Instagram to ditch chronological feeds for algorithms

In September 2015, Instagram reached 400 million users with more than 80-million photos shared on the photo and video sharing platform in a day. And it got there with users seeing posts in chronological order, the latest posts showing and the old ones being moved to the bottom of the feed. This, according to Instagram, does not work, as its users miss about 70% of what is on their feed.

To solve this problem, Instagram is introducing an algorithm arranged feed. This is the similar to Facebook’s News Feed and Twitter’s recently introduced algorithms to its timeline, where users see what they are most likely interested in and not recent posts.

“As Instagram has grown, it’s become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share. This means you often don’t see the posts you might care about the most,” the video and image sharing platform wrote on its blog.

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The move to use algorithm is an attempt to improve user experience. Soon, users will see their feed being arranged according to what Instagram thinks they care about the most and not recent posts. The algorithm will pull data about a user to determine what they want to see. This data includes the relationship with the person posting the image or video and timelines of the posts.

Instagram stresses however that all the posts are still going to be there but just in a different order. And the order will not be chronological, but based on whether Instagram thinks a user will be interested in a post.

The advantages, Instagram points out, is that with the new rearranged feed users are more likely to see a post that was posted in the middle of the night by someone they care about as it could appear at the top of their feed even if it is a few hours old.

That sounds great but might also neglect some friends’ posts that you really want to see, thanks to the non-chronological order. It might work for or against brands too, as their posts could be affected in the same way.