Facebook earlier started showing posts out of order, and now Instagram will be testing this for its users. On Wednesday, Instagram said it is experimenting with a more personalized feed which will rely on an algorithm to sort videos and images which, in turn, is based on what users are most interested in. With this change, Instagram’s new news feed will more closely resemble that of parent company Facebook.
Will the changes be permanent?
Only a small percentage of users will test the algorithm for now. Whether the changes will be made permanently or temporarily across the platform will be determined by the initial results. Since Instagram de-emphasized timestamps on posts by shrinking them and putting them underneath the pictures, there is every reason that the Facebook-owned firm will keep the changes permanent.
Using machine-learning technology and the other signals of interest, Instagram will try to determine how the content can be sorted. The timeliness of the posts and the relationship between users will play an essential role in pushing up the posts of the people you interact with most higher in the feed.
Currently, posts are organized from newest to oldest, thus frequently leading to missing posts from friends. People miss an average of 70% of the posts in their feeds, Kevin Systrom, co-founder and chief executive of Instagram, told the New York Times. “What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible,” Systrom said.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter now have similar news feed
This feed experiment suggests the increasing popularity of the social media platform and the resulting surge in content. Currently, social media has more than 400 million regular users, and 75% of them live in countries other than the U.S. Due to time differences, international users frequently fail to see posts overnight, said Mike Krieger, another co-founder and Instagram’s chief technology officer.
Not only Facebook and Instagram have made changes in their news feed, but Twitter also. Earlier this year, it changed its user feeds to underscore quality over chronology. Similar to Instagram, the micro-blogging site started sorting tweets by a personalized algorithm. Instagram suggested that the new feed will not be optional, but Twitter still lets its users opt out of the new feed.
