Instagram briefly turned on horizontal scrolling, and people lost their goddamn minds
It’s one of those fun little usability glitches in the grab-bag of buggy software that is the human brain that people crave novelty, but hate change. Case in point: The general shit-losing that happened this morning, when Instagram screwed up and pushed an update to its scrolling system to “a few orders of magnitude more people” than it initially intended, ruining its platform forever, at least for a couple of minutes.
Specifically, the Facebook-owned social media firm was trying out horizontal scrolling on its mobile app, forcing users to either tap their finger or swipe it (instead of scrolling) in order to see new stories, because apparently we’re all just lawless barbarians now, huh? The app’s users—having diligently trained their index fingers to make one minuscule motion, and not another—were not having it, of course, and the backlash to the changes (which, to be fair, also seemed weirdly ignorant of the fact that phones are taller than they are wide, which makes vertical scrolling a much easier way to parse information) was quick, and lash-y.
Again, though, Instagram is very sorry that it ever even considered making you possibly think about altering your digital routine. (That’s a finger pun, by the way.) At least one company rep blamed the changes on a bug, which is wild, since the new version had a tutorial screen, suggesting the existence of advanced but extremely conscientious software glitches. The change has now been rolled back, though, with company head Adam Mosseri noting that the organization is “Always trying new ideas, usually with a much smaller number of people.”
Hey, at least they didn’t try changing their logo again, right?