Instagram's Reels Tab: Cannibalising Yourself on Purpose
Putting Reels in the center of the nav bar was Instagram choosing to compete with its own feed before TikTok finished the job.
What I noticed
Instagram moved Reels to a dedicated slot in the bottom navigation bar, dead center, the most valuable pixel in the app. The feed, the original product, got pushed aside. Every time you open Instagram, the structure of the app nudges you toward short video over the photo grid that built it.
Why it works
TikTok proved that short, algorithmic video held attention better than a chronological friends feed. Instagram had two options. Defend the feed and slowly lose time-spent to TikTok, or attack its own feed with a competing format and keep that attention inside the app. They chose to compete with themselves.
Nav placement is the loudest signal a product can send. By giving Reels center stage, Instagram was not just adding a feature. It was telling its own growth machine, the recommendation system and the creators, where to push. Creators follow distribution. Put a format in the center of the nav and the supply side reorganises around it within months. The placement was a forcing function, not a convenience.
The tradeoff
The core feed users, the people who came for friends and photos, got a worse product. The app they loved now optimises for strangers’ videos. Instagram bet that winning the attention war mattered more than honouring the original use case, and a lot of long-time users felt the betrayal.
What I’d steal
If a competitor has found a better format, cannibalise yourself before they do it for you. Defending the old product to the death just hands the transition to someone else. The hardest growth decisions are the ones where you choose to hurt the thing that made you, on your own terms.
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