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Instagram's New Algorithm That Puts the Best Posts First Goes Live For All (instagram.com)
Instagram announced on Friday that it is rolling out its algorithmic feed around the world. The idea is, Facebook-owned photo and video platform says, users will see photos that they are likely to enjoy -- as opposed to seeing what people they follow have posted in reverse-chronological order. The algorithm uses machine learning to create a more personalized feed based on what it thinks you will enjoy more. TechCrunch reports: If you think that sounds a lot like parent company Facebook's News Feed algorithm, you'd be right. As Facebook came to understand long ago, the posts people want to see aren't necessarily those that are the newest. They're those that matter to you, personally. But since most of us aren't on our phones 24/7 -- hey, even the busiest people sleep for a few hours per night! -- we tend to miss posts from our favorite people. This is especially true if you're trying to keep up with friends in other time zones.
Enjoy
As someone who constantly changes his FB feed to show the newest (because that's how I find the things I want to know about), I would like to say that it's a giant pain in the ass and that all of the corporations who think they know better than I as to what I want to see and when need to take a long walk off a short pier so they can go soak their head.
What you are doing is not "curation", it is propaganda. I, for one, am tired of it. And far sooner than you think, this will lose whatever effectiveness it once had. People have a way of becoming immune to it's influence. Learn from Mad Men. You have one chance to change people's minds. Don't squander it on the flavor of the month.
...As Facebook came to understand long ago, the posts people want to see aren't necessarily those that are the newest. They're those that matter to you, personally....
What if the posts that matter to me, personally, the most are the newest.
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Why doesn't fb's super special algorithm pick that up? Why, when I tell it that I want to see newest posts first (MULTIPLE TIMES!!!), it constantly overrides that directive and shows me stuff in what appears to me to be random order?
If the stuff you're seeing is sorted in reverse chronological order, you can browse through it up to the point where you last browsed through it. Then you're done becomes you know you've already seen everything that comes after.
If the stuff you're seeing is sorted in whatever way some mysterious algorithm thinks you'll find it interesting, you can't stop browsing. An interesting thing that you haven't seen before may be just one more page scroll down, buried among stuff you've already seen. This is like counting marbles by pulling one out of the bag, writing a number, throwing it back into the bag, and pulling out another marble. It's extraordinarily inefficient at finding all the unnumbered marbles, and guarantees you can never know if you've counted them all.
And what happens if you run across something you really do find interesting, but you have to put your phone down to do other stuff. And between then and the next time you're able to browse the algorithm has updated what it thinks your preferences are? You can't reproduce the previous sort order. So now it's like a magazine, where the pages can randomly rearrange their order while you're in the middle of browsing through it.