Instagram is experimenting with Favorites and Chronological Order of posts

Instagram is constantly adapting to change and continuously evolving for everyone's convenience. This year, Instagram had significant challenges with the public pressure to be more transparent and provide more options for people to control their presence on the platform.

Instagram has announced that it is working on a new way for users to decide on how their news feed should sort the content they see. Last week, Instagram announced that it is experimenting with Favorites, a feature that lets people choose between an algorithmic feed and a pre-2016 reverse chronological feed.

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, explained that one version of the chronological feed would let you “pick your favorites and they show up at the top in chronological order,” he said. The other would let you see the posts from everyone you're following in chronological order, though he didn't mention how recommended posts would be interspersed.

Today, there are still a number of people who want to be able to see Instagram posts in chronological order, preferring to not have posts re-ordered by an algorithm they can’t control. Favorites wouldn’t give in to this demand (though Instagram has tested a chronological feed in the past). But it would at least give users the ability to ensure they weren’t missing the posts from those whose updates they wanted to see the most.

As for the Favorites upgrade, according to screenshots obtained by Paluzzi, the feature won’t necessarily always show all favorite accounts first, but it will prioritize them over others. It works by letting you search for and add accounts to a Favorites list that the Instagram screenshot says will appear “higher in a feed so you don’t miss out.” Only the specific user can see who is on their Favorites list and no one is notified when they are added or removed from a Favorites list. Currently, Instagram’s feed is controlled by a set of algorithms that rank the order of the content in a feed by the most recent and shared posts by those who users follow along with a set of other factors like engagement. Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri recently shared more information about Instagram’s algorithms in a detailed blog post published last June.

“We want to make the most of your time, and we believe that using technology to personalize your experience is the best way to do that,” Mosseri says. “Each part of the app – Feed, Explore, Reels – uses its own algorithm tailored to how people use it. People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, but they want to discover something entirely new in Explore. We rank things differently in different parts of the app, based on how people use them.”

This is a similar level of privacy as offered by Instagram’s several-years-old “Close Friends” feature, which instead focuses on allowing users to create a separate list of followers so they can share their more private and personal Instagram Stories with a select group of their own choosing.

Given that users who were paying for content would not want to miss a moment, it would make sense to give them tools to designate those creators as “Favorites” whose posts were also more highly ranked in their Feed.

A Favorites feature could also be useful to those who had taken a break from Instagram and would rather see the important photos and videos they missed from favorite accounts upon their return, rather than just the most recent or interesting updates from across all of the accounts they follow.

And while not likely the main goal, the new feature could help to address users’ complaints about the algorithmic feed in general.

Though Instagram did say it’s working on the development of Favorites, it doesn’t necessarily mean such a feature will launch to the public. Companies of Instagram’s size often prototype new ideas, but only some of those tests make it to a general release.