In a blog post published this Tueday, Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram went into some tantalizing detail on how Instagram decides what posts you see on the various feeds on the app.
 
Entitled “Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works”, the blog post is the first of a series and was probably written to quell some of the persistent rumors bubbling that Instagram intentionally hides or favors certain posts.  Or maybe it’s just another example of tech companies trying to ride the gravy train of privacy protection as a PR ploy like Apple.  Your guess is as good as ours.
 
In any case, the blog post is interesting because it lays out in broad strokes the various logic behind the algorithms that the company uses to decide what you see.  If you remember back to 2010 when Instagram started, it literally just was a feed of photos posted by users in chronological order.  Obviously since then, there are a lot more users, so some kind of ranking algorithms are necessary to make the app usable.
 
Enter the blog post, which lays out this thought process.  In the “Feed” and “Stories” sections of the app, Adam explains that they basically show you what your connections share, and then rank it with something called “signals.”  According to Adam, there are 1000s of signals, categorized as follows:

• Information about the post. These are signals both about how popular a post is – think how many people have liked it – and more mundane information about the content itself, like when it was posted, how long it is if it’s a video, and what location, if any, was attached to it. 
• Information about the person who posted. This helps us get a sense for how interesting the person might be to you, and includes signals like how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks. 
• Your activity. This helps us understand what you might be interested in and includes signals such as how many posts you’ve liked. 
• Your history of interacting with someone. This gives us a sense of how interested you are generally in seeing posts from a particular person. An example is whether or not you comment on each other’s posts.

-Adam Mosseri, CEO Instagram, excerpts from June 8, 2021 blog post
 
He then goes on to explain even more about the ranking algorithms used in other parts of the app.  This is an interesting read on how tech companies’ algorithms actually work, and there are apparently more blog posts forthcoming that will share potentially even more details.

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