Instagram and Adam Mosseri Announce (Bad) Move To Throttle Down Content With TikTok Watermarks

In a further move that is escalating the competition between #TikTok and #Instagram's copy-cat short-form content platform, #Reels, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said they will start throttling down any videos with TikTok's watermark on it.

They have said this in the past as well, but now (apparently) really mean it. According to Fast Company, they will be making changes to the algorithm that will start throttling that content down. Mosseri notoriously made an algorithm change on Facebook which throttled and destroyed Business Pages in favor of friend-to-friend content in the past. Fast-forward to today and Facebook is reporting its first ever decline in users. It's not surprising. People were on there for entertainment, video, and news, not to see what their friends of yesteryear are doing.

Adam Mosseri announced the algorithm change about Instagram original content on Twitter, of all places (lol)

Mosseri's decision might have saved some bad press for Facebook in the past by throttling spammy Business Pages, and I think this move is mostly more of the same. This will save some bad press or negativite comments in the Meta offices and meetings because IG is full of TikTok videos. However, those TikTok videos gave a lot of steam in the Reels engine, and it tells me something even more important. People are creating on TikTok, not Instagram. People like using TikTok to create and post. Perhaps most importantly, he underestimates how much people are not going to create two versions of their videos, and how a lot of people have already shifted over to TikTok.

I think many saw this coming anyway, and Instagram clearly wants people to create original content within the Meta-verse of platforms. It makes sense, but I don't think helps Instagram at all. They need to raise the rates they pay people to create content. Asking people to just create content for them is long gone. Everyone has bent the knee and done that in the past to no avail or long-term growth.

Also, I'm not sure how the #algorithm affects content that is simply uploaded to the platform and not created by recording the video or editing the video within the platform. I suspect that content that is edited/created within the platform (or any platform for that matter besides #YouTube), as opposed to uploaded, will and does better. Another hassle creators do not want to go through.