Instagram users are furious after a recent update introduced a new way to browse through their feed.
Beginning during the early morning hours on Thursday, Instagram began rolling out its newest update which did away with the tried and true up and down scrolling in favor of scrolling side-to-side.
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“Introducing a new way to move through posts,” the pop-up informing users of the change reads when users first access the newly updated app, alongside a message encouraging people to try it out. “Tap through posts, just like you tap through stories.”
The automatic update has affected users around the world who have reported that the new feature seems to be mimicking the huge success of Instagram’s stories feature, in which people tap through by going sideways. Now, to scroll through their feeds, users are required to tap through posts in the same way they do stories, though it has been greeted with a less than positive response.
“‘Let’s take something that works really well and make it frustratingly unusable.’ – people at Instagram probably,” one person wrote.
“did instagram JUST change scrolling on your feed from up and down to left and right?” another questioned. “I didn’t update anything and it just suddenly changed while I was refreshing my feed and it’s SO UGLY.”
“Hi, bring back the old Instagram please. No one asked for this,” one person voiced their complaints, adding the hashtags “#bringbacktheoldinstagram” and “#nonewIG2019.”
“This new Instagram update is dumb. Why get rid of the scrolling feature? It’s been like that since the beginning. Why would you do this. This reminds me of that awful Snapchat update that they had to change back to normal because it sucked so bad,” one person commented, referencing the controversial February Snapchat update that shuffled around the app’s features and completely changed the app’s design.
Others have reported that their feeds are now littered with ads, with one person claiming that they have seen “an advert every other post since the new #instagram update.”
Some were upset with the fact that Instagram opted to change the scrolling method rather than bring back chronological order, something that has been a sore spot among the app’s users ever since Instagram decided to feature what they deemed more interesting posts first in June of 2016.
Although a number of users reported that the update almost immediately reversed for them, if you are not among those lucky enough to still be scrolling up and down, Instagram.com is still safely a scroll-zone. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, also stated that those still affected by the update, which he claimed was supposed to be a “very small test that went broad by accident,” should be able to simply restart the app to get back to up and down scrolling.
