“To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the change. “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.”
Some users of the photo-sharing app are likely to be unhappy with the change, as many Twitter users were when the company began testing more curated feeds. But for parent company Facebook, which engineered the social algorithm that now influences more than a billion people, this move is not unprecedented.
Judging by Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom’s comments to the Times, the change likely has less to do with controlling what users see and more to do with the app’s increasing popularity. “On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their Instagram feed,” Systrom told the Times. “What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible.”
Unlike Facebook’s news feed, Instagram will still show every post on your feed, albeit reordered—so you can still get your fill of parody accounts and puppy photos.
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