Have you ever wondered why you see certain posts and stories on Instagram? For years, people have wondered how Meta-owned photo-sharing platform’s algorithm works on Instagram.

Finally the social networking platform has explained how posts and stories recommendations work on Instagram for users in a new blog post.

“We want to do a better job of explaining how Instagram works. There are a lot of misconceptions out there, and we recognize that we can do more to help people, especially creators, understand what we do,” Instagram said in a blog post.

The social networking platform said that it doesn’t have a singular algorithm that oversees what people do or don’t see on Instagram. Instead, it uses a variety of algorithms, processes and classifiers that are built for its own purpose.

“We want to make the most of people’s time, and we believe that using technology to personalise everyone’s experience is the best way to do that,” Instagram added.

Meta-owned platform further explained that each tool, Feed, Stories, Reels, Search and more, use its own algorithm on the app that is tailored based on how people use it. “People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, use Explore to discover new content and creators and be entertained in Reels. We rank things differently in these different parts of the app, and have added features and controls like Close Friends, Favourites and Following so you can further customise your experience,” the photo-sharing platform added. So How Does Feed Ranking Work?
Feed is a mix of content from the accounts one follows on the platform. Instagram shares content on your feed based on posts shared by the people you follow, as well as posts from accounts people don’t already follow but the social networking platform thinks users might be interested in.

“We determine what you might be interested in based on a variety of factors, including what and whom you’ve followed, liked or engaged with recently,” Instagram said.

For the next step, Instagram stores all the information they have about what was posted, the people who made those posts and user’s preferences.

“We call these “signals,” and there are thousands of them. They include everything from when a post was shared to whether you’re using a phone or the web to how often you like videos,” Instagram said.

So What Are These Signals?
User Activity: Posts you’ve liked, shared, saved or commented on help us understand what you might be interested in.

Information About The Post: These are signals both about how popular a post is – think how many people have liked it and how quickly people are liking, commenting, sharing and saving a post – and more mundane information about the content itself, like when it was posted, and what location, if any, was attached to it.

Information About The Person Who Posted: This helps Instagram get a sense for how interesting the person might be to the user, and includes signals like how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks.

User History Of Interacting With Someone: This gives the Meta-owned platform a sense of how interested users are generally in seeing posts from a particular person. An example is whether or not users comment on each other’s posts.