Instagram feeds to show pictures according to relevance rather than time

People don’t see 70 per cent of what’s on their feed, the company said, and the new feature is intended to show off some of those posts that get missed

Andrew Griffin
Wednesday 16 March 2016 10:48 GMT
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Instagram is going to start showing everybody’s pictures out of order.

The app will soon change to ordering pictures according to how interested it thinks people are going to be in them, rather than when they were taken. It will make the feed more like that on Facebook, which owns Instagram, and echoes a similar move made by Twitter just weeks ago.

Instagram said that it was making the change to ensure that people see “the posts you might care about the most”. On average people don’t see 70 per cent of what’s in their feed, the site said, and so the feature was being added as a way of making sure that people were kept up to date.

The posts won’t simply be ordered according to how popular they are, Instagram said. The app will also look at the relationship that a user has the person posting, and how long ago the post went up.

The company said that no posts will go missing, they will just be put in a different order.

“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,” the company wrote in its blog post. “And when your best friend posts a photo of her new puppy, you won’t miss it.”

The company said that the feature will be gradually rolled out and might change as it goes along.

“We’re going to take time to get this right and listen to your feedback along the way,” Instagram wrote in a blog post. “You’ll see this new experience in the coming months.”

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