What Even Is Instagram Now?

Long after shifting your feed away from friends and toward influencers, Instagram is adding new features intended to make the app more personal. The turnabout exposes the platform’s identity crisis.

In her classic novel Frankenstein, author Mary Shelley imagines a monster that's reanimated with its piecemeal body sewn together, tendon by tendon. “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials,” Shelley writes.

That’s exactly what scrolling through Instagram feels like right now—an ungodly morass of features stitched together. It’s an AI search tool! It’s a shopping app! It’s getting on my last nerve. Instagram is having a full-blown identity crisis, and I’m exhausted.

Mimicking features from other social media platforms and grafting them onto existing apps has long been the modus operandi for Meta, the owner of Instagram. Three years after Snapchat popularized the ...