In an AMA this weekend, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared some thoughts on why some videos on the platform appear to be of poor quality after being posted, and how it all boils down to performance. Asked about the “blurry” of the old stories at key moments, Mosseri said, “In general, we want to show the highest quality video that we can. But if something is not watched for a long time – because the vast majority of views are at the beginning – we will switch to a lower quality video.” If the video later becomes popular again, “then we will re-release the video at a higher quality,” he said. Topics user (listed by The Verge).
More on that in a later answer though Mosseri added, “We tend towards higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) for creators who get more views.” The comment raised concerns among smaller creators in the responses that they are competing with others with larger platforms, putting them at a disadvantage. Meta previously said it uses “different encoding configurations to process videos based on their popularity” as part of how it manages computing resources.
The performance system “operates at the aggregate level,” Mosseri said, “not at the level of the individual audience … [sic]rather a sliding scale.” In response to a user who questioned its fairness to smaller creators, Mosseri said the quality change “doesn’t matter much” in practice because it’s “not huge” and viewers care more about video content than quality. “Quality is more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks bad,” he said.Clearly, not everyone seems convinced.
