Instagram might make your video look terrible if it’s not popular

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has admitted that the company may reduce the quality of your video if it thinks it’s not getting enough views …

In an Ask Me Anything session, a user asked:

Do stories lose quality over time? Mine look blurry in highlights

Mosseri said yes, they can.

In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can. But if something isn’t watched for a long time, because the vast majority of views are in the beginning, we will move to a lower quality video […]

It works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level. We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary theshhold, but rather a sliding scale.

It’s likely this is because the company offloads less-watched videos onto slower (and cheaper) servers.

Creators weren’t impressed with the admission.

“Doesn’t this make it harder for smaller creators to compete?”

“This setup to me seems to favour established creators and makes it harder than ever for newbies to make a go of it 🤷‍♂️”

“This is why many people are very jaded with Instagram as a photo sharing (and video sharing) app. The very heart of it has become solely dependent upon performance, metrics, views, and engagement—so much so that I can’t even control if the quality of my video is retained due to Instagram pushing a bias.”

“We all use it, and yet there will still be levels and a subtle form of elitism introduced […] It just seems unfair and morally wrong especially artistically.”

“This is truly insane. Your users should not have to ‘perform’ in order to receive a comparable level of service from you.”

“You’re essentially keeping smaller creators in low-quality jail. The quality of stream matters a lot for artists, videographers and cgi artists, people that do not rely on the speaking-to-phone-camera format – that rely more on the quality of the image as the medium.”

“Awesome, glad I invested in 3000$ worth of camera gear for my business page.”

Photo by Luke van Zyl on Unsplash