Instagram confirms it won’t refresh your feed when you open the app

Instagram is making a change to remove a feature that has long been considered annoying by users, the company’s head has confirmed via social media. From now on, the social media platform’s feed will not automatically refresh when the app is opened after a period of short inactivity, allowing the user to see the posts that first appear on their screen. Notably, this development comes after the company confirmed that it is deliberately lowering the quality of Instagram Stories and Reels, which do not get many views, and reserving the computing resources for videos that are watched by a large number of users.

No more automatic feed refresh on Instagram

During a recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) (via @_blunderchief), Instagram head Adam Mosseri was asked about a recent change on the social media platform that people were unaware of. The official highlighted that Instagram has stopped what is known internally as a ‘rug pull’ – a user interface (UI) feature that caused the feed to automatically refresh when the user accessed the app.

According to Mosseri, this was done because the app was trying to load content and was displaying the most recently downloaded messages and videos in the meantime. Although this feature was intended to improve user engagement, even the company official admitted that it was “annoying” as all the interesting content that first appeared on the screen moved and disappeared, requiring users to manually scroll down to get to it to search.

Fortunately, this will no longer be the case as the change has been implemented on the social media platform, Mosseri has confirmed. Instead of automatically refreshing the feed, Instagram now loads content but only displays it when the user scrolls. Then the newly loaded content will be inserted below the messages already displayed.

While this decision comes at the cost of an “engagement hit” for the platform, it provides a “much better experience” for the average user.