Michael Calore: Probably never. Almost never.
Lauren Goode: Well, in this case, I think you can really agree with them because I heard you talk about your Instagram experience recently and it doesn’t seem to be going very well.
Michael Calore: Right. These days, I feel very uncomfortable opening Instagram.
Lauren Goode: Why so?
Michael Calore: Well, I want to tell you all about that.
Lauren Goode: OK. Let’s talk about that.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hi guys. Welcome to the Utility Lab. I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I’m Michael Calore. I’m a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And we’re joining this week by WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs, who’s calling from Chicago. Hey, Kate. Welcome back to the program.
Kate Knibbs: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Lauren Goode: It’s great to have you. ALRIGHT. So today we are getting “scrolling”, which means we are talking about Reels, Instagram’s TikTokification. If you’ve spent any time on Instagram lately, you may find yourself in an endless feed of videos instead of photos. And those videos are called Reels. Sometimes they can even be Stories from people you don’t even follow.
So what’s going on with Instagram? The short answer is that it is becoming a TikTok clone. Instagram’s parent company, Meta, which was formerly known as Facebook, wants to be all things social, which means it sometimes blatantly copies other popular apps like TikTok or Snapchat. Kate, you’ve got some thoughts on Reels. You’re writing about it for WIRED.com this week. Why is this happening?
Kate Knibbs: Well, the short answer as to why it happened is because Meta wants to survive and grow and the company thinks the best way to do so is to split TikTok. They have some good reason to think that this might work. If you remember, Instagram blatantly ate Snapchat when it created Stories, and that feature was a huge success. So I think that’s the same thought process that led us into this Reels hell.
The big difference here, which is what I’m writing about, and what we’re all upset about, is that Reels sucks. In fact, Instagram Stories is a premium version of Snapchat functionality. Instagram stole from Snapchat, but they made it better and that’s why people love it. What’s going on with Reels and I know they’re doing something similar on Facebook, but to be honest I try to use Facebook as little as possible so I’m not familiar with what they’re doing there But Reels is an attempt to decouple TikTok essentially to move TikTok’s functionality to Instagram, to convince people not to close the Instagram app and open the TikTok app, but just stay on Instagram.
But that is not what is happening in reality. From my point of view anyway, what’s happening is, I’m opening Instagram and getting angry when I see all the videos I don’t want to see, then shutting down and going to TikTok and not even doing it. stay on Instagram for the reason that I think I want to open Instagram, to see photos of my friends and family.
