The popularity of a video published to Instagram would affect the actual quality of that video. Said Meta executive in charge of Instagram and Threads Adam Mosseri, "the videos that become most popular are shown better, and then there's the other direction-the low-quality videos get low grades.".

According to a video via The Verge, Mosseri said Instagram tries to show "the highest-quality video that we can," but he said, "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.".

That is not new information in the whole scheme of things. In fact, Meta had been writing about using various configurations of encoding for various videos based on their popularity way back last year. After, though, when someone posted a video from Mosseri on Threads, there are many users who found many questions and criticisms and described the approach of the company as "truly insane.".

These discussions made Mosseri respond more specifically. For example, he said that such decisions happen on an "aggregate level, not an individual level," meaning the decision of watching or skipping would not impact the video to be played in front of any individual viewer.

Like when I am creating really quality stuff and I go super, super, extra time into this, as if the CPU-intensive encoding might cost a little bit of extra storage to store files like three minutes of video content but actually more views drives quality to the creators as a sliding scale rather than this binary," Mosseri added.

Several users further commented that, in this model, the system that emerges tends to favor popular creators on smaller ones — popular creators get to post in the highest quality, reinforcing their popularity, while smaller creators can't break through.

Mosseri called it "the right concern," but he said, "In practice it doesn't seem to matter much, as the quality shift isn't huge and [whether] or not people interact with videos is way more based on the content of the video than the quality." Quality, he said, turns out "to be much more important to the original creator."