Instagram's Facebook-style recommendations and notifications and an uptick in the number of ads in feeds are making the service more annoying to use
Why does Instagram want to be so much like its big brother at a time when the pre-eminent social network is drawing so much criticism?
Wall Street JournalKatherine Bindley
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 critique lands mid-arc for Instagram. The service had already moved off the chronological feed — back when the algorithmic shift loomed, brands and bloggers were literally begging followers to switch on notifications to survive it. The WSJ's complaint is that the next phase copies Facebook directly: recommendations, notification volume, and denser ads, at the exact moment the parent network is under fire for its own design choices.
First-order effects
Users absorb the cost immediately: more ads per scroll, more push notifications, and recommended content displacing posts from accounts they actually chose to follow.
Advertisers and brands get what they asked for — the algorithmic feed and notification economy created the reach they now buy into, so the annoyance is partly their inventory working as designed.
Second-order effects
The ad-load strategy runs into a ceiling: by late 2020, an analysis found Facebook and Instagram ads approaching saturation after years of roughly 30% average quarterly growth, meaning further density yields diminishing returns.
If the pattern holds, consumer social platforms converge on the same recommendation-dense feed model regardless of brand identity, and differentiation shifts to who offers the best escape hatches — controls, quiet modes, chronological options — rather than who resists the model.
That convergence makes 'engagement engineering' a regulatory and reputational surface in its own right: the same levers criticized here reappear later in scrutiny of how platforms target teens and shape usage habits.
The trend: Social feeds are converging on Facebook-style algorithmic recommendation and rising ad density, with platforms selling the resulting attention while bolting on user controls as the pressure-release valve.
Instagram used to be a haven from things that made Facebook annoying and creepy—then the photo-sharing app started using some of the social network's powerful digital tricks http://www.wsj.com/...
Good read. I wonder what Instagram would've been like (for its users) without Facebook. Different, but in what ways? FB certainly helped it grow, but is obsession with aggressive and never-ending growth for growth's sake worth it? http://twitter.com/...
Facebook challenge. It's ownership of Instagram has masked Facebook's decline in engagement. Its revenue pressures, though, may force Instagram to own Facebook's problems. http://www.wsj.com/...
This seems straight out of @kashhill report. Interesting. This likely ends under the new EU privacy regulations. http://www.wsj.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Users are noticing that Facebook is getting more and more aggressive at sending you alerts in order to goose engagement. https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @sarahfrier pic.twitter.com/DwX1qR5JUF
“the company has only gotten more aggressive in its emails to win him back... 'It looks like you're having trouble logging into Facebook,' the emails would say...” https://www.bloomberg.com/... @sarahfrier @technology
Growth hacking, or “the content of mail they send is essentially trying to trick you”? https://www.bloomberg.com/... by @sarahfrier pic.twitter.com/8Oun76OJxx
Facebook is getting increasingly aggressive with asking people who don't log in very often to log in, sometimes with tricky messages about account security. Why is that? My story: https://www.bloomberg.com/...
this is happening with Instagram, too. I created an account (that I do not use) for a work thing a year ago and it's been sending me, “you seem to be having trouble logging into your account” emails for two months. http://twitter.com/...