With Instagram suggested posts, the memes come to you.
This new feature pushes for more engagement and ironically, I love it.
Instagram recently introduced suggested posts. These are posts that come after you’ve seen all the posts from people or rather accounts you follow. Instagram says that the suggested posts are based on posts from accounts like the ones you follow and posts similar to the ones you like or save.
Suggested posts is a strange feature especially since it shows up right after you’ve sen all your posts in your feed and finally reaching that “You’re All Caught Up” marker.
This mid-feed alert lets users know that they have seen every post over the past two days from accounts they follow since Instagram removed the chronological feed – we’re still mad about it.
This is Instagram’s way of deterring users from staying on the app for long. Instagram introduced as part of its Time Well Spent features in a bid to be more responsible with its users.
Time Well Spent is a movement by Tristan Harris, a former Googler who started in January 2018.
Well, Instagram now wants you to stay on the app for as long as the suggested posts let you.
Before this feature went public, it was being tested for a few users. At the end of your feed was two tabs, Suggested Tab and Older Tab.
After months of checking out Suggested Posts, I have come to love this feature.
I mainly use Instagram for memes after I did a follower cleanup and purged a lot of accounts I followed.
So most of the time, when I open that app, I only scroll past a couple of photos and then hit my Mecca – Instagram’s suggested posts.
Instagram’s algorithm has known for a while that I only like memes even when I’m on the Explore page so my suggested pots are only memes.
Suggested posts keep me coming back to the app and even when I leave, I feel good about myself especially with the COVID-19 pandemic and the weird state the world is in right now.
I probably think I’m the only person who gets excited by my suggested posts – as soon as I open the app, I will even quickly scroll past posts from people I follow just to see what Instagram has algorithmically curated for me in my Suggested Posts feed.
I get to not only have a laugh but also get enlightened by some of the accounts that share informational posts from Tumblr or Twitter.
I have come to love the diversity of content on my Suggested Posts especially the social justice slideshows that have come to dominate Instagram.
Instagram’s Suggested Posts also highlights some of the underrated and niche meme accounts.
Instagram’s suggested posts bring a rush of endorphins and as a person who likes doomscrolling on Twitter, the distract the memes bring is worth it.
I get a different kind of high scrolling through my suggested posts
