Meta’s latest features are straight out of 2017

Meta’s latest Instagram features let you repost your friends’ videos and track their real-time locations. Which is great — if you missed out on Snapchat in 2017 and TikTok in 2022. 

On Wednesday, Instagram introduced three features to make the platform feel more social and “help you connect”: a Friend Map that shows you where your friends are in real-time (if they opt in), reposts that let you share other people’s content to your feed, and a Friends tab in Reels that shows what the people you follow are watching and liking. All of which might sound useful — until you realize you’ve seen it all before.

The Friend Map is a near-match for Snap Map, which launched seven years ago. The repost function echoes TikTok’s reposting feature, introduced in 2022. And the Friends tab? That’s a cross between X’s “Following” feed and a long-gone Instagram activity tab that was axed in 2019. If Instagram’s innovation strategy feels more like a scavenger hunt through other people’s products, that’s because, well, it largely is.

This latest round of copy-paste updates isn’t a one-off. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has a long and storied track record of aggressively copying social products that already work. Instagram Stories mimicked Snapchat. Reels was an answer to TikTok. Threads came out of the gate looking like X (formerly Twitter), just in Instagram’s shiny clothes. Facebook Marketplace mirrored Craigslist and OfferUp. And even Instagram and WhatsApp — now centerpieces of Meta’s empire — weren’t built in-house. They were acquired.

There’s a reason this keeps happening. Meta isn’t in the business of starting trends. It’s in the business of scaling them.

What’s yours is... Meta’s

The internal logic at Meta seems simple: If a feature is gaining traction elsewhere, absorb it before your users leave for the competitor. Over the years, former employees have described a culture that prizes speed of execution over originality — with product decisions often driven by competitor check-ins rather than internal inspiration. “Copying is faster than innovating,” one former Facebook employee wrote on an internal email thread in 2012. That approach wasn’t a secret. It was a tactic.

That strategy has worked — stunningly well, in fact. Instagram Stories crushed Snapchat’s user growth. Reels has given TikTok a run for its ad revenue. Threads, despite a shaky 2023 launch, gained over 100 million signups in a matter of days by tapping directly into Instagram’s existing network. Meta doesn’t just copy; it copies with the full force of billions of users behind it.

But the cost of that strategy is starting to show. Instagram, in particular, is facing a kind of identity drift. It’s a social app that’s no longer very social. In recent regulatory filings at the FTC’s antitrust trial against the company, Meta disclosed that only about 7% of time spent on Instagram involves interacting with friends’ content — the rest is algorithmically recommended videos and influencer posts. That shift reflects more than just changing user habits; it’s a direct result of product decisions that prioritized scale and stickiness over intimacy. 

Now, while Meta has been busy chasing TikTok’s engagement model, Instagram has increasingly deprioritized the very relationships that once made it feel personal — replacing them with a steady scroll of viral clips, influencer promos, and algorithmic discovery. Users log on to be entertained, not to catch up. The irony is that while Meta keeps adding features to make Instagram more social, the core experience feels lonelier than ever. Now, tools such as the Friend Map or Reposts feel bolted on — vague gestures toward connection on a platform that has increasingly been optimized for performance, not presence.

The latest Instagram updates are an attempt to claw its original audience back. But instead of reimagining how people might connect, Meta is once again borrowing blueprints. And it’s doing so in a way that feels more reactive than revolutionary. Meta’s pattern has become clear: Monitor what’s working elsewhere, build a lookalike, and launch it faster, bigger, and louder. Instagram Stories took on Snapchat. Reels mimicked TikTok. Threads entered the ring as a Twitter rival. Facebook’s short-lived “Hobbi” app aimed for Pinterest’s crowd. 

But copying isn’t the only tool in Meta’s kit — acquisition is often plan B. And even acquisitions have followed a similar logic. If something can’t be copied quickly enough, Meta might buy it outright.

