Instagram has finally fixed an annoying bug in its app that has been annoying users for a long time. Now, when you open the app, it will wait for you to scroll through the page before showing you new content.
Regular Instagram users know this frustration. You open the app, see some interesting content, but it quickly disappears when Instagram refreshes your feed. This is made even worse by the fact that it’s almost impossible to find anything, especially videos, using Instagram’s search function, which means that whatever interesting stuff you were watching is likely gone.
For a long time, there was a suspicion that this behavior was a bug – perhaps Instagram was frozen as a background process on iOS or Android and it was simply restarting. It turns out that this is not the case.
Adam Mosseri, an Instagram executive, said in an interview with AMA earlier this week that the “carpet pulling,” as it’s called internally, was designed intentionally “because we were trying to upload new content and it was taking a while, so we were showing you what was already uploaded and that’s generally good for engagement.” Even if that’s true, they didn’t handle this process of uploading new content gracefully. It should always happen after the user swipes.
Luckily, Mosseri recognized that this behavior is “very annoying,” so Instagram is going to stop doing this and wait until you start scrolling through the feed before refreshing it. A minor change that will undoubtedly make a lot of people very happy.
