That behavior — which Instagram apparently called “rug pull” internally — wasn’t just some weird bug. Mosseri says the app did it “because we were trying to load new content, and it was taking a while, so we showed you something that was already downloaded in the meantime, and it is generally good for engagement.”

You open up Instagram on your smartphone and immediately see an intriguing video on your feed. Suddenly, before you can even dive into the clip, the feed refreshes, and the video is gone.It seems like something like that would be a glitch,