Instagram has said that it lowers the quality of older, less popular videos. In an interview with The Verge, Adam Mosseri, head of the platform and Threads said that they tend to have “ a bias to higher quality for creators who drive more views.”

He added that because videos are usually most watched right after they are posted, they go ahead and reduce the quality if they haven’t been watched for a while. But if the video gains popularity later, the quality is then re-rendered and improved. 

Last year, Meta had admitted in a blog to having separate encoding configurations for different videos based on how popular they were. 

But creators overall expressed concern over Mosseri’s comment and the lack of control they had over their own content. Some criticised the move saying photographers and creatives with smaller followings would be impacted and a certain type of creators would always be prioritised. 

Mosseri responded to the backlash saying while it was “the right concern,” the quality shift wasn’t “huge and whether people interact with videos is based more on the content rather than the quality.” 

He also noted that the decisions were made on an aggregate level not individually so the engagement of a single video will not adversely impact quality.