![]() You could let posts zip by and stop it with your finger when you saw something interesting, or a post by a friend rather than a meme account. In an infinite scroll feed, there is the feeling of it being a timeline of sorts, a long stream that you’re going back through. Why is this a dark pattern? Well, again, it’s about controlling how you experience the content. With images it doesn’t matter nearly as much, you can take your time scrolling by. Obviously this has been successful in that app, and if you’re focusing on video content, it makes a certain amount of sense: when a video is playing, you want to show the whole frame so you don’t miss the beginning. The other big UI change is a switch from the classic infinite scroll to an item-by-item flipping style, also highly reminiscent of TikTok. It’s all out of the standard Meta playbook for user behavior manipulation. Here Instagram wants you to be inconvenienced by the process of silencing a video so that you’ll engage more fully with it, maybe Remix™ the Reel™ by tapping the little round soundtrack button - another Instagram original! Instead of leaving the choice to you, they weight that choice heavily on the side they would like to see more of. ![]() That’s why I appreciated defaulting to silent or at least the knowledge that a single tap would quiet the app without affecting the rest of the phone.ĭark patterns are often less about deception than direction. How many clicks of the volume down button will it take for me to make this aspiring viral video, probably a TikTok screencap, shut up? Impossible to say. Sometimes my music comes on all quiet because I turned it down for some game (or, now, for Instagram). I don’t know about you, but my phone is set to vibrate all the time, but that’s not “silent.” I literally have no idea what volume my phone is set to at any given time, because some apps have their own volume levels, others take over the system one and so on. You can see at least that I’ve trained my search page well. If you want Instagram to be silent, you have to set your entire phone to silent. Okay, it still makes it quiet - why is that a problem? Because what they’ve done is added friction to consuming the content in the way you choose. Now tapping something just pauses or unpauses it. The safe assumption was that the sound was off until you tapped it. This has always been a user-friendly feature, because millions check their feeds in public places where the raucous cheers or music blitz of a random sponsored video would be an unpleasant surprise for everyone within 20 feet. The first thing I noticed was that I could no longer mute or unmute videos - sorry, Reels™ - by tapping on them. I asked Instagram about whether and when the new UI would come to everyone and haven’t heard back, but will update if I do. In this case they took the opportunity to bring in a few bad habits and troubling choices, all pretty clearly intended to juice their metrics and force users to interact with content on the app’s terms. ![]() The new UI is plainly inspired by TikTok, the way Instagram has routinely been “inspired” by its more innovative rivals, like when they clone-stamped Stories out of Snapchat. Update: They’re spiking the changes for now. Although the company has not rolled it out to all users yet, the changes seem in line with its intention to move away from its original model of photo sharing among friends, to the one pioneered by TikTok: showing as much algorithmically targeted video content as possible and juicing engagement wherever practical. I, of all people, got a fresh new user interface in Instagram the other day.
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