Reels Talk
Why I think shoving the new ‘Reels’ product into Instagram may actually be a mistake
If timing is everything, Facebook looks like the finest timepiece Switzerland has to offer today.¹ With the Microsoft/TikTok fiasco still fresh in our retinas, and the fate of that service in the US still causing influencers around the world to be picking at itches, in walks Facebook with some calamine lotion. Instagram Reels.
Yes, Facebook’s latest foray into the Clone Wars launched today to much fanfare. Again, the timing is just perfect. Unfortunately, the service is not.
To be clear, Instagram seemingly did a great job copying the core functionality of TikTok. The tool itself is very, very well done. The issue, I believe, is one of strategy. Put simply: I think it’s a mistake to cram this product into Instagram.
Before I go farther, I’ll note that I’ve used the product for an hour, max. This is full-on hot take/armchair quarterbacking. But that’s what we do around these parts. If that interests you, pull up a chair.
First and foremost, when I opened Instagram today to try out Reels I couldn’t even find it. There are no obviously visible signals of where it resides aside from an IG placement in the Stories carousel at the top of the app which they use from time to time to showcase new features. But if you didn’t know that, you’d be pretty clueless other than randomly poking around.
That’s because there is no new section of the app for Reels. At first, this may seem like a good thing: Facebook has a history of shoving superfluous new areas into their apps to A/B test the hell out of all of us. Instagram decided not to do that here, which I appreciate. But the flip side again is that I couldn’t find Reels at first.
Turns out it lives in the “Discovery” section, which I never use, but apparently half of Instagram users do regularly (per the company). So, okay, this wasn’t the original intent of the area, but again, I appreciate trying to do this without shoving it in our faces.
The next tricky bit was how to create a Reel. That was a little more straightforward because it’s in the camera. But not every camera. Not the one you get to when you hit the “+” button that’s front-and-center, for example. It’s the one you get when you swipe to the left. You know, the one where all the other stuff is — Boomerang, Layout, Live, etc. Swiping gets you the the Reels camera as well. It’s twice to the right. Or maybe once. Or maybe three times left.
Amazingly, this has seemingly already changed slightly as of this evening, just a few hours after it first rolled out. Unless I’m in an A/B test, at first, there were all these types of cameras in a carousel of sorts at the bottom. Now the carousel appears to be just three options: Live, Story, and Reels. This change makes some sense as there were way too many options before. But now those options are in a floating left side nav. And the filters are in another carousel, this one with the shutter button. And then there’s a top nav. And a bottom nav which extends out from the camera type carousel.
If this sounds confusing it’s because it is confusing. Put simply: it’s a clusterfuck of options suspended in weird and seemingly arbitrary places. It makes the Microsoft Office nav look like the Great Pyramid.
We’re getting to my point here, I swear.
When I joked on Twitter earlier that using Instagram was becoming a bit like entering the old cheat code on Contra — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start — the joke actually wasn’t perfect because that’s actually a relatively easy code to remember. Using Instagram is far from easy to remember. And it’s getting more complicated by the day.
Now look, I know, I know. Shoving Stories into Instagram worked. Brilliantly. This is like that, right? I don’t think so.
To me, Stories in Instagram worked for two reasons: first, the purpose of Stories was the same one Instagram was built for: to share images with your friends. “Friends” is a bit of a loose term here, but it leads to the second key: that a social graph of some kind is crucial. For Snapchat, the social graph is close friends, whereas for Instagram, it was becoming more about followers. But still, the mechanism was the same, which is why Instagram’s “close friends” feature was easy to build in as well.
TikTok is different. It’s actually not a social network, it just looks like one to some people on TV. It’s a content and entertainment network. It’s Netflix with UGC and true virality. It’s YouTube with better algorithms, tools, and mobile UI. Instagram is not this type of network. That is why IGTV did not work — amazingly, it’s still shoved in here too, which is additionally confounding — and why I think Reels won’t work.
…at least inside of Instagram. I would not be shocked if we see a stand-alone Reels app in a few months, if not sooner.
Now I know what you’re thinking: but Instagram tried that with IGTV and that didn’t work either, and they killed off that app and moved it fully into Instagram itself. But that has more to do with the flaws of IGTV (clear from the get-go), than the mechanism, I think. Which, again, is why it’s not working inside of Instagram itself with its billion+ users.
I think Reels has a shot as a stand-alone app because again, the tools are great.² And the time is right. What’s holding back Reels is, ironically, its seemingly greatest strength: those billion+ users tied together in a graph.
To clone TikTok, you can’t just clone the tools and UI, you need to clone the things that actually make it work: namely, the algorithm and model.
Easier said than done, of course. But the first step is Instagram letting go of their social graph and instead figuring out how to get the billion+ users to forget about it too. To focus on creating content for a new audience. An audience they don’t yet know. But is there!
Again, this is so much easier said than done. And it may in fact be impossible. But if Instagram can figure out how to get its billion+ users to provide enough content to quickly train those all-important algorithms, they have a shot. And this may indeed be why they shoved Reels into Instagram itself! Again, that worked for Stories. But again, Stories was different. And I think given the impeccable timing of this launch, they would have been able to get enough people to download a new app, to serve a new purpose.
Instead, we have a massive Frankenstein problem inside of Instagram. A product which started out so simple and fast has now become a comically bloated mess of features and functionality. It’s both ruining what Instagram was and holding back Reels.
But we’ll see, I’m not always right. But sometimes I am. Facebook and Instagram have obviously thought about and through all of this. I just think it may play out differently than they think it will. But there’s uh, still a lot going on in this space, to say the least.
¹ At the very least, they look better than this.
² Though as history has taught us (and Facebook), being better isn’t always good enough. Again, the point of the networks have to align.
