Instagram’s VP of product says users should ‘give up’ on chronological feed

Instagram, much like Facebook, did away with the chronological feed to an algorithm driven feed in 2016. Since the change, Instagram users have demanded the company to restore the older feed or at least give an option to do so. Turns out, Instagram has no plans to make the change and has asked users to "give up" on the chronological feed.

Instagram will not bring it back even as an option or toggle for users. "Yes, you should give up on the chronological feed," Vishal Shah, Instagram's VP of product said at an event in Mumbai. "It is just good for the ecosystem and it keeps the platform simple," he explained.

Instagram had discontinued chronological feed saying that users should see posts that are relevant and matter to them. The app now shows posts from account you interact with the most. This could be in the form of comments and likes.

Vishal stressed on "product incentives" as a key driver behind the algorithm based feed. "70 percent of the content that people could see was not being seen. So you're only seeing 30 percent of the things you could see," he said.

"So, the incentive for the producer was to post as often as possible no matter how good the quality of the content was so that they could be seen because the more likelihood of them being seen is the more often they post. That's just a bad incentive. I'd rather have people be incentivised for good content. Feed ranking gives the incentive to build great content and not to create more content," he said.

Instagram which continues to assert itself as a creator-first platform wants users to focus on good content. Shah also highlighted Instagram Explore as the alternative to explore content. Instagram Explore too is heavily algorithm based showing content related to accounts you follow.