Instagram has begun to roll out a new feature that is designed to keep you in the app scrolling through your feed and looking at posts.
Pic after pic, the aim is to keep you interested in what people have to share with the world. The new Instagram feature is part of your feed, and it’s related to content that you already follow. So chances are you will likely want to keep looking at it and engaging.
The update was starting to be pushed out to the Instagram app today. So you should already have access to it. Though it could be easy to miss depending on how long you scroll through photos.
Instagram ‘Suggested Posts’ feature aims to keep you scrolling… forever
Digital wellness be damned. Instagram wants you to keep scrolling through your feeds forever and ever and ever, and it’ll do so with its new feature called Suggested Posts.
After you scroll through your feed for a long enough period, you’ll eventually reach the end. Or what is technically the end. See, your feed is designed to show you the last couple of days worth of posts.
Once you get through everything you get a message that tells you that you’re all caught up. You can then click a link to see even older post if you wish. Except now you don’t have to. Suggested Posts is here to allow continuous scrolling without clicking that link.
The content that it surfaces is closely related to the content that you’re already interested in. Though, the accounts who’s posts are being shown to you are not ones that you follow.
Suggested Posts surfaces content that Instagram thinks you’ll want to see
Suggested Posts uses Instagram’s algorithms to pick out content it thinks you’ll like. However it isn’t really just picking things at random.
It’s certainly smarter than that. Content is actually related to accounts and post categories you already follow. So if you follow a certain restaurant that serves burgers for example, then Suggested Posts may show you posts about burgers from other accounts.
The suggested posts also won’t be the same content that pops up in the Explore tab for you. Instagram says it’ll be different than that and related to content you already follow.
Instagram says that the aim is to allow users to go deeper into their interests. But it definitely feels more like a push to keep people in the app and looking at content.