Instagram eliminates annoying “rug pull” disappearing video

You open Instagram on your smartphone and immediately see a fascinating video in your feed. Suddenly, before you can even dive into the clip, the feed refreshes and the video is gone.

It seems like something like that would be a mistake, right?

Well, apparently Instagram did this on purpose. But it really annoyed users, so now they did it stopped It.

Instagram rejects the “rug pull”.

In one video In his Instagram Stories, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri was asked to share a recent change to Instagram that “people might not know about.”

Mosseri shared that Instagram has removed what was known internally within the company as a “rug pull.” Mosseri defined the rug pull as when users open the Instagram app and see content, but it immediately disappears and moves down the feed as new content is added.

Amazingly, Mosseri said this practice was done intentionally in Meta’s own app. According to Mosseri, Instagram decided to display this content because it was already loaded in the app and gave users something to watch as the app was downloading new content from the last time the user opened Instagram on their device.

“It was generally good for engagement,” Mosseri said, before admitting it was “really annoying.”

Because it was annoying, Instagram decided to get rid of it.

It should be noted that Instagram is far from the only app to do this. I personally have complained that Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, displays content in the For You feed that immediately disappears shortly after the app is opened on a user’s smartphone. At first I assumed it was a bug, similar to Instagram. However, now it seems that some social media companies have no problem giving their users a worse experience if it means they hit their engagement metrics.

We hope this practice stops across all social media platforms.