Instagram’s Daily Limit feature has been secretly changed to encourage users to spend more time on the app.
With the Daily Limit function, users can manage how much they spend on Instagram by setting a time limit for how long they may browse. As a recent TechCrunch storey points out, the lowest time restriction was formerly 10 minutes, but that’s now 30 minutes.
Instagram seems to have discreetly eliminated the option for mobile users to set a daily time restriction reminder lower than 30 minutes, a move that appears to correlate with Facebook/Meta reporting decreasing growth.
And that appears to be the problem. Slowing down the development of any platform, social or otherwise, is never a good thing. It is possible to restrict the amount of time individuals spend on Instagram, thereby limiting the likelihood that they will infect others with the same need to browse through endless photographs of lunch menus.
It’s not obvious whether the change was made by Instagram itself or by Meta’s top brass, but it would be fascinating to hear the rationale for such a decision.
Instagram is still the finest iPhone app for sharing images, and TikTok is still the best video-sharing app, but there is still space for both to survive in the market. Whatever Instagram does to ‘steal’ TikTok’s features and eat its lunch, it will never be able to do so.