Ask HN: Why people asking for chronological order feed on Instagram?

3 points·startupflix··4 comments

If the solution to a problem isn't perceived as being good enough (eg people think an algorithm is hiding things they want to see instead of showing things things they want to see) users will often state they want the simplest possible alternative. In the case of a timeline that's everything in the default time series order. Essentially they're saying "The algorithm isn't working, so remove the algorithm and show me everything."

Does the algorithmic feed is more useful than the chronological approach? Will people move to a new app if the app provides chronological order feed?

The problem with the chronological feed is that you get people's posts bunched together. If a friend is having a night out and posting lots of selfies, meal pics, drinks pics, etc then that's all you'll see when you log in. It'd just be one person's updates for pages on end. That's a bad provably experience that stops people coming back to the app. The algorithm tries to improve that.

Also, and I don't know about Instagram, but on Facebook if you have 250 friends you could be seeing as many as 1000 posts a day from your network. You'd never see anything more than an hour old if it was chronological - imagine all the stuff you'd miss any time you didn't choose to scroll back.

Chronological ordering is awful.

Thanks a lot. Thank you for clarifying my doubts :)

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