When Instagram launched its now iconic “live” feature almost a decade ago, the concept was simple: Rather than share a “permanent” post or a story that would disappear in 24 hours, you could share an ephemeral moment to your followers in the moment and at any time. That’s mostly how the feature has worked in the years since—at least, that is, until today.
There’s now a follower threshold before you can go live
As reported by TechCrunch , Instagram now requires you to have 1,000 followers or more before you can go live on the app. In addition, your account needs to be public, which means private accounts can no longer go live, even if they do meet the 1,000 follower minimum.
You don’t need to read my article to figure out whether you’re affected. If you try to go live with a private account, or one with fewer than 1,000 followers, Instagram will block you, and show the following pop-up alert :
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
I’m not sure why Instagram still offers the option to ineligible users at all. Maybe it figures users will be more confused or upset about losing the Live option altogether, and keeping the tab there offers a way to get the word out to anyone who might be interested in going live without the proper prerequisites.
It’s not like this change is without precedent: As TechCrunch notes, TikTok also requires you to have at least 1,000 followers before going live. YouTube, too, has restrictions, requiring at least 50 subscribers before using its live function. So it’s not like suddenly Instagram is the only platform that won’t let all its users go live at any time.
Losing features is never great
To me, though, the issue isn’t how Instagram compares to other platforms; it’s that the company is taking a longstanding feature away from users without providing a good reason. Maybe it saves the company money, or maybe it cuts down on the number of live streams at any given moment. But it’s always going to be a hard sell when you’re trying to justify walling off a feature all users previously had access to—in this case, a feature that has been around for nearly 10 years.
While it will affect fewer users, it’s functionally no different than if Instagram decided to stop letting you post a story unless you had reached a certain follower count, or locked the ability to add music to your posts unless you average a certain number of likes. It’s easy to put restrictions on features when they launch, but another thing entirely to do so when those features were core to the platform for so many years.
The new rules certainly make me ineligible to go live—though I wouldn’t have wanted to in the first place.
