I became most aware of the changes Instagram had made to their feed shortly after the Superbowl. I remember scrolling through my feed and suddenly wondering why some influencers were posting recipes for Superbowl snacks after the event was already over. I quickly realized these were posts from 4 or 5 days earlier...and they were the 3rd post showing up on feed. "Why would they show me content that is no longer relevant?," I thought, "And what new stuff am I missing out on because it's being replaced by stale posts?"
It wasn't long before this became a fixation of mine. Every single time I opened the app I became more distracted by seeing how old the posts were rather that the content of the posts themselves.
I was elated to see that Instagram announced this week that they are moving back in the direction of reverse chronological feeds. That's not to say that they're returning to their old ways altogether, but they're at least doing more to bring more recent posts to the top of the feed. I understand that in their ad-supported world they need to be able to control the algorithms to make sure people are seeing the right ads, in the right quantity. Hopefully by bringing more current posts to the top, users will be more likely to spend more time scrolling rather than getting frustrated and quitting the app altogether.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/22/instagram-recent/
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