If you’re the kind of person who likes discovering new things on Instagram, this will probably be good news for you. They said that there has been a positive response to their testing of the “suggested posts” feature that they’re now looking at putting it in your main feed, maybe even ahead of those that you follow. So if you just want to see photos and videos from the accounts that you follow, this may be annoying for you. But it looks like they’re also working on a snooze button for that for those that will not appreciate that new feature.
The Verge shares that Instagram will soon be testing putting “suggested posts” mixed in with your main feed. More interestingly, they may even put it ahead of the posts from accounts you actually follow. Currently, you will only see those additional content after you’ve seen everything that from the people or brands that you follow. So if you follow a lot of accounts, then you may not reach the end of those updates and not see the suggested posts that the algorithm thinks you’ll like.
So because they got mostly positive feedback about this feature, they’re now thinking of mixing it all up in the feed. And so they’re also testing out the ability to snooze these suggested posts for 30 days so you can hide them when you’re browsing. But if you like seeing additional content, they’re also testing out allowing users to add topics that they may want to see from the suggested content. They are testing this out to a small number of users.
If ever this feature makes it out of the testing phase, it may also see a major change in how Instagram actually works. They of course want to keep people engaged and active in the app and adding suggested posts might do the trick. But it also might turn off those who just want to see posts from the accounts that they actually choose to follow. And there are still some who are angry about losing the chronological feed so we might see people leaving the app altogether.
As we said, this is still in the testing phase with a small group of users so if you’re worried about having a messed-up feed, you don’t need to worry for now. We’ll know more about if Instagram decides to bring this to all accounts soon.