Instagram's Adam Mosseri says an algorithm-free feed would leave you "overwhelmed" with content from "companies, brands, and publishers." He was responding to Australia's proposed "My Feed, My Way" rule, which would require platforms to let users opt into a plain feed of the accounts they actually follow. His argument: take the algorithm away and friends disappear, brands flood in, people get bored, and the whole platform gets worse for everyone.
We build a platform with no algorithm at all. So it's worth checking his claim against something that actually exists.
He's not fighting a ban. He's fighting a toggle.
"My Feed, My Way" doesn't remove Instagram's algorithm. It asks Instagram to let people who want a plain, chronological feed of who they follow have one, optionally, while everyone else keeps the algorithm exactly as it is. If the algorithmic feed really is better for most people, it wins by default. Nobody has to switch.
That's the tell. You don't lobby against an opt-in toggle because you're worried people will pick the worse option. You lobby against it because you're worried a meaningful number of people would pick the other one, and that number matters to the metrics the algorithm is actually optimising -- watch time, session length, ad reach.
The algorithm made the problem it's now used to justify itself
Mosseri's reasoning is: friends post less than brands and influencers, so a chronological feed skews toward brand content, so people get bored. Maybe. But ask why friends post less in the first place. A decade of algorithmic ranking has rewarded polish, consistency, and professional output over a photo of your actual weekend -- because that's what keeps people scrolling, which is the entire point of the algorithm. The feed didn't drift toward brands and influencers by accident. It was optimised there.
Using the result of that optimisation as evidence against removing it is circular. It's a bit like flooding a room with smoke and then arguing you can't open the windows because everyone will be overwhelmed by how much smoke there is.
"The pie gets smaller" is a business sentence, not a user one
Read his actual quote again: engagement drops, "there's less reach to go around," and creators "get more and more mad about the fact that their reach is going down." That's a description of ad inventory and creator-economy metrics, not of anyone's experience watching the app. It's a completely reasonable thing for the person running Instagram's business to worry about. It's a different thing from "users will be worse off," and the quote quietly asks you to treat them as the same claim.
We're not a social feed, but we're the same bet made real
Long Play isn't chronological Instagram. It's a video platform, and the comparison only goes so far. But the underlying bet -- that people don't need an algorithm deciding what they see, that direct access to the creators you actually follow is enough -- is exactly the one Mosseri is arguing against, and it's the one Long Play is built on. No recommendation engine deciding what gets surfaced. No feed optimised to keep you there five minutes longer than you meant to stay. You find work through search, genre browsing, and the creators you actually follow, and you see what they made, in order, without anything deciding that's inefficient.
It hasn't produced a wall of brand content, because there's no algorithm here rewarding brands for posting more than the people you actually came for. That was never a property of chronological feeds. It was a property of what Instagram's algorithm spent a decade training everyone to do.