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Instagram Will Now Let You Follow Hashtags In Your Main Feed (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sign-of-the-times dept.

"Up until now, there were two ways to interact with a hashtag," reports The Verge. "You could click through a hashtag on a post, or you could search for a specific tag in the Explore section of the app." Today, Instagram is adding a new way to interact with a hashtag: the ability to follow hashtags so you can see top posts and Stories about a topic on your home page. From the report: You can now "follow" a hashtag the same way you would follow an account. Instagram's algorithms will then pick and choose some of the highlights from that collection and surface them in your main feed. It's a fundamental change to one of the largest social media platforms in the world, elevating your interest in adorable dogs or expensive automobiles to equal status with your friends and family. By contrast, the posts injected into my main feed based on the hashtags I chose to follow (#modernart, #bjj, #ancient) felt carefully curated. There is a lot of variety, even within those categories, but you can train the algorithm on what you do and don't like. Engage with the post by leaving a heart or a comment, and Instagram will assume you want more. Click the menu button on the top right of the post, and you can downvote the offending image by asking Instagram not to show you similar content for that hashtag again. After a few days of this, the art in my feed, both martial and modern, felt fine-tuned to my taste.

23 comments

  1. Now by l33t+j03 · · Score: 0

    Fist

    --

    Cunning linguists

    1. Re:Now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With gusto.

  2. Hooray! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    #IHaveNoLife

    1. Re:Hooray! by sittingnut · · Score: 1

      online "social networks/media" bloats till they can follow the most idiotic popular thing, just like all the other "social networks/media". then they slowly die.

  3. W00t! by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Awesome.

    What's a hashtag?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:W00t! by gnick · · Score: 1

      Hashtag's the name of the panda on the Tonight Show. Also a keyword for when you tweet a snapgram.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  4. meanwhile, on usenet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    While the same concept does not directly apply, the idea was that this kind of thing was up to the client, and you could pick from a wide range of clients as you liked to get the functionality you wanted.

    Then "web forums" came along and threw that idea out the window. Who needs user choice, anyway?

  5. What? C'mon Slashdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So I've been coding in C for just over 30 years and have been designing hardware a bit longer than that. How is this news for nerds? I don't know what 'Instagram' or hashtags even are? This has nothing to do with technology. It's the effect of technology of society at best; a bit like a social studies project.

    This isn't science. It isn't engineering. It isn't news for nerds.

    1. Re:What? C'mon Slashdot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Scroll past?

    2. Re:What? C'mon Slashdot. by lucm · · Score: 1

      #burn

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    3. Re:What? C'mon Slashdot. by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      To what? Oh, to "Twitter Officially Launches 'Threads,' a New Feature For Easily Posting Tweetstorms"?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  6. And I give a shit because?..... by Snotnose · · Score: 1

    Instagram. Some social media thing. Don't have a facebook/tumblr/myspace/linkedin/pinterest/whatever "social giving companies personal information" accounts.

    As a tecchi, I give 2 grams of dogshit about this because? A) Someone paid you to post it; B) I'm way out of touch with how things work today.

    I'ma gonna go with A, cuz I may be out of touch, but I'm damn near 60 y/o and have learned a thing or three about how things work.

    1. Re:And I give a shit because?..... by lucm · · Score: 1

      It's BeauHD. All he does is pick random stories from the slush pile to use as filler between his thinly disguised ads for Apple products and he thinks nobody notices.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    2. Re: And I give a shit because?..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are a smart cookie!

  7. this is by schleimkeim · · Score: 1

    neither news for nerds, nor stuff that matters.

    1. Re:this is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Evidently, it matters to the one person (beauHD) because the rest of us are anti-social

  8. Hashtags in Instagram by backgroundpi1 · · Score: 1

    This is actually good and bad. The good side is that you'll be able to follow those hashtags that you are interested in. The bad side is that nonsense or useless content might ride along with these hashtags. -http://www.backgroundpi.com/ team

  9. Doesn't belong on Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nobody cares

  10. Like diaspora* by livvydun · · Score: 1

    So it just copies diaspora*.

  11. gives them more information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Which they then can sell to advertisers.. or even put the advertisements right in the hashtag feed.

    Unintended consequence:

    companies are going to figure out which hashtags are popular and spam ads into those hashtags with out paying instagram for running an advertisement thus negating the point of following hashtags?

  12. News for Instagram by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hashtags that matter.

    Sorry, I'm honestly not that old, but I don't fucking care about hashtags, twitter, instagram, or whatever the fuck else this article is on about.

  13. INSTA-BS by jf_moreira · · Score: 1

    Oh my. May be very important for the majority, but, wow. What a life changer. Last time I used Instagram was on 2013.

  14. Machine "learning" by psyclone · · Score: 1

    The concept of "the machine 'learns' what I like/dislike by showing me more/less of those items after I rate them" behavior is concerning in the context of free-form information. In the case of Netflix, it's great, as that is entertainment. But as more and more people consume *information* from social media sources using algorithms like this, it will further divide society.

    Soon everyone will only see "news" they agree with, instead of muti-faceted stories and derive their own opinions.

    Ye who controls the algorithms will soon drive public opinion.