Misguided though they are, plenty of Instagram users are
pissed about the company's plans to begin arranging posts by algorithmic order.
“NO NO NO NO NO,” harangued one Tumblr user who goes by the handle homefries.
“HORRIBLE IDEA!” insisted nonsuchgarden.
“If I wanted Facebook-style posting I would have set up an account with Facebook,” said leesee3.
Like it or not,
Facebook-style posting is exactly what Instagram users are getting -- and whether they know it or not, it’s the best thing for everyone.
Like Facebook before it, Instagram has simply
become too big for arranging posts in reverse-chronological order.
Average
users just don’t have the time or thumb strength to scroll through their entire feeds. Odds are, therefore, that the content they are seeing -- i.e., the stuff that has been posted most recently
-- is not the “best” content in their feed.
Of course, I put the word “best” in quotation marks, because content value is entirely subjective. That’s where
Instagram’s algorithm comes in.
“The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the
person posting and the timeliness of the post,” Instagram explains.
Ultimately, the network’s
success is riding on its ability to fulfill this promise.
The move is not without risk, but the alternative is, well, Twitter. For years, it refused to fiddle with the order of user feeds, and
the result was an increasingly worthless content experience. Twitter very
recently began testing relevance-based feeds, but not before immense damage was done.
No matter how loudly some users wail, it would be a huge mistake for Instagram to go down the same dark path to irrelevance.
This column was
previously published in Moblog on March 16, 2016.