Instagram long-form videos and full control of your feed may be on the cards

Instagram long-form videos have previously been a possibility the company has ruled out, but its head Adam Mosseri now says that it might be that the platform needs it.

One thing he is promising is a way to allow users to “proactively shape content in their feeds,” although you shouldn’t hold your breath for this …

Instagram long-form videos

Instagram has previously said that it sees short-form videos as a defining factor of the platform, and that long form video is something the company is happy to leave to apps like YouTube. The company is currently sticking to this line, but Mosseri acknowledges that this may not remain the case indefinitely.

He made the remarks in a Semafor interview.

While YouTube increasingly encourages its creators and media companies to make long, highly-produced videos that increasingly resemble traditional television, Mosseri emphasized that as it stands, lengthy content does not work on Instagram, and part of the appeal is the constant variety.

But Mosseri said that could change, in a way that could radically alter the platform. “It might turn out that maybe we’ll need premium content to work,” he said. “It might be that we need longform video.”

Proactive control of your feed

Meta recently introduced a new feature called Your Algorithm, intended to give users greater control over their feed, in response to growing frustration that the algorithm doesn’t prioritize content from the people they have actually chosen to follow.

Users will now see a list of what Instagram considers to be your top, recent interests. This kind of peek behind the algorithmic curtain is already uncommon in social media apps, but Meta is taking it a step further by allowing Instagram users to influence their algorithm directly by picking topics they want to see more or less often in Reels.

This is a relatively small step, but Mosseri promises that there is much more to come.

 Instagram plans to let users proactively shape content in their feeds in a way that would feel “fundamentally different.”

“Some of these new technologies should evolve in a way that you can kind of touch metal, where you can go in there and just tell it what you want, or make it what you want, whether that is shaping [your] feed to give you what you’re interested in or going deep in search to understand something, or creating something and being able to really mold it into what you want more proactively

You might have thought this was both relatively simple and urgent, but the company warns that it could take two to four years to get there.

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