Instagram is the largest photo- and video-sharing platform, and it is experiencing issues.
Its parent company, Meta, is the largest social media the world has ever seen. Since the company rebranded from Facebook, many skeptics and critics suggest that the rebrand is the company's way to clear its name from various claims and allegations people have made about it in the past.
During this time, engagements on the social media Facebook, including on Instagram, have dropped.
As a way to ensure that users will stay around longer, Instagram has quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes.
The Meta-owned photo-sharing platform has redesigned the well-being feature so users can no longer set the Daily Limit time to 10 minutes or 15 minutes.
Instagram introduced the Daily Limit feature back in 2018.
The feature is originally meant to "limit" users using the app, by allowing them to receive notifications about their Instagram usage after spending as little as 10 minutes per day on the app.
This feature is supposed to help users curb their social media addiction, in which in turn, aims for their well being.
Instagram introduced this feature when it was making a big marketing push to suggest that more "mindful" usage of its services was possible, as concern over social media addiction surged.
But realizing that engagements are down, and Meta is growing tremendously slow, if compared to years before, an update in strategy is needed.
By bumping up the the minimum time to 30 minutes, and the maximum time to 3 hours, Meta can ensure that users will spend longer eyeballing for content feed on Instagram, allowing the company to cash in by targeting those users with ads.
Instagram also cleverly redesigned the interface, by putting the longer time options first in the list.
It's worth noting though, that existing users of this feature still have the option to retain their existing daily limit of 10 or 15 minutes, only if it was set previously. To these people, this update will send them a notification, which encourages users to change it.
According to Instagram, the update is meant to make the feature less confusing.
"We have two time management features. Our existing 'daily limit' shows you a notification when you’ve hit your daily limit, but our newest feature 'Take A Break' shows you full-screen reminders to leave the app, and includes 10 minute intervals. We changed the 'daily limit' options to avoid sending people multiple notifications at the same time," explained a Meta spokesperson.
However, the update is introduced just in time when Meta is struggling.
On its 2021 quarterly report, Meta expects slower revenue growth this 2022 due to more competition for people's time and users paying more attention to features that generate less revenue, such as Reels.
So here, the way Instagram is introducing it feels more like a change for it to urge people into using the app more.
It seems like Meta wants users to keep scrolling to view more ads, in order to counterbalance Meta's revenue concerns.