The nightmare of influencers: Instagram tries to show only three stories per user

Instagram is thinking of hiding the stories of users who upload more than three images a day behind a button, an A/B test in Brazil has revealed.

Brazilian user Phil Ricell described on Twitter a new feature not yet available to all users that limits you to three images per story. If you want to see the rest of the story that a person has uploaded during the day, you have to press a small button that says “Show all”.
Stories are the most used method of uploading content to Instagram. Each user can add 100 images or videos per day to their story, which expires after 24 hours. If this new feature ends up rolling out to everyone, which isn’t certain to happen, then every time you open a user’s story you’ll only see three images before moving on to the next user…unless you hit the little “Show all” button.

This is a radical change in how Instagram stories work, with its advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages: with less time spent with each person, you could end up seeing content from more users than usual, and those users could be forced to better select their content to get your attention in just three opportunities.

Among the downsides: Instagram often shows ads when you go from one user’s story to the next, so this change could favor the appearance of ads or sponsored stories.

From the point of view of the influencers who live from their stories, the change could have a negative impact. Now they will have to convince you to press the “Show All” button so that you can continue to see their daily content. But again, this is an A/B test. It could come to nothing, like so many others.