Instagram Recommends Photos in Your Feed Now, Users Aren’t Happy

Instagram is now rolling out a new “Recommended Posts” feature widely to its users. It suggests photos and videos for you directly in your feed from people you don’t follow. Instead, the suggested content will be based on what people you follow have liked.

TechCrunch reports that the feature is being quietly released after it was spotted earlier this month while Instagram tested it out with a smaller subset of users.

The new “Recommended for You” section will be found in your feed view and will show three to five photos, TechCrunch says. Instagram previously recommended content as well, but you needed to visit the Explore section of the app in search of them — now they’ll be front and center alongside your main home feed.

This is a major new direction for Instagram that causes the company to further deviate from its origins as a simple, chronological photo-sharing service and into a service that’s much more heavily based on algorithms, much like Facebook’s News Feed is.

And just as users loudly complained when Instagram switched feeds from chronological to algorithmic, many users aren’t happy with this latest move. Here’s a sampling of some of the negative reactions found on Twitter:










On its help site, Instagram says that while you can’t turn off the Recommended for You section, you can temporarily hide posts you see in it by tapping the three-dot menu above them.


For now, the recommended posts will appear after you’ve gone through the posts in your main feed from people you do follow. No word on whether this will be the permanent arrangement, or whether the end goal is to integrate recommended posts directly into your main feed like what’s seen on Facebook (which owns Instagram).

(via TechCrunch via DPReview)

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