Whether it’s a spiel about the benefits of rubbing beef tallow on your face, specific ab exercises and tips targeting belly fat, or a Gen X dancer wishing you joy through their body movements, Instagram Reels are as varied as they are numerous. But they do share one thing in common: Viewers often think, “What have I done to deserve this?”
It’s not just that people hate Reels — the shortform video posts found on Instagram — it’s that some people hate Reels to the point where they use it to describe other things that they hate. From music, to food, to sentimental “boy mom” content, being deemed “perfect for Reels” is a sign of being off or unwelcome; basic but also subtly repulsive. Instagram Reels has simultaneously become an adjective and an insult — a corny type of thing no one really wants to watch, and a convenient negative shorthand to express a specific stripe of dislike.
So why do people hate Reels so much?
Before finding use as a derogatory descriptor, the content on Reels has long been characterized as bad — dating back to its launch in 2020 as a TikTok rival. Users I spoke to say that, unlike that other social media video app — which seems to know so much about us that it’s led to concerns about information privacy — Instagram’s algorithm is comically disastrous. This is doubly hilarious when you take into account how much data Meta has on all of us.
If Reels was a true TikTok competitor, using years and years of collected Instagram and Facebook data to create a truly uncanny feed, it would be frightening. Thankfully no one, including Meta, Instagram’s parent company, seems concerned about it being good.
It’s not just you — everyone’s Reels is full of raw milk, belly fat warnings, and “devil yoga”
Like most social media users, many of us are simply lurkers. For the hundreds of millions who use Instagram, most will never make a Reel. In 2022, the Wall Street Journal obtained leaked data from Meta that indicated that only one-fifth of Instagram users actually make and post shortform video to the site. While Reels has managed to stick around since then (and not leak any further creator data), the majority of users I spoke to still say they only watch them — sometimes by accident. And most of the Reels they consume, they don’t particularly like.
Talking to users about what stuck out in their feed, the answers ranged from banal to bizarre; a barrage of things no one asked for. I heard about everything from videos featuring mediocre crowd work by random stand-up comedians to infertility guidance, from rants about how yoga was designed by Satan to purposely disgusting food influencers, to a woman giving tips about how to curb one’s “lust urges” with air squats.
This social media funhouse mirror prompts several questions, such as, “What about me says I would enjoy smearing beef tallow on my skin and drinking raw, unpasteurized milk?” and “Do I seem like a person seeking confirmation that yoga is a demonic practice?”
Adam Moussa, a social media editor, explains that Reels pumping out weird-to-hostile videos isn’t a singular experience. Moussa primarily works in food journalism, which means he not only has to cut video for platforms like Reels, but also needs to study what else is on there and what’s getting views. He’s found that it’s aggressively uninspiring for everyone. He compares watching videos on the app to panning for gold and coming away with mounds of gravel.
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“The algorithm feels so scattershot, so aggressively bad at doing anything that could be considered curation,” Moussa tells Vox.
“I see constant repetition of lengthy engagement farming slop, videos that open with a shot of a kitchen sink or a doorknob and the text ‘IT TOOK ME 45 YEARS TO LEARN THIS.’ As you watch, it’s just a series of random things being strung together, making you believe you’re leading up to a payoff that never comes,” Moussa added.
Reels appears to reward this kind of social media edging. From what Moussa and other users can tell, the platform seems to prioritize videos with lots of views over videos that a lot of people have enjoyed. While those two are not mutually exclusive and can overlap, prioritizing videos that keep you watching over videos users have actively double-tapped to “like” seems like one of the reasons Reels gets so much backlash.
If there were some kind of payoff — humor, satisfaction, shock, etc. — perhaps the yoga-is-a-demon-dance or guy-imagines-gender-swap-Super-Bowl Reels would feel a little less like mind mud. At the very least, they would serve some kind of purpose and be worth sharing, even if it was in a “oh wow this video is very bad lol” kind of way. But the sheer lack of impact is what feels so frustrating.
Vox reached out to Meta for comment about Reels’s algorithm and did not receive a response.
Is Reels for old people, otherwise known as millennials?
It’s also worth noting that the generational split on platforms might be dictating at least part of the vocal dissatisfaction.
Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist who covers internet culture and parenthood, explained to me that because millennials, especially millennial women, dominated Instagram in its early stages, it makes sense that the algorithm and content on the social media platform they pioneered would reflect their interests, especially as they age. She notes, however, that there’s a preponderance of a particular type of content.
“Instagram was a place that [millennial] mom influencers monetized very well from the beginning. They were some of the first people to really start to make a lot of money — a lot of them were in that sort of wellness space, but also straightforward mom advice, or just like being a hot person who happens to be a mom,” Grose tells me, explaining that Instagram became the natural progression for motherhood influencers who got their start blogging. Those influencers got only more popular as their peers became parents themselves. A wildly informal survey of millennial users showed they found themselves inundated with parenting content, whether they have kids or not.
That said, whether it’s motherhood, relationship advice, fitness tips, or cooking videos, the inherent problem with millennials making millennial content — no matter how “good” it is — is that, like the many generations before them, millennials have inevitably become corny.
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“Reels can kind of feel like being on social media with your parents,” Beverly Hart, a creator and influencer, tells Vox. Hart is a younger millennial, 31, on the cusp of Gen Z. To her, Reels is kind of like visiting a social media retirement home. The content, the way it’s all presented, the interface — it all feels a bit dated, watching older people talk and makes jokes to other older people. Hart prefers TikTok.
“The millennial cringe is hard to watch,” she tells me.
What came first: the content or the algorithm?
At the heart of the Reels frustration is a chicken-or-egg scenario. Which came first: the algorithm or the content? For Reels’s slop algorithm to work, it needs slop to push out, so are creators just making more and more slop to feed the beast? Or was there just an enormous amount of slop in the first place, and the algorithm adapted accordingly?
For Sharon Kim, a lifestyle content creator, Reels has incentivized a specific kind of video she makes.
“I, and a lot of women I know, will spend time making wholesome, uplifting, or inspiring fitness or lifestyle stuff but the algorithm won’t even push it out to .08 of my followers,” says Kim, who has 10,400 followers on Instagram. “But if I post myself in a bikini or if I post myself in makeup, all of a sudden Instagram will push your content immediately to like everyone.”
Kim, like other creators I spoke to, prefers TikTok, where a clip of her father stubbornly eating excessively hot peppers at the Peking Gourmet Inn in Falls Church, Virginia, has been played over 766,000 times.
The number of views Kim’s dad — with beads of sweat crawling down his face — can get versus Instagram’s assessment of the superior worth of Kim posting herself in a bikini highlights what she says is the gulf between TikTok and Reels. Even though they’re both curated parts of her life, the former allows her to show other facets of her personality, while the latter feels like she’s boxed in. TikTok, she says, is also better built for videos to go viral.
“Instagram [and Reels] is for friends who know you on the internet who may or may not be supporting you, and TikTok is strangers on the internet who don’t know you, supporting you,” Kim says.
Some say that on Reels, however, you might encounter strangers who don’t support you.
“The comments section can be judgey,” Hart, who makes content for both Reels and TikTok, says of the Meta site. Her videos tend to focus on fashion and beauty, and also combine the two with her experience in politics as a former Hill staffer. But she doesn’t post about politics on Instagram because it’s too divisive, even though those clips often go viral on TikTok. She fears how out of hand the Instagram comments can be: “I’ve — thank god because I’m weak — only had a few bad comments.” The negativity about Reels might reflect the negativity on Reels.
Pointless videos, relying on the tastes of a generation losing its cool factor, featuring predetermined, dull content from uninspired creators, with nasty comment sections. It’s no wonder that Reels has become a pejorative.
Perhaps the most frustratingly hilarious thing, watching Reels flop around in its badness, is that it all comes back to something much more basic than any diagnosis: Meta could fix Reels if it really wanted to.
“What’s most galling about all this is that platforms can disincentivize the shit. They can throttle it or ban it entirely,” Moussa, the social media producer, tells me. “But they don’t. Meta doesn’t give a fuck about incentivizing quality content on the platform, otherwise they wouldn’t allow a system that enables creators and brands making things actually worth watching to be so gunked up.”
But if Meta did, we’d unfortunately have to find a new way to talk about Reels.
