Instagram Reintroducing Chronological Feed Option in 2022

Wednesday December 8, 2021 2:29 pm PST by Juli Clover

Instagram is planning to reintroduce a version a chronological feed option in 2022, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today in a Senate panel on teen safety (via Engadget).

Instagram Feature 2
"We're currently working on a version of a chronological feed that we hope to launch next year," Mosseri said, explaining that Instagram believes in giving people more control over how they view content.

Such a feature has apparently been in the works "for months" with Instagram targeting a launch in the first quarter of 2022.

When Instagram first launched, it provided a chronological feed that displayed the newest Instagram posts when you opened up the app, but in June 2016, Instagram swapped over to an algorithmic feed that displays posts based on relevancy.

Instagram has not had an option for a chronological feed for the past five years, so introducing an alternative to the algorithmic feed will be a major change. There have been multiple complaints about the Instagram feed over the years, and in 2018, the company did tweak the algorithm to make newer content show up more often.

Instagram has claimed that its algorithm is designed to surface the moments that people care about the most, highlighting posts based on interaction frequency and timeliness, but many Instagram users will likely be happy to have a chronological option.

Tag: Instagram

Top Rated Comments

Return Zero

56 months ago

"in the works for months"... This used to be the way the feed was. Why does this have to take a long time, as if it's a new feature?

Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)

mdlyen

56 months ago

But will the setting stick or revert every time you open the app (like Facebook)?

Score: 18 Votes (Like | Disagree)

WiseAJ

56 months ago

Do you mean META? Facebook no longer exists.

Facebook the social media app still exists, Facebook the company is now META.

Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)

adamjackson

56 months ago

When social networks ditched chronological, that's when I deleted my accounts. Facebook in 2011, Twitter in 2013. If they didn't trust me to read stuff that's newest versus what the algorithm thinks I want to see, that means they decide what I see and when and they took that power away from users which does increase engagement because we all know users over-subscribe by over-liking / following more content than they can reasonably see but that was the last straw for me. at this point, I see no value in going back to these social networks after almost 10 years without them.

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)