Instagram announced Thursday that it is once again making changes to “give you more control over your feed and ensure the posts you see are timely.”
The company announced two big changes on its blog—one that puts you in control of when your feed refreshes and one that ensures the most recent posts “are more likely to appear first” in your feed.
The first change is one that Instagram needs to pass along to Twitter, because it is something that I have been lamenting forever. There is nothing more annoying than clicking on a post to expand the comments, then returning to the main page, only to lose your place and have your feed jump all the way back up to the top because Instagram automatically refreshed before you were ready.
Instagram has figured out that this is enough to make people close the app in frustration, so they are now testing a “New Posts” button that lets you decide when you want to refresh your feed so that you don’t lose your place in your browsing.
The other dumb thing is the loss of chronological order. There’s nothing worse than seeing the flyer of what was probably a bomb-ass party three days after it happened. That was the state of the Instagram feed once they removed chronological ordering. Posts were showing up days after the fact, much to the annoyance of many users.
To fix that, Instagram said that it has made changes ensuring that new posts appear first in your feed. It is not a return to chronological order, but at least the feed will make a little bit more sense.
An Instagram spokesperson told Newsweek that the company has no plans on returning to the chronological order for posts. In addition, the “New Posts” button is still in testing mode and not available to all users on the app.
So while we aren’t getting chronological order back, at least newer posts will show up sooner—and not three days after the event has happened.
It’s the little things.