Instagram revealed today how it organizes users’ feeds, including how it considers different factors in its algorithm. Up until now, Instagram’s feed was sort of a mystery science. Posts from family members and close friends show up near the top, which was the goal of the company’s decision to move away from the reverse-chronological feed in 2016, but the way the app filled in the blanks between those close friends was slightly mysterious.
Instagram product lead Julian Gutman explained to TechCrunch and other outlets, including The Verge, today that it ranks three main factors when creating users’ feeds: interest, recency, and relationship. Interest is how much Instagram thinks you’ll care about a post, with the most important obviously coming to the top. Recency just means Instagram prioritizes newer posts, and your relationship to the poster is of course also considered.
The more you’ve interacted with someone on the platform, the more likely you are to see their content up front. Instagram also takes three other factors into account: frequency, following, and usage. Frequency is how often you actually open the app, as it wants to show you the best posts since you last opened. Following means that if you follow lots of people, Instagram might show you less from one specific person so you can see more from all the people you follow. Usage is how long you spend on Instagram, so the app determines when to show you the best posts and whether you’ll see less important posts.
Instagram also cleared up some misconceptions today. It’s not considering an option for the reverse-chronological feed, so you’re stuck with what the app’s doing now. It also doesn’t hide any posts in the feed, and if you keep scrolling, you should see everything posted by everyone you follow. Instagram also says it doesn’t down-rank users for posting too frequently or for including too many hashtags.
A lot of this is somewhat obvious: Instagram shows you posts from the people you care about first. That’s what an efficient algorithm is supposed to do. But the fact that Instagram had to address these additional myths shows how much people worry about their posts actually showing up in feeds. Some users might not care about their engagement, but for the growing number of people whose livelihoods and businesses rely on the platform for brand awareness, it’s crucial.
Comments
But why?! I follow the people I already care about. No need for relationship and interest. I just want recency with chronological order. Is that hard for companies to comprehend? I swear there’ll come a company around that has the chronological feed as cornerstone and I’ll gladly move over.
By bhargavbuddy on 06.01.18 3:28pm
because it works… I guarantee you their data shows that their algorithms increase use & engagement where as a pure chrono doesn’t.
By aarontsuru on 06.01.18 3:40pm
I know I’m only one person, but since the change I actually scroll through the feed less. It serves zero purpose for me, as I have no desire to see a post from 1 hour ago, followed by a 4 day old post, followed by a 2 hour old post, above a 30 minute old post. It never makes any sense to just about anyone. They also claim it’s based on family, while only guessing who family might be… That’s not weird or anything.
By Tdhawk88 on 06.01.18 3:45pm
If they are "new" to you, does it really matter if it is 30 minutes old or a day old? That is a real question. I personally would rather it be the way it is than see the same things over and over because I opened the app twice within the last hour.
By mattopotamus on 06.01.18 3:49pm
However, I keep seeing the same damn 3 day old posts and none of the new ones.
By sciguyhifive on 06.01.18 4:01pm
Yes. Yes it does matter. Imagine you’re at a party and you’ve been talking to a group of people for an hour. The first topic of conversation is about puppies. That conversation lasts ten minutes. Then you move on to world peace, the environment, how terrible The Last Jedi was… Someone that overheard the first conversation, but missed the rest, comes in at the hour mark and blurts out, "Oh, yeah! Puppies are hiLARIOUS!!!" Everyone just sort of stares at the guy, then moves on.
That’s kind of what happens when you have a mixed feed like that. I don’t want to be commenting on a stale conversation because software decided that it wasn’t important until it was stale to my group.
By Sam Dunham on 06.01.18 4:02pm
Agreed. It’s so frustrating seeing a couple more recent posts from friends then there’s one from an athlete I follow about a game that happened two days ago, or a contest for a music festival that happened last week. There are so many cases where the algorithm is just hot garbage.
By tagish on 06.01.18 4:22pm
And this is the year of AI. Some time they’ll get it right, but there’s no intelligence at all in what you describe. Who writes an algorithm to show you relevant posts and forget to NOT show posts about something that happened that’s not news anymore, like "We’re at the stadium and seems like we’re winning!". Yeah, I know, it was two days ago. Or "Cool concert". Yeah I was there so (and Instagram knows it based on hashtag, tagged location etc)…..
By oj88 on 06.02.18 6:13pm
You’re not the only one. I’ve just added the people I care about as favorites, so they appear more at least (those who post a lot like famous tech guys I follow would otherwise appear all the time), but not chronological, and if I see an interesting post at the top and accidentally refresh, the feed changes completely.
I vaguely remember Facebook saying they wouldn’t change Instagram in any drastic way? But then they totally cut chronological order which made me actually use Instagram in the first place (before that Facebook served well enough and didn’t want YET another social network to check and handle, but then Facebook screwed up their feed making Most Recent every time more difficult, especially on mobile), AND they introduced paid posts. That mess. People I don’t have a clue who is suddenly appearing.
By oj88 on 06.02.18 6:08pm
You misinterpreted their question. Increased user engagement is what they want, but it’s at the cost of functionality for people who actually actively curate their friends list. The fact you say it "works" in lieu of being useful for the user shows just how little users look out for themselves when trying to rationalize things.
By cthuluface on 06.02.18 4:28am
This algorithm makes sense if I follow 100+ but I follow few and I want to see my feed in reverse-chronological.
By gadabaj on 06.01.18 3:51pm
It’s all a smokescreen to allow them to subtly shift the needle in favor of those who utilize social media as a business. The smoking gun is simple: if this was really about what was best for the end user, they’d let it be an option, because if it truly was better for the end user, the majority of end users would eventually choose their algorithmic method over straight up reverse chron.
