Many have complained about Instagram’s change from a chronological feed to an algorithm based feed
It’s been some time now since Instagram decided to ditch their chronological feed in favor of a more Facebook-esq algorithmic feed designed to show you what it thinks you want to see. As with any major change, the move was hit with a lot of criticism, much of which seemed to fall on deaf ears at Instagram. Despite a lot of outcry, the company continued to launch new feature after new feature, while mostly ignoring the complaints about the algorithm-based feed.
But that all changed today with the announcement from Instagram that they are making some new changes to the feed Whole they aren’t going back to a strictly chronological feed, they are moving, ever so slightly, back in that direction in their latest update.
According to the Instagram press release, the company has taken steps to introduce new features that will allow you to have more control over your feed and to ensure that the posts you are seeing are timely. So let’s get this clear: your feed is still based on the algorithm. That has not changed. But what Instagram has done, is weighted newer posts more so that they will show up in your feed before items that are older. This is great news!
That was always one of the more annoying aspects to the Instagram algorithm: you would be scrolling through your feed and stuff posted minutes ago was being shown sandwiched between items that were hours or even days old. It was impossible to know, unless you specifically looked, how old the post you were looking at was. So you may have commented consoling someone who posted about having a bad day, only to find out after you commented that the post was a day or more old. Needless to say, this new feature is a welcome one, at least from our perspective.
The other big addition they announced was the introduction of a ‘new posts’ button, which the company is introducing to allow you to refresh your feed with new posts when you want to, rather than whenever Instagram decided to refresh it for you. This will also be nice because it will allow you to get a shot of new content at the click of a button, rather than scrolling through the same posts over and over again because the algorithm had not refreshed your feed yet.
To learn more about these Instagram changes you can get all of the details over on the Instagram news blog.
