Instagram Tweaks Feed Order To Show Users Preferred Content
Instagram is shuffling your feed, and you'll hopefully be seeing more of the content you're interested in as a result. According to the social network, users miss out on an average of 70-percent of the content in their feed, an issue that itself grows as Instagram's user base expands and the amount of content with it. To address that issue, Instagram will soon ditch the chronological feed order in favor of a specialized one.
Says the company, "Your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most." The content shuffle will be based upon things with high odds of catching your attention — photos and videos from people you're close with, content based on the "timeliness" of the post, and more. Nothing is disappearing — it's merely showing up in a different order.
The move has sparked concerns, as expected, but Instagram reassures users it will be listening to feedback and making adjustments as necessary. "We're going to take time to get this right," the company says. The reordered feeds will be rolling out "in the coming months," though no further details on that were provided. It is likely some users will be seeing the change before others, so keep an eye out.
It's a common issue social networks face — how to best organize the glut of incoming content so that users see the things they want to see. Do it wrong, and users will be forced to hunt for content, feeling frustrated and like they're missing out. Do it well, and the content that never makes it in front of a user's eyes will be things they don't care about anyway.
Facebook has long been tweaking its users' newsfeeds, often to their frustration, doing so for the same reason: someone who has hundreds of friends can't possibly keep up to date on hundreds of status updates everyday. More recently, Twitter made some changes to its own feeds, adding a while-you-were-away feature that surfaces tweets you'll hopefully find interesting and puts them at the top of the feed. Users are able to click out of the curated tweets if they're not interested.
SOURCE: Instagram