We need to talk about this announcement. Maybe I’m not your demographic on paper, but I have had an active online presence since 2004 and I have several different social media accounts including one instagram account that is not even a year old yet but already has almost 13,000 followers. I didn’t even buy instagram followers! And this change of display order of photos you’ve announced makes me VERY NERVOUS. Let me tell you why – Facebook’s algorithm SUCKS GIANT DONKEY TESTICLES.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten vulgar. BUT IT DOES.
I was trying to find a link a friend of my posted on FB recently that showed up in my feed, so I went to her page and what was at the top? A notice of posts of hers I had missed.
WAIT. Why did I miss them? They were more RECENT than the link I was looking for. Turns out? The link was from awhile ago but it had just shown up in my feed – I guess because it was getting likes? But I had missed pictures she had shared from a wedding and a status or two. But thankfully it showed me that link! God forbid I see pictures of her family when she’s sharing out an article from somewhere!
Do you see what I mean, Instagram? Facebook chose “popular” over what I would really want to see from a friend. Which is pictures of her family.
But you know what? I had actually already seen some of the pictures. Want to know why? Because she put them on Instagram too. And when I use instagram, I scroll down until the last time I looked. Granted, on my personal account I don’t follow tons of people, and maybe you’re trying to cater to those that do, but since instagram is just photos I can scroll down waiting in line at Target one time a day and catch up. And if I haven’t done that in awhile? I know there’s things I missed and I might want to check out my friend’s IG feeds individually. Another thing I love about Instagram is that you have the power to use a tool such as socialfollow in order to gain followers for your profile, which is something you can’t say for the majority of social media platforms.
But with Facebook? You have no idea. You can’t assume you’ve seen anything or missed anything. I had NO IDEA I missed any of Heather’s photos. I do the same with FB as I do Instagram, scroll through in line, or when I’m waiting for photos to import at work and don’t want to bog down my computer, or when I’m lying in bed watching a boring TV show with the kids. Instagram is EASY To scroll through. It requires NO READING so I can quickly catch glimpses of my nephews or my friend’s rabbit or my other friend’s trip to Disneyworld or the Hamilton casts’ trip to DC. It doesn’t take long and I know when I’ve gotten to familiar photos I’m caught up. It might be because of this weird machine learning I’ve been hearing about. I heard from a friend that Kenji have used machine learning to make their Instagram bots efficient.
I know I haven’t missed anything. Like photos from a friend’s family.
Maybe your algorithm is going to be smarter. Maybe you’ll do a better job predicting “moments we believe you will care about the most.” I hope so because Instagram is my favorite right now. It’s the only way I see my family in Colorado and if your algorithm screws that up I’m going to be really sad.
So much this. I HATE the Facebook algorithm, I hate that Twitter are bringing that nonsense in, I hate that my favourite places to hangout online are changing! Grrr!
Instagram is also my favorite, because of the lack of “ordering”. I stopped checking twitter so often because it started doing that as well. Just show me the stuff my friends post, in the order they post them. It’s that simple. Don’t mess with it.
Yes. I’m an old curmudgeonly blogger (long retired), but that doesn’t mean I want my comfortable social places to change.
UGH. It should be a feature you can CHOOSE to enable or disable. Forcing it onto everybody is lame. I follow over 300 people and I have no problem keeping up with them all the way it is now. To me this seems like a way for them, like on Facebook, to allow power users (people that pay them) to be seen more which is not at all what they sell as “things you most likely want to see”. I don’t think it will be long befor you can pay to promote posts like you can on Facebook making them “the things people want to see most”.
*sigh* I’m tired of online services “improving” things. It usually results in reduced functionality and a crapton of annoyances that seem minor, but add up to the point I no longer want to use the service. Who asked them to do this? Like Anna says, it sounds like it’s about money rather than what their USERS actually want.
I DETEST Facebook’s “help”!!!
I cannot find enough words of agreement for this post. I was beyond disappointed when I read the article. I hate the FB feed. I hate it that no matter how many times I switch the feed to recent, it is always back to popular the next time. I do NOT want IG to go that way 🙁
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that feels this way! That’s exactly how I use IG as well–I don’t follow that many people so it’s no bother at all to simply scroll down to the last one I saw. I *like* things in order! If someone is posting multiple photos of a trip (or tweeting it, or Facebooking it) I want to follow along as it happens, OTHERWISE IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE. THINGS NEED TO MAKE SENSE, PEOPLE.