See the Moments You Care About First

instagram:

You may be surprised to learn that people miss on average 70 percent of their feeds. 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.

To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.

The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. As we begin, we’re focusing on optimizing the order — all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.

If your favorite musician shares a video from last night’s concert, it will be waiting for you when you wake up, no matter how many accounts you follow or what time zone you live in. And when your best friend posts a photo of her new puppy, you won’t miss it.

We’re going to take time to get this right and listen to your feedback along the way. You’ll see this new experience in the coming months.

Instagram’s solution to its volume “problem” is to replace the current, purely reverse-chronological ordering of posts with a feed algoritmically reordered to give precedene to moments “believe you will care about the most.”

My initial reaction is this fundamentally changes what Instagram is. I like the time-based element of “chance” in what I actually end up seeing in my feed—of creators I’ve already decided are interesting enough to follow.

If I want content Instagram algorithmically thinks I’ll be interested in, I already have the “Explore Posts” option that comes up with “Search”. (Surely they could just add a filter to that that could limit posts explored to just those from the accounts I follow?)