During the Q&A session, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that the quality of videos uploaded to the platform depends on how popular they are. The fewer views a video gets, the worse its quality becomes.

Mosseri explains that the loss of quality is not critical, and if a video becomes popular again, its quality is improved.

“In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can. But if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video. If the video later spikes in popularity again, then we will re-render the higher quality video,” Mosseri said.

Later in the thread, answering the question of whether such a system has an impact on smaller creators, he wrote that video quality matters more to the creators themselves than to the viewers.

“The quality shift doesn’t seem to matter much in practice as it isn’t huge and viewers appear to care more about video content over quality. Quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks poor, than to their viewers,” explains the CEO of Instagram.

In 2023, Meta announced that in order to conserve computing resources for a smaller number of the most popular videos, it gives new videos the simplest encoding. When it gets enough views, the encoding changes to a more robust one. And when it becomes popular, Meta applies the most advanced coding to further improve the quality. This system works on both Instagram and Facebook.