We brought you a headliner the other day about Instagram de-emphasizing follower counts in future iterations.
And today we caught a glimpse of the future and, boy, they weren’t kidding.
In a bid to make Instagram about the content and not about the likes and follows, the division under Facebook is redesigning its interface to put content front and center as well as otherwise bury things like the vaunted “Follower” count so many people love.
Aside from making some of this information less prominent, the photo and video grid will remain more or less the same. There will be some changes to user interface features but, more or less, things will remain the same.
Now the user profile will be featured along with the bio then some information on followers. The number of posts a user has will not be visible on the front screen.
Instagram’s new improvements are part of making it a more appealing service for advertisers. As one of the main sources of revenue for the app, ad revenue is chief among the division’s focuses in the coming years.
Deploying an AI-based program to target fake users and bots, Instagram is taking a lot of the “fake followers” and the inflated numbers they cause head on. They argue it will not only lead to a better user experience but also make numbers more relevant. After all, how relevant is it if you have thousands of followers, most of whom are fake?
Of course, fake followers and the industry that has sprung up around providing them also points to a strange phenomenon in society- social media madness. From risking one’s life to take a selfie to scamming people out of money in order to live an enviable life on Instagram, it’s absolutely amazing what people will do for fleeting Internet celebrity.
