- help users who follow few accounts, or follow low-volume accounts, seem like they have more content to look at; this helps retention
- lift viral content higher, to reward users producing popular content, and expose it to other users assuming wisdom of the crowds
- expose a different set of content on successive views; this helps engagement
- put ads in your feed with higher frequency, whose perceived density would be much more jarring given the reference points provided by the unchanged ordering of a chronological feed
In many cases, these changes disadvantage the most the sort of people the platform cares to retain the least.
Instagram added this a little while ago[1], which flies in the face of these "never-ending feed" complaints.
Like I said above, I feel they have made it worse by adding more and more features. They added video, and that was cool. They added messaging, which that was handy. They successfully copied Snapchat, and that was a plus, I guess. They added a location map, OK. Tagging people’s faces in photos... live video with endless notifications... and now IGTV, which is heavily promoted despite being very different than the original app. It’s definitely what I would call feature and mission creep. My opinion is that Instagram was good and successful in the first place because it simple, like Twitter. It appears to me their intention is to replace the old Facebook product with Instagram, probably because younger people don’t use Facebook much. I would guess this is partially because FB is so cluttered and full of unnecessary and annoying features. That’s the direction I see the Instagram app heading in, which is not what their audience wants.
When I repeatedly post on my FB wall and receive no interaction, I stop posting. When my FB newsfeed is full of annoying political topics, though I unfollowed the last 20 people who posted about annoying political topics, it’s boring and frustrating to read it, so I stop. Then, when I go to the pages of actual friends and family members whose content I care about, and find they have posted things that have not been displayed to me while days of annoying political topics have been, it’s obvious that something isn’t working right.
The people I know who use Instagram are a network of artists with very dedicated community. We notice right away how things affect our views and take it personally because we are chiefly individuals with nanobusinesses doing all our marketing ourselves, mainly on IG.
People were eager to move to Ello, Tsū and most recently Vero. It seems to be easier to get the content creators there than the audience.
Define worse, because basically every metric I'm aware of says that instagram is more popular and has higher user engagement than ever.
I think your "filtered feed" complaint is something that really ticks off a narrow segment of users, but that the remaining 99% doesn't care about at all. All they notice is a more interesting and relevant feed. Look at it this way - basically every major social network (instagram, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc) has implemented some sort of filtered feed. Every time some small segment of tech-savvy users or power users gets extremely annoyed and complains loudly, but I'm unaware of any network reversing the decision and going back to pure chronological - to me, that says that their internal engagement numbers overwhelmingly justify the decision.