Instagram Is Killing Its Chronological Timeline

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Weeks after Twitter announced it, Instagram is now looking into changing the order in which posts appear on our feeds. No more chronological order. Your feed will soon be ordered to show the images that Instagram believes you will care the most about.

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In a blogpost Instagram explained that people miss on average 70% of their feeds because, as the platform grew it has become harder to keep up with everything that our friends share.

People miss on average 70% of their feeds on Instagram.

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To change this, and help us keep up with the posts we care about the most, Instagram is testing a new order on the feed, that will push up the content that the platform believes is important to us. This will be based on an algorithm that calculates the likelihood that we will be interested in something based on our past interactions with content, our relationship with the person posting it, and the timeliness of the post.

Instagram is testing a new timeline that will push content it believes is important to us.

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For now, all the posts you would usually find in your feed, will still be there, just in a different order. But, in the future, Instagram may even decide to remove content from our feed, simply because it thinks it is not something we would care about. And that is not cool.

Instagram explained:

[quote]If your favorite musician shares a video from last night’s concert, it will be waiting for you when you wake up, no matter how many accounts you follow or what time zone you live in. And when your best friend posts a photo of her new puppy, you won’t miss it.[/quote]

Of course, I believe this will also create space for a new types of ads that will boost the chances of content, to feature on top of our feed. Remember that you read it here… when it suddenly appears in your ad manager a few months from now. The company says it will be testing the new timeline over the coming months, while listening to user feedback. I have an idea how that might happen…

Personally, I almost always scroll all the way down to the last photo I have seen, but that’s just me. What about you?