For those who love Instagram, a change has arrived. Just as you thought your summer sunset and breezy beach pictures would be added to the normal feed, moving back farther with the time, an algorithm has come to mix things up. No longer will the pictures of your delicious beet salad or your Wine Wednesday pictures be part of a chronological order, but they will now be ordered in a similar way to your Facebook news feed, where time often has little bearing. If you haven’t seen this format yet, you will within the next few weeks, according to an Instagram spokeswoman, who helped us figure out five things to we need to know about the new feed.
1Can I get rid of it? When Instagram first announced it would be changing over to an algorithm, people weren’t too happy. A Change.org petition quickly got over 300,000 signatures, and countless users were warning their followers to turn on notifications for their posts so that they would still be visible. Now that the change is upon users, it seems that there’s nothing to do but accept it. Once you have it, you have it. This isn’t just a test, this is the future of Instagram.
2Why change? According to Instagram, people miss about 70 percent of their feed. The platform has grown so much since it started that apparently there’s just too much content to get all of it, even with the chronological ordering. This new system is supposed to help you find more posts that you may end up missing.
3How does it work? Like Facebook’s news feed, a number of factors will be taken into account to determine what posts are the “moments you care about.’’ Even though chronological order has been nixed, how recently a post was shared is a factor that will help move it to the top. Along with that, the frequency that you interact with a person will affect where in your feed their posts show up, as will the number of mutual relationships you have with that person and if the post itself falls into categories that you find interesting.
4Pros and cons Instagram isn’t revealing the details of its algorithm, but posts still promise to be somewhat timely. Your best friend whose posts you like the most will likely get bumped to the top, but your nephew’s art project that your not-so-Internet savvy sister-in-law ’grammed won’t be up there unless she’s also a hit among your network. Users have gotten accustomed to Facebook’s random arrangements, so maybe this will become the new normal here.
5Is it working? Despite the irate reaction from Instagramers far and wide, the spokewoman said that the new algorithm is working. “Over the past few months, we brought this new way of ordering posts to a portion of the community, and we found that people are liking photos more, commenting more, and generally engaging with the community in a more active way.’’ Now it’s just the waiting game until every user has this feed.
john paul Stapleton