An internal document released during the House’s antitrust investigation into Facebook showed that the company briefly considered building a full-on WhatsApp competitor that would function more like China’s WeChat, noting how tightly integrated commerce and messaging had become in other markets. “The biggest potential threat to Facebook Blue and Messenger is someone building out a full ecosystem like WeChat,” the memo warned. The proposed fix? Build one ourselves. Instead, Facebook simply bought WhatsApp outright in 2014 for $19 billion, effectively eliminating the threat. Two years earlier, Meta purchased Instagram for $1 billion — a defensive move that now looks like one of the most powerful acquisitions in tech history.

Meta’s plan appears less about originality than optionality: clone it, crush it, or consume it. That approach has allowed Meta to consolidate vast swaths of the social web under its umbrella, often before regulators could catch up. But that buy-or-build reflex is now at the center of global antitrust scrutiny. In the U.S., the FTC’s continuing case against Meta argues that these kinds of acquisitions weren’t just strategic, they were anticompetitive. Regulators claim that the WhatsApp and Instagram deals were designed to neutralize threats before they could become meaningful challengers. In Europe, Meta has faced repeated fines and investigations tied to its market dominance and data consolidation. For critics, the company’s history points to a long game built on erasing rivals, not outthinking them.

But Meta’s moves have also reinforced a deeper shift — away from inventing what people want, and toward absorbing what they’re already using.

Zuckerberg’s moonshot moment

If there was one moment when Meta swung for the fences — trying to invent rather than imitate — it was the metaverse. CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the entire company around the idea of the metaverse in 2021 — hence: Meta — positioning immersive virtual reality as the next era of social connection. It was supposed to be Meta’s moonshot: a digital world where people would hang out, work, play, and live through avatars in virtual spaces. But that vision never caught on.

Reality Labs, the division building Meta’s metaverse hardware and software, has lost tens of billions of dollars since the pivot began — over $70 billion as of mid-2025. Despite years of investment, Horizon Worlds remains a ghost town. User numbers have repeatedly fallen short of internal goals. And Meta’s VR hardware — including the latest Quest headsets — has struggled to gain traction outside of niche gaming audiences. Even internally, employees have reportedly been reluctant to use the products for meetings or collaboration. Zuckerberg still believes in the Metaverse — but no one else does.

The goggles just never became cool. They never took over real life — dinner parties, meetings, or classrooms. And while Zuckerberg once claimed the metaverse would be the successor to the mobile internet, most of Meta’s users seem far more interested in the very platforms the company was trying to evolve away from: Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The company still insists it’s in the metaverse race for the long haul. But after years of losses and lukewarm adoption, even Wall Street seems to be losing patience. Meta’s most audacious social innovation yet now reads more like a detour — or a cautionary tale.

Right now, Meta is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, launching a standalone assistant app built on Llama 4, investing in cutting-edge compute, and building models that rival the front-runners in the generative AI arms race. Meta’s internal tools for content moderation and recommendation are some of the most advanced in the industry. And the company is experimenting with community-based fact-checking and proactive content detection powered by its own AI stack.

But much of this work still feels less like invention than catch-up. Chatbots, multimodal assistants, video editing tools — none of these are uniquely Meta innovations. They’re table stakes in a race already defined by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Meta is moving quickly and building smartly, but it’s still operating within a blueprint set by others — as happy as the company’s spending is making Wall Street. Meta may be out-engineering (and out-spending) the competition, but it’s not out-imagining them.

Internally, Meta has some of the sharpest AI researchers and product engineers in the world. They certainly spent enough money making sure that is the case. But none of that changes what Instagram looks like when you open the app. That dissonance — between innovation on the back end and imitation on the front — has become one of the company’s defining characteristics. Meta is increasingly a platform company: It builds the infrastructure, the data pipes, the recommendation engines, the LLMs. But the consumer-facing layer, the part people actually touch, has become a slightly delayed remix of something that someone else already made.

There’s a version of Meta that could invent the next big thing in social media. It has the talent. It has the reach. It has the data. But whether it has the imagination — or the appetite for risk — is far less clear. Until then, the strategy remains familiar: If they can copy it, they will. If they can’t, they’ll buy it. And if they build something genuinely original? You probably won’t see it in your feed.