In a video (via The Verge), Mosseri said Instagram tries to show “the highest-quality video that we can,” but he said, “if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video.”
This isn’t totally new information; Meta wrote last year about using different encoding configurations for different videos depending on their popularity. But after someone shared Mosseri’s video on Threads, many users had questions and criticisms, with one going as far to describe the company’s approach as “truly insane.”