Reel Talk About Instagram

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you've opened Instagram recently, you've certainly seen Reels. The photo-sharing app has started aggressively pushing the TikTok-like video feeds onto its users, a move that has sparked a heated response. Longtime users, and even celebrities like Kylie Jenner, have been urging Instagram to ditch the feature, which in addition to showing you more viral videos also shows you fewer updates from your friends and loved ones. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has defended the move, saying that Instagram is sticking with Reels and showing more videos in general, no matter how you or the Kardashians feel about that.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs joins us to rant about Reels and why all the social media platforms are copying TikTok now.

Show Notes

Watch Mosseri’s recent video about Reels (on Twitter, of course). Read Kate’s story about how Instagram keeps showing her sick kids.

Recommendations

Kate recommends the book The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism by Adrienne Buller. Lauren recommends the Jordan Peele movie Nope and also Jason Parham’s WIRED review of the film. Mike recommends the Netflix show How to Change Your Mind and John Semley’s WIRED story about the companies racing to engineer new psychedelic drugs.

Kate Knibbs can be found on Twitter @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike.
0:00.8	Lauren.
0:01.6	Mike, how often do you get to say that you agree wholeheartedly with the Kardashians?
0:07.6	Probably never, close to never.
0:10.0	Well, in this case, I think you might actually agree with them because I've heard you talking about your Instagram experience lately.
0:17.6	And it seems like it's not very good.
0:19.0	Right. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to open Instagram these days.
0:22.1	Why is that?
0:23.0	Well, I'd love to tell you all about it.
0:25.0	All right. Let's talk about it.
0:31.0	Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired.
0:37.3	And I'm Michael Collori. I'm a senior writer at Wired. And I'm
0:37.8	Michael Collory. I'm a senior editor at Wired. And we're joined this week by Wired Senior Writer, Kate Nibs, who's calling in from Chicago. Hey, Kate, welcome back to the show. Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's always great to have you on. Okay, so today we're getting real, which is to say we're talking about reels, the TikTokification of
0:56.2	Instagram. If you've spent any time on Instagram lately, you've probably found yourself in an endless
1:01.3	feed of videos instead of photos. And those videos are known as reels. Sometimes they might even be
1:07.5	reels from people you don't even follow. So what is happening to Instagram?
1:13.4	The short answer is it's becoming a clone of TikTok. Instagram's parent company, Meta, the company
1:19.4	formerly known as Facebook, wants to be all things social media, which means it sometimes
1:24.3	blatantly copies other popular apps like TikTok or Snapchat.
1:29.2	Kate, you've had some thoughts about Reels. You're writing about it for Wire.com this week.
1:33.3	Why is this happening? Well, the short answer of why it's happening is because Meta wants to
1:39.8	survive and thrive and the company thinks the best way to do so is to rip off TikTok.
	...

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