At an AMA this weekend, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared some insight into why some videos on the platform seem to degrade in quality even after they’re published, and whether it all comes down to performance. “In general, we want to show the highest quality video possible,” Mosseri said when asked about older stories appearing ‘blurry’ in highlights. However, since most of the views come at the beginning, if they are not watching for a long time, they will switch to a lower quality video.” In the future, if the video’s popularity soars again, “we will re-render the video in higher quality,” he said in his reply. thread user (found The Verge).
But to elaborate further in the follow-up answer: Mosseri “We prefer higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) for creators, which drives more views.” The comment raised concerns from smaller creators, who responded that they were being put at a disadvantage in competing with other creators with larger platforms. meta It previously said it uses “various encoding configurations to process videos based on their popularity” as part of how it manages computing resources.
“The performance system works at the aggregate level, not at the individual viewer level… it’s not a binary criterion,” Mosseri said. [sic]Rather, it is a sliding scale.” In response to one user who questioned fairness for smaller creators, Mosseri said that the quality change is “not that big” and that it actually “doesn’t seem to matter much” because viewers seem to care more about video content than quality. “Quality seems to be much more important to original creators, who are more likely to remove a video if it’s not good, than to viewers,” he said. Naturally, not everyone seems convinced.
