You might have noticed that Instagram has recently made a few cute changes to your feed.

Practically all your friends’ content is gone. There are roughly 100 times more ads. It’s stacked with reposted TikToks from meme accounts you don’t follow. And everything is played at full volume against your will.

This morning I scrolled past 64 shoddy videos and screenshotted tweets before seeing one photo from a friend. Each swipe felt like I was wading, deeper and deeper, into a sea of hot internet garbage. And, thanks to the app’s new “immersive” screen display, I very quickly felt my head slip underwater.

Before we go any further, I know how this sounds. Complaining about changes to a social media platform is boring. We’re all scared of change. Everyone hates the new until the second they kinda love it. But I really feel like this complaint is justified.

Other users have called this “one of the worst updates to an app [they] have ever seen” and argued Instagram has become “one of the most unbearable, unusable social media platforms to exist” (a huge call considering the competition includes Facebook, Twitter and Reddit).

This is partly because the changes – which the app has been testing with select users since May – are clunky. The scrolling function doesn’t work very well. The forced audio is annoying. It all feels like a D-grade knockoff of TikTok.

But a much bigger part of the frustration is that these changes represent a fundamental shift in what the app is, especially when compared to what it promised us.

Instagram was supposed to be a living photo album; a place where you could trade snapshots of your life and keep up to date with the people you love and the people you’ve been weirdly stalking since high school. But as the platform pushes more and more “recommended” posts into our feeds (usually high-profile accounts, viral video creators and internet-famous dogs) to boost engagement, it pushes out the people we actually know and care about.