Instagram boss Adam Mosseri reveals that fewer views means lower quality of your posts

When it comes to Instagram Reels or videos, many users and the tech community often find that the quality of the videos varies, especially when it comes to some of the old videos. Although this question has been asked many times, the head of the social media platform, Adam Mosseri, recently shed light on the difference in video quality and the reasons behind it. It seems like if your video doesn't get many views, the quality of your video will drop.

Adam Mosseri confirms that Instagram actually reduces the video quality of some posts and that users are under no illusions

Have you ever scrolled through Instagram and noticed that the quality of some videos was not up to par and perhaps passed it off as a mistake by the content creator? Speaking to AMA, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri provided more details about this quality discrepancy and admitted that Instagram adjusts the quality of videos according to its performance.

In response to one of the questions about blurred highlights, especially on older stories, Mosseri clarified that while they strive for the highest quality of videos since most views come on the first post, they later moved the videos to a lower quality become. For example, if the video gains popularity again, Instagram will move it back to higher quality videos, as Engadget points out.

Explaining this in detail, Mosseri mentioned the tendency towards videos that generate more views:

For creators who get more views, we prefer higher quality (more computationally intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files).

However, this comment did not go down well with micro-content creators or small creators who believe it puts them at a disadvantage, especially compared to those with larger platforms. Meta has noted that as part of its resource management strategy, it uses different encoding configurations to process videos depending on their popularity. This approach aims to optimize computing resources by matching quality to viewership, which helps maintain efficient performance of the platform.

Responding to small content creators' dismay at the disadvantage, Mosseri further explained:

Quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks bad, than to its viewers.

So for viewers, this change doesn't have much of an impact as the focus is on content rather than quality, but some of the creators still felt they were in a disadvantageous position. Regardless of whether this optimization that Instagram is making to its videos changes the way viewers see the content, it is still a revelation that the best quality is attributed to the videos that generate more views.