Folks on Instagram could be in for a big surprise after changes were made to how the feed works. Instead of showing the most recent posts, Instagram will now show the posts it thinks you care about the most.
What's happening here? Not much, just Instagram being the latest app to go the route of algorithms. You see, this is exactly how Facebook works, so it should come as no surprise to find out that Instagram has adopted the same thing because Facebook is its owner.
Twitter adopted a similar feature and it seems to be working just fine. However, on Facebook, not everyone likes the new changes, and not everyone knows that with just a few clicks of the mouse, they can set it back to how they want.
"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," according to the Instagram blog.
We're not certain if Instagram will give users the option to choose. If not, we suspect its user base could riot. It has already begun on Twitter with several folks saying the developer should leave the feed alone. Don't be surprised if the feature is rolled back or if the option is given to allow users to choose whether or not to see posts in a chronological order or to have it show posts based on their tastes.
To make matters worse, several folks on Instagram are complaining and starting petitions in hopes to have the feature rolled back. We doubt their pleas will work, so right now we can only hope for the sake of users and Instagram itself that everything works out just fine in the end.
Chances are, the algorithm may not work as expected during the first couple of weeks or months, but it should improve as time goes by.