Facebook decided to mess with the only well-received app it has and changed the Instagram scroll from vertical to horizontal.
It happened rather quickly, but after MASSIVE outcry the company reverted the changes within the hour.
According to IG, the new ‘feature’ was suppose to be just a test for some users but got pushed to almost everyone.
bruuuuuh, i’ve had the atrocity that is @instagram sideways scroll for no more than 10 minutes and in those few mins i haven’t been able to use the app for more than 10 seconds without getting pissed off. please tell me there’s a way to turn this off.
— bobbito francisco (@robertontenient) December 27, 2018
via Variety:
Adam Mosseri, whom Facebook recently installed as head of Instagram with the departure of the photo-and-video-sharing app’s founders, responded Thursday morning to users on Twitter, explaining that the horizontal-scrolling feature was “supposed to be a very small test that went broad by accident. Should be fixed now. If you’re still seeing it simply restart the app. Happy holidays! ?.”
The test “went to a few orders of magnitude more people than intended… sorry about that,” Mosseri posted on Twitter. He also tweeted, “Sorry for the confusion! Always trying new ideas, usually with a much smaller number of people…”
An Instagram rep blamed a “bug” for the wider-than-planned deployment of the feature test. “Due to a bug, some users saw a change to the way their feed appears today. We quickly fixed the issue and feed is back to normal,” the rep said.
Many users who received the Instagram app with the new scrolling feature immediately decried it as a step backward compared with the vertical-feed orientation — making it harder to see updates and slowing down the ability to navigate through posts.
We glad they listened — that update was TRULY terrible.
