The Ordering of Instagram’s Algorithm: a Case Study (Not Really a Case Study)
A look at 41 photos in my feed this morning, but in what order?
At 8:40am, Sept. 20th, 2016, I checked my Instagram feed. We all know Instagram’s changed how it presents photos to you this year, moving away from the ol’ reliable chronological, to an algorithmic secret-sauce that leans heavily on popularity, shareableness, and the capacity for Instagram to upsell.
This morning, I thought I’d write down the sequence of images in my feed (poorly represented by the PDF contact sheet, above) just to see how much they differed from the old, “traveling back in time” method.
Here’s the 41 images above, in the sequence they were presented, showing the time they were originally posted, and linking to the original post:
16h
23h
20h
16h
11h
18h
19h
15h
14h
17h
17h
23h
23h
20h
12h
18h
13h
23h
14h
21h
14h
20h
17h
18h
20h
16h
23h
1d
11h
9h
15h
12h
13h
15h
17h
21h
8h
17h
20h
17h
16h
