In March, Instagram announced plans to move away from showing posts in strict reverse chronological order, and instead boost those based on the “likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting, and the timeliness of the post,” as it explained at the time.
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.
As Instagram says in its brief announcement published on Thursday, on average, people miss 70 percent of their feeds. And as Instagram has continued to grow and expand – the company now reports over 400 million monthly users – the number of photos and videos on its service have increased as well. That’s why it’s making this change.
Source: TechCrunch