Instagram Working on 'You're All Caught Up' Feature to Let You Know When All New Posts Have Been Viewed

[MacRumors]

Instagram has not used a chronological feed for years now, making it difficult to determine when you've seen all of the new content on the social network.

Instagram may be planning to fix this issue with a new "You're All Caught Up" feature that's designed to notify users when all unseen posts from the last 48 hours have been viewed.

The feature was first noticed by TechCrunch, and an Instagram spokesperson confirmed that it is being tested and will show up for a limited number of users.

Instagram did not, however, share details on how it works and whether it includes every single post from the people you follow or just the best ones that its algorithm has decided to display.

The new "You're All Caught Up" text is part of Instagram's pledge to offer a Usage Insights feature that will let users know just how much time they're spending in the Instagram app.

"We're building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram - any time should be positive and intentional. Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it's the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously," Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom wrote on Twitter last week.

Article Link: Instagram Working on 'You're All Caught Up' Feature to Let You Know When All New Posts Have Been Viewed

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Nice deal. Always frustrating when you go back just to find it's all posts you've seen before.

Now here come the complaints about a chronological timeline from people that don't understand that if you had that still you'd never see the posts from most of the people they follow as there'd be just too much content.

 

[iZac]

As MacGuy rightly suggests ...

Why would they just not reinstate a chronological feed for those of use that want it? Just a tick box to let us have a little more control.

 

[djbuddha]

OR... they could just put it back in chronological order (or even have a switch for that purpose).

But then again, why would any corporation want to listen to user feedback. I mean- NOBODY wants chronological order, right?

 

[charlituna]

at this point I'd rather have someone else create an Instagram viewing app. then maybe we'd finally get one that is created to work on an iPad. give us options to put in chronological order, etc

 

[tzm41]

This feature is the materialization of the FOMO syndrome. The urge to "catch up" with every single post on your social media feed is a bit insane.

 

[Mizouse]

Just give us the option for chronological order. Hell even Facebook has the option for "most recent"

 

[charlituna]

Just give us the option for chronological order. Hell even Facebook has the option for "most recent"

facebook has a lot of options that folks would love to see on instagram. like iPad support, merging 'like' lists into the timeline etc.

 

[C DM]

Just give us the option for chronological order. Hell even Facebook has the option for "most recent"

Bingo. Seems like they are solving the problem by coming up with various semi-related workarounds while avoiding the actual solution of providing that simple option.

 

[FelixDerKater]

Who has time for that kind of stress?

 

[ike1707]

What an ironic day for me to delete my IG account

 

[trusso]

"Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without."

- Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
​

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

As MacGuy rightly suggests ...

Why would they just not reinstate a chronological feed for those of use that want it? Just a tick box to let us have a little more control.

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

 

[djbuddha]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

Even though I argue for chronological order (as I wrote above). I can't argue this point at all. Very well put.

 

[PsyOpWarlord]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

Not sure about Instagram but on Facebook, this is really an issue because Facebook forces you to look at all those Like, Share, and Game post on your main news feed. If they had separate tabs it wouldn't be an issue.

Main (default) news feed: Chronological Order - shows only the post your friends type up themselves.
Like/Share feed: Trending order - Shows all the like/share posts (that annoying click happy crap)
Game feed: Post involving Facebook games. I have no idea if chronological or trending is better here as I avoid gaming on Facebook completely.

 

[SeattleMoose]

Part of the FaceBook (what's that sucking sound) Universe...no thanx.

 

[ignatius345]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

I, for one, am very very tired of tech companies (and their apologists) telling me what's good for me. I think a lot of us don't give half a crap what the "data shows" and just want to see things in order instead of having another damned algorithm choose for us.

While you're sitting here telling me it's "better for me" to just let the nice machine sort things, I'm looking at 3 day-old posts from the same 10% of the people I follow placed above hour-old posts from others. And I don't buy for a second that this has any purpose but to keep my eyeballs in the app for as long as possible as I scroll and scroll hoping to make some sense of what order they're deigning to show me posts in. Enough.

 

[C DM]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

And yet Facebook has offered and continues offer an option to look at posts chronologically if the user elects to do so.
[doublepost=1526964820][/doublepost]

Even though I argue for chronological order (as I wrote above). I can't argue this point at all. Very well put.

Sure you can. Average by far doesn't represent even the majority, it's just a statistical calculation that doesn't necessarily mean much one way or another for many many users. But, more importantly, even with all that, Facebook still offers an option to sort the feed chronologically to this day.[doublepost=1526964820][/doublepost]

While you're sitting here telling me it's "better for me" to just let the nice machine sort things, I'm looking at 3 day-old posts from the same 10% of the people I follow placed above hour-old posts from others. And I don't buy for a second that this has any purpose but to keep me scrolling and keep my eyeballs in the app for as long as possible as I scroll and scroll hoping to make some sense of what order they're deigning to show me posts in. Enough.

And that describes it all rather well.

 

[iZac]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

I certainly see your point, if you have that many friends on Instagram, that would be an issue. Although for my personal use case following 100 people, It's not a problem. It certainly wasn't a problem for me before they instigated their algorithm, just the option would be nice. If it's a mistake, the user can always untick it.

But if we must use an algorithm, a less user-hostile way would be to allow users to prioritise or ignore users manually and not leave the decision to the service to decide who is more important to you based on whatever black magic they use.

 

[itsmilo]

This screenshot looks just like snapchat with these bigger story posts on top.

I don’t like it. Stick to the small circles

 

[HacKage]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

I see where you're coming from, but certainly in the case of IG, that was happening to me as it was anyway. The same 4-5 IG profiles (sneaker pages) were just flooding posts up, some of which I liked which the algorithm took as me wanting to see even more of those posts and I never got to see anything from my friends. Eventually I unfollowed ALL of these pages, and unfollowed