing a feature that prompts users to take a photo at a random time each day. Then there’s Instagram Stories, a response to Snapchat that in 2018 earned Instagram 300 million active users, more than the entire user base of Snapchat. But this is…
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