At last weekend’s AMA, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared some insight into why some videos on the platform appear to degrade in quality long after they’re posted, but it’s all about performance. It came down to . In response to a question about older stories appearing “blurred” in the highlights, Mosseri said: “In general, we want to show the highest quality video possible. But if something doesn’t get watched for a long time, the majority of views are in the beginning, so lower quality videos If the video then spikes in popularity again, “then we will re-render the video at a higher quality,” he said in his response, and the video will be re-rendered to Threads. Reposted by user (discovered by The Verge).
However, in a later reply, Mosseri elaborated further, saying that “higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) for creators who get more views. It’s biased,” he added. The comment sparked concern in replies from smaller creators, who said it would put them at a competitive disadvantage against other creators with larger platforms. Meta previously said it uses “different encoding configurations to process videos depending on their popularity” as part of how it manages its computing resources.
Mosseri said the performance system “works on a collective level,” and “not on an individual viewer level…It’s not a binary threshold (sic), but rather a sliding scale.” said. In response to one user who questioned fairness to small creators, Mosseri said the change in quality was “not massive” and that viewers seem to value video content more than quality. Therefore, it actually “doesn’t seem to be very important,” he said. “Quality seems to be much more important to the original creator than to the viewer; poor quality videos are more likely to be removed,” he says. Unsurprisingly, not everyone seems to be convinced.
