Last week, Instagram announced a major change to their whole user experience. They are planning to ditch the classic chronologically arranged timeline for an algorithmic based one.
It made sense due to the fact that the company is now part of Facebook and its mother company uses an algorithmic powered News Feed. The advantages of this setup is getting information that relates to you and from Facebook’s side, it makes it easier for them to partner with advertisers to targets ads that you might engage in.
Although this move has its advantages, the impending change is not sitting well with some people as there is a petition posted on Change.org that is meant to implore Instagram to keep the chronological order. The petition, rightly named “Keep Instagram Chronological” was started by one Sarah Heard where she gives reason as to why Instagram should change their stance:
After what happened when Facebook switched to algorithm based feeds, it’s certainly not something that small business will want. At the very least, shouldn’t the community be able to opt in, rather than having it mandated that this is how will now see our feed?
The two main points from her argument are the possibility that some businesses who have signed up to advertise on the platform will have lower ad conversions and the new change should be opt in where people can choose to enable it.
Currently, the petition is rather popular with over 200,000 people supporting it which is just shy of of the 300,000 people that are required to send the petition to Instagram.Instagram actually said in their blogpost while announcing their changes that they will listen to the feedback regarding the whole issue and we will have to wait and see if Instagram ultimately gives us an option to opt out of the new timeline.
