Facebook’s sister social network Instagram announced Thursday that it’s testing a “New Posts” button in users’ feeds. By tapping it, you’ll be brought to the top of your Instagram feed where more timely posts are said to start appearing. The new feature is intended to stop Instagram from refreshing automatically, causing you to lose your place in the feed.
Along with the new button, Instagram is also promising users that they will begin seeing more “newer posts” in their feeds. “With these new changes, your feed will feel more fresh, and you won’t miss the moments you care about,” a blogpost from Instagram announcing the new tweaks says. “So if your best friend shares a selfie from her vacation in Australia, it will be waiting for you when you wake up.”
It’s not clear yet if the new changes will do much to solve Instagram users’ number one complaint about the social network: the algorithmic timeline introduced in 2016. It renders it impossible to see the latest pictures and videos your friends and family have posted. Prior to 2016, Instagram was entirely chronological, making it far easier to know exactly when you were all caught up. Now, being on Instagram can make it feel as though time is warped.
This feeling is especially acute during major holidays, when your feed can easily become clogged with Christmas tree posts for days after December 25 has passed. The algorithmic timeline also makes it frustratingly easy to miss limited-time sales or timely events from businesses and brands. Over 26,000 Instagram users became so fed up with the social network’s feed change that they signed a Change.org petition begging Instagram to reverse it back to chronological. If you're worried about missing posts from specific people, you can also turn on post notifications for their accounts.
Unlike on Facebook and Twitter, there’s no way to switch from an algorithmic feed to a chronological one on Instagram. all you can do if you're worried about missing posts from specific people is to turn on post notifications for their individual accounts.
From the company’s perspective, this deliberate product decision makes perfect sense: If Instagram can temporarily suspend time in your mind, then maybe it can get you to keep scrolling for longer. There’s no way to definitively know when you’ve seen all the posts you may have missed.
But Instagram also knows that its purely algorithmic timeline has frustrated users for years, and if it doesn’t do something to make it feel more timely, it could drive them away. Also in 2016 however, Instagram introduced the Stories feature, where you can post videos and photos that expire after 24 hours. Copied from Snapchat, Stories are generally much more intimate and timely than pictures and videos published straight to the feed. Now used by over 300 million people every day, it’s possible Instagram hopes Stories can ultimately ease users’ dissatisfaction with the algorithmic timeline. Still, a chronological timeline is really what users want—and Thursday’s announcement mostly just feels like a Band-Aid.
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