“Creators who drive more views” are the ones who receive the highest quality rewards.
During an Ask Me Anything session that took place over the weekend, Instagram’s head of product, Adam Mosseri, provided some insight into the reasons why certain videos on the site appear to have a lower quality long after they have been posted. He explained that the issue is primarily related to performance. “In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can,” Mosseri stated in response to a concern regarding the appearance of previous stories in highlights as being “blurry.” In the event that anything is not viewed for an extended period of time, we will switch to a video of lower quality. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of views occur at the beginning of the film. He stated in the message that “then we will re-render the higher quality video” in the event that the video experiences another surge in popularity in the future. This statement was shared by a user of Threads, which was discovered by The Verge.
Nevertheless, Mosseri went on to elaborate further in a subsequent response, saying, “We bias toward higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views.” The comment has caused tiny authors to express their displeasure in the comments section, stating that it places them at a disadvantage when competing with others who have larger platforms. When it comes to the management of its computing resources, Meta has stated in the past that it employs “different encoding configurations to process videos based on their popularity.”
According to Mosseri, the performance system “operates at an aggregate level,” without referring to the level of the individual viewer. What we have here is not a threshold that is binary, but rather a scale that is sliding. Mosseri stated that the quality change “doesn’t seem to matter much” in practice because it “isn’t huge” and users appear to care more about video content than quality. This was in response to a user who questioned whether or not it was fair for smaller makers. The original creator, who is more likely to remove the video if it appears to be of low quality, appears to place a far higher priority on quality than the viewers of the video, according to what he commented. It is not surprising that not everyone appears to be convinced.