Instagram Rolls Out Horrible New Redesign, Pulls Back After Quick Backlash

Instagram today rolled out a new redesign for its app. The redesign completely changes how Instagram works — it turns the feed into a horizontally scrollable feed, much like how the Stories format work.

You are able to tap through posts and switch between posts like stories, and there’s also a progress bar at the top that shows how many posts you have seen in your current feed. Pulling up on a post takes you to the comments, and you can like/share/save posts like before.

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Instagram has been testing the feature since October, and the company rolled it out to more users today. The rollout led to a ton of quick backlash from Instagram users, who definitely aren’t a fan of the new design:

https://twitter.com/shadefuls/status/1078318632080474113

We love a Bird Box meme:

https://twitter.com/HartEdition/status/1078317611140685824

https://twitter.com/1DJFirstClass/status/1078317784776495104

It looks like Instagram might have released the update to everyone by mistake. The company has now pulled the update for everyone after the quick backlash, likely because it was only meant to be tested with a small number of users. Still, there’s a good chance the update will make a comeback in the future, but this backlash should be a good indicator to Instagram as to how terrible this idea is.

https://twitter.com/LearrickL/status/1078318264210608128

Crisis averted. For now.

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Conversation 6 comments

  • woelfel

    27 December, 2018 - 11:11 am

    <p>Rollback was so fast that I didn't even notice it.</p>

  • yoshi

    Premium Member
    27 December, 2018 - 11:29 am

    <p>Just checked mine and it's this new way. This is a nightmare.</p>

  • sentinel6671

    Premium Member
    27 December, 2018 - 12:31 pm

    <p>This event reinforces that everyone should have their own platform, namely a blog with their own domain name. The big social media companies can never be trusted to act in the best interests of the user base. I bet this update will be back, whether we want it or not.</p>

  • LT1 Z51

    Premium Member
    27 December, 2018 - 1:43 pm

    <p>Mine was like that for 5 minutes. It was awful.</p>

  • ReformedCtrlZ

    Premium Member
    27 December, 2018 - 2:02 pm

    <p>Kinda wish I had seen this. From what I've seen I actually really like that design. I like the focus on each post as a separate thing instead of just back-to-back posts. I'd love to see them implement this as an option for users, especially those of us who seem to like it.</p>

  • Robert_Wood

    27 December, 2018 - 3:29 pm

    <p>Instagram should learn from Snapchat on what happens when you radically redesign your platform. They copied everything else from Snapchat, they should probably learn from Snap's mistakes too.</p>

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