Response to Joseph Ye's Lecture 4 Blog (IGTV Design) ​

After reading Joseph's blog, I was struck by a few thoughts. I don't think the issue with IGTV being separate was so much an app design flaw as a business strategy flaw. By placing it in a separate app, Instagram was essentially stating that IGTV was a separate product by Instagram, rather than being a part of Instagram. Not all users of one app by a company will adopt a new one, so keeping it all on the same app made IGTV more likely to gain users and popularity since current users of Instagram would see it while browsing the app and could use it with no additional setup cost.

But according to recent news, IGTV no longer exists and has now been further integrated into Instagram by allowing videos posted directly onto the Instagram main feed to run up to 60 minutes. There's now a separate Video tab that's visible on a user's profile, where the long videos can be seen. They got rid of it because adding the IGTV button to the main app didn't help increase usage all that much. According to an article by The Verge, Instagram decided to remove the button because "very few are clicking into the IGTV icon in the top right corner of the home screen in the Instagram app." The button in the top corner was not very visible, and it conceptually seemed like a separate service still, which somewhat went against Instagram's intention by adding it in the first place. I do agree that merging IGTV with the main app was a good idea, but I don't think they initially went far enough.

However, they now have "Reels," which is for short-form video content to rival TikTok. Most social media companies have some form of this now, like YouTube Shorts or the Watch feature on Reddit. As a separate tab on the lower bar, Reels does seem somewhat separate from the main Instagram content, but it's more integrated than IGTV was. Plently of social media apps have multiple content tabs, like Twitter has "Communities" and Tumblr has "Tumblr Live," which provide different functionality but appear alongside the search and notification tabs, thus appearing more like another feature of the app rather than a separate service.

I suppose what I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong design-wise with IGTV being a separate product, it just meant that Instagram was less able to bank off its current userbase to drive traffic. But along the lines of what Peilin mentioned, there are also reasons why we have separate apps, rather than one mega-app (albeit cultural ones). And as someone who doesn't use any of the side features in the current social media apps and finds them somewhat obnoxious, I'd rather keep things separate.