Adam Mosseri says the old Instagram feed is dead
Plus, the internet's continuing shift toward images over text.
I hope everyone is having a great start to the new year. Today’s issue of PHONE TIME includes: annotating head of Instagram Adam Mosseri’s post on authenticity and the future of social media, plus some thoughts on how the internet continues to shift away from text and toward images and video. Scroll to the end for some of my memes.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri posted an Instagram carousel detailing his thoughts on the future of social media, given the rise of AI and shift away from institutions toward creators and personalities.
“The key risk Instagram faces is that, as the world changes more quickly, the platform fails to keep up. Looking forward to 2026, one major shift: authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” he begins the post.
Comments on the post largely reflected the concerns creators have had for years: overwhelm with changing features, confusion about the algorithm, exhaustion with the pressure to post and keep up with trends. This past summer, in my piece titled “Does your Instagram grid still matter?” I wrote about the pile-up of new Instagram features that made it seem like the app was trying to dig itself out of a hole, rather rather than go ahead with a clear vision for the future.
“Unless you are under 25, you probably think of Instagram as feed of square photos: polished makeup, skin smoothing, and beautiful landscapes. That feed is dead. People stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,” Mosseri continues. In my experience as someone under 25, this is largely correct but also depends on whether someone uses the platform in connection with their work or larger personal brand. Some of my creator friends post Reels or on the feed nearly every day; many of the people I grew up with post on feed once a year or not at all. For the first group, personal and professional moments are all mixed together in one soup. And while it is true that the hyper-filtered, meticulously color-schemed feeds of years past are gone, new aesthetic languages associated with being hot, cool, and well-read have taken their place.
Here are a few of my annotations on some of Mosseri’s other points:
“The primary way people share now is in DMs: blurry photos and shaky videos of daily experiences. Shoe shots and unflattering candids. This raw aesthetic has bled into public content and across artforms.” Direct messages and close friends stories offer more intimate, closed spaces to share images, life updates, and memes that people might feel uncomfortable sharing on the main grid. I know a lot of people who’ve started secondary accounts—for food and cooking photos, tracking gym progress, their photography, or even just to share snaps of their life with close friends who’ve opted in to more frequent sharing. The “raw aesthetic” Mosseri talks about here actually offers a lot of possibilities for media and even more traditional reporting-centered journalism, I think. For example, iPhone photography complements the voice-y writing of many Substacks in a way that more professionally packaged and produced stories might not. Reporters from all outlets can share detailed, on-the-ground coverage through Instagram stories, giving audiences the feel of actually being there.
“The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic. They’re competing to make everyone look like a pro photographer from 2015. But in a world where AI can generate flawless imagery, the professional look becomes the tell.” I’m not a photographer, but I think this undervalues the effort, skill, time, and dedication to craft that professional photographers use in their work. I saw a few comments from photographers disheartened by the platform’s changes over the years. “As a photographer, so much of what we create comes from time, experience, and the way we see the world—not just the final image,” commented Chris Ha.
“Labeling is only part of the solution. We need to surface much more context about the accounts sharing content so people can make informed decisions. Who is behind the account?” I strongly agree with this and also think that Instagram’s shift towards more algorithmic curation is in direct contrast to this goal. When we receive content primarily from people we don’t know or aren’t following, we’re lacking significant context, especially when in an interface like Reels that encourages continuous scrolling without taking the time to stop and investigate something further. Information without context is a huge problem in terms of media literacy—I’ve written before about what can get lost when we get news and information downstream of the original source.
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Long live text!!!
In the most recent Galaxy Brain episode, Charlie Warzel describes a continuing decline of the significance of text in the media landscape, especially as LLMs flood the web with AI-generated text.
This shift to an increasingly visual internet is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, especially when I was preparing for my talk on the feminist internet last month. I wrote about it here.
As someone who’s worked across a variety of forms—TikTok, Instagram, long-form print and digital—I think a lot about the opportunities and limitations of each format, especially when it comes to informing and storytelling. In my view, each medium adds different shades of color into a story. Stories and media packages that I’ve loved or resonated the most with often combine multiple media formats, not just for the sake of having clips to post on Instagram or TikTok, but to fully detail the different parts of a scene, character, or movement.
I still think text is vital and one of the best canvases to fully flesh out a story. If you watch marketers talk about upcoming trends using the TikTok green screen feature (or even reporters talking in front of screenshots of their own articles) or influencers going back and forth on podcasts, they’re often using text-based reporting and writing as foundational matter to build upon.
Mosseri talks about embracing the “raw aesthetic,” but I think his characterization limits this idea to just being willing to make an Instagram Reel with no makeup on or vlogging your bad rainy day. The two words I’m thinking about regarding all of this are embodiment and craft. Like Ha commented on Mosseri’s post, the work of a photographer isn’t just in the final image, it’s in how they see the world—something which, as anyone doing creative work knows, takes years and more years to develop.
