Instagram’s Latest Update Favors Consumption Over Creation

How the Thumb Zone reveals where Instagram’s priorities lie

While dying the bottom half of my hair blue and hoarding special edition EOS lip balms came close, no middle school accomplishment was quite as formative as receiving my first smart device: a sleek, electric blue iPod Touch. As a seventh-grade girl in 2012, this was a game changer. 

No longer would I have to beg my older brother for a turn playing Doodle Jump, take wrist-mangling selfies on my mom’s point-and-shoot camera or have conversations about juicy middle school drama displayed on the family desktop. Best of all, my digital social life was no longer limited to the doldrums of Google Chat or email. 

As soon as word got out that I was the proud owner of such a coveted device, I was inundated with a wave of messages from friends.

“Download Instagram!” they begged excitedly. So I did. 

Thus, the notorious @carebear716 was born, kick-starting my adolescent journey into the world of duck faces, aggressive photo filters and obnoxious mirror selfies. 

Despite it having been an unashamedly cringeworthy era, the photo-sharing app was at its prime during these first few years of its existence. There was a reason why my friends and I were so excited to have a digital space to share our lives with each other.

For the most part, our feeds were filled with photos from friends and classmates. Posts were casual and personal—snapshots of meals and goofy selfies, often accompanied by lengthy captions. It felt like a genuine, intimate space to interact with each other. 

Unbeknownst to us, 2012 was also the year that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Ever since, Facebook has, unsurprisingly, transformed the app into a moneymaking machine. Each update has nudged users toward commerce and away from social interaction. 

In 2015, the app opened the Instagram feed to all advertisers, implementing the same targeting advertising strategy used on Facebook. The app became inescapably saturated with advertisements and sponsored content. In 2016, it removed the chronological feed, replacing it with an algorithmic one. This meant users would see photos they were most likely to interact with—including content from brands and businesses—before they would see posts from friends, no matter how recently the photo was posted. 

While each of these changes received backlash, none have been quite as radical—or more telling of the company’s priorities—than the most recent update. 

Not only did the app developers expand their e-commerce platform, but they changed the application’s layout entirely to prioritize this feature. Anchored at the bottom of the screen, where notifications used to be, a small, flaticon handbag sits—out of place amongst an array of familiar glyphs. Here, users can browse and purchase from familiar brands directly from the app.

The shortcut to “reels” (Instagram’s largely unsuccessful TikTok copycat) replaced the “new post” button. Both notifications and the “new post” function are now located at the top right-hand corner of the screen. 

In short, the functions that make social media social—sharing posts and viewing interactions on those posts—have been replaced by needless and unwanted moneymaking features. It isn’t inherently wrong for apps to pivot their focus over time, and it’s inevitable that companies will find ways to increase profits. However, it is predatory to take advantage of people’s habits by replacing the most commonly used feature with a shopping tab. 

The problems don’t end there. It isn’t just that people will habitually navigate to the e-commerce platform. The shortcuts are formatted so that the shopping feature is naturally the most accessible. The app has taken one giant step closer to becoming a marketplace rather than a social hub.  

In his book “Designing Mobile Interfaces,” Steven Hoober coins the term “The Thumb Zone,” illustrating the most comfortable areas of touch on a smartphone screen. He recommends that the most important features be placed in the “easy” zone, and the least important at the very top, in the “hard” zone. 

By placing the notification and “new post” button in the most inaccessible area, Instagram is signaling its preference for moneymaking and further nudging users into consumption and away from both creation and social interaction. 

It’s no surprise that Facebook is leaning heavily on Instagram for monetization. Facebook user engagement has been waning since 2017, and Instagram has been accounting for an increasing percentage of Facebook advertising revenues, according to a 2020 study published on Statistica. 

At some point, users may get fed up with such heavy commercialization. In fact, the collective frustration that has already been brewing may explain TikTok’s raging success. Unfortunately, the chances that Facebook will move away from a moneymaking strategy are slim, and the same downward spiral might already be in motion for TikTok, which has begun to introduce more ads and sponsored content. 

Few memories from my awkward middle school years trigger a warm sense of nostalgia. But when I think of Instagram circa 2012, I can’t help but long for a different kind of social media. In many ways, it’s this nostalgia that keeps me from deleting the app altogether. Now, advertisements and sponsored posts have replaced the authentic, personal content that first drove me to download the app. With its most recent update, it has become increasingly clear that Instagram is monetizing off of our belief in a service that it doesn’t seem to provide anymore.