By fueledbygin on 06.01.18 7:03pm
Exactly. They could at least make it an option that resets to the algorithmic feed every time you open the app. Sort of like doing a manual search.
This forced feed is actually making me use Instagram less – I’m tired of seeing the same people at the top of my feed.
By backwithan808 on 06.02.18 1:20am
With his algorithmic feeds, Zuck cares for his users like a good mother of dimwits would do.
By dhoughal on 06.01.18 3:46pm
Doesn’t this completely fulfill itself, though? If it’s showing me the people with whom I interact more, then I’ll be less likely to interact with others, which pushes the people I interact with more (because of the algorithm) higher up the list, which means fewer interactions with other people and so forth and so on.
I really don’t understand why all of these social media platforms don’t give users the option of just pulling in posts in reverse chronological order. Heck, bury the option deep in the settings so that only uber nerds will activate it. As the poster above, I’m someone that’s less inclined to use a platform that thinks it knows better than I do what I want to see.
By Sam Dunham on 06.01.18 3:56pm
The technology just isn’t there yet.
By davely on 06.01.18 4:02pm
This is my single biggest complaint with Instagram. Every time they push a new app update, I find myself going to the App Store and leaving a new 1-star review that specifically mentions the lack of a chronological feed.
Meanwhile, the app is still rolling with something like a ~4.8 rating. It seems like most people just don’t care.
By davely on 06.01.18 4:03pm
Wow, just checked and 4.5 on Google Play. Every dev like me knows that after reaching just 1000-2000 installs, if you have 4.5+ your app is considered great.
Social media apps that can be great tend to have poor ratings no matter what because soo many use them that there’s always some 1 star reviews by mistake and some comment in a foreign language using Google Translate in the Developer Console doesn’t make sense at all, or just not knowing what they’re doing, like app won’t take photo and they don’t understand it’s because their space has run out (and device saying so as well), and people thinking 1 is better than 5 etc. Many of the big apps are crap in various ways, like bloated, size, usage of a huge amount of third party libraries, overwhelmingly many features, battery consuming, integration with absolutely everything running tons of background and push services, but generally anyway don’t deserve 3 stars. Then they wouldn’t have 500 million+ users, and users would use mobile website, light app or third party (if API) or just not use the service.
By oj88 on 06.02.18 6:24pm
Well this is certainly not how my feed works. Maybe I’m using the app wrong, but posts from my friends and family are often missed because most of my feed is filled with posts from the sports related pages I follow. Then the problem I encounter with that is the app showing me a sports score or highlight from a game that took place 2 days ago.
I guess I "engage" with the app more because I’m constantly scrolling and scrolling to find a familiar face or using the search feature to see specific people lost in the feed.
My suggestion: Make my main feed reverse chronological order and use the Explore page for the "algorithmic/pages you might want to check out" feed
By DFrance on 06.01.18 4:57pm
Helped quite a bit adding my closest friends which I actually care about to the favorites list, and some I have post notifications on for, like friends not posting constantly but when they do they’re great photos.
When wanting to see something from a very popular tech guy I follow for instance I just go to that specific account.
But I preferred the Instagram Feed before Facebook indeed.
Would be great with an option: "Don’t show account in feed" (and a separate list/tab for those guys with direct links to their accounts). I just follow 130 people, 99 % friends, most almost not active, someone very, and some once in a while (those I never see so often find myself like every 3 months checking manually a friend’s account and man, I’ve missed 5 posts from a person I care about and usually have great posts – pretty typical for my friends is that those who rarely post, post good posts when first posting, as they think more if this is something people will care about instead of all the garbage many post constantly, like images with flower backgrounds and some "super genius" quote usually incorrect and false).
By oj88 on 06.02.18 6:32pm
My feed has always been and continues to be reverse chronological order. I follow less than 150 accounts and check my feed a few times a day and have always scrolled until I was caught up with everything so maybe instagram has determined that since I always see everything anyways, I can just keep the chronological order. I hope it stays this way.
By thomsanati on 06.01.18 5:05pm
I follow just 130 people, most rarely post, but even so I can’t imagine wasting so much time scrolling through all the garbage which most is anyway when I’ve tried to see what the hype is about, like my GF and many others are constant "zombie scrollers", they’re flicking constantly on their screen, seem not to really see what they’re scrolling through. Then they need a neck massage or Ibuprofen for staring down all day.
Maybe I should try it but I think I’ll go mad. Instagram knows very well I open the feed maybe 4 times a week. Mostly I open it just for friends I have set post notifications on for (not feed).
My best posters are those who almost never post, but people I care about, and if I have forgotten to turn on post notification for x person I’ll never see the post based on my activity. So once in a while I’m like "shit, maybe x person has posted something last 3 months but since they’re little active and I open the feed little, I’ve not seen it, and have to go to the person’s account manually, and yes, some very great posts there. Post publications = On from that point. These who post little but good posts they actually think before posting. Do people actually want to see it and will they? They’re not heavy users so they also see, when trying to use Instagram (which they don’t really understand the hype about, and we’re talking young adults here, tech savvy people) most posts disappears into a black whole, so they get no attention when posting.
By oj88 on 06.02.18 6:44pm
I don’t care about your livelihood or your brand awareness. I want to see photos. End of story.
By SilverRubicon on 06.01.18 9:30pm
since the lack of chronological update I couldn’t give a shit about instagram.
which is a shame cuz it’s a great platform, but no longer for me.
By graha.me on 06.02.18 7:06am
If you have like just 10 people you give a damn about, add them to favorites, and feed might become somewhat useable, not chronological but almost, at least if opening and scrolling through regularly, stopping when coming to posts seen or from others. But if you want to see em all, or many, it’s a mess.
By oj88 on 06.02.18 6:48pm