Social Media

Instagram Is Working on a New Type of Post Feed Prioritization Called ‘Favorites’

By Bill Toulas / September 13, 2021

Mobile developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi revealed that Instagram is working on the introduction of ‘Favorites,’ which will be a new post ranking system for feeds based on what friends and accounts you are interested in are up to. Instagram users have always been complaining about the “algorithm” that is responsible for content curation, but the simple chronological order listing is simply not coming back on the social media platform. The ‘Favorites’ is just another way to give people some control, allowing them to tag posts and have them rank higher in their friends' feeds.

To get started with ‘Favorites,’ one has to add accounts to their favorites list, and Instagram will help users on that part by serving them with some suggestions based on the account activity on the platform. Those accounts won’t have any way of knowing whether or not they are on your favorites list, allowing people to avoid all the unnecessary drama and maintaining the privacy of their selections. Possibly, one may choose to skip a “Close Friend,” and no one would ever know.

This is essentially a post prioritization on the account level, so users will just get to see what they’re most interested in first and above all else. The rest will come under the ‘Favorites’ feed, as normal, so nothing gets lost. The goal for the platform is to give users one more incentive to visit Instagram more often, checking on their favorite accounts quickly.

The difference between this new feature and Close Friends is that the latter is more geared towards Stories and sharing them exclusively with people closest to you. While both affect feed prioritization, they are essentially wholly different things. In the end, though, it is just another data point for users to enter and help make Instagram’s content curation algorithm a tad bit smarter.

Another problem with ‘Favorites’ is that “rising stars” or regular accounts will just drop down even further, while celebs and established influencers will now enjoy an even positioning onto people's feeds. Of course, we cannot evaluate the side effects before the actual feature is rolled out, so we’ll have to wait and appreciate everything when Instagram officially introduces ‘Favorites.’



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