Instagram update completely changes how users scroll through feed

I had it for all of five minutes and during those few minutes I found it very bizarre.

My first instinct was to scroll vertically, but doing so resulted in a behaviour akin to scroll-jacking on the web that is oft met with disdain. It first tried to get me to scroll horizontally (fine, on the first run, in order to teach me the new behaviour), but then it broke down the vertical scrolling into different subsections –photo, comments, more comments– that was highly unnatural.

Further, the horizontal scrolling didn't facilitate the fast-scrolling that I'm used to on the feed, which is helpful in finding a particular post, or when trying to quickly skip over posts I found uninteresting. Instead, it restricted scrolling to one-post-at-a-time.

I feel it was a big mistake to replace the smooth, natural vertical scrolling that comes for free on mobile devices.

Thread: https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1078321786586951680

"Sorry about that, this was supposed to be a very small test but we went broader than we anticipated."

Sounds like it was already rolled back. It seems like an interesting idea, but I'm not sure why they would push a change like this live. Possibly a mistake?

It is now very tedious to view multiple photos in a single post since it also requires horizontal swiping. I think the trick is to pause for a moment on the multi-photo post before continuing to swipe?

it looks interesting as concept, but I found it a little bit strange and slow to use. Edit: it was rolled back on my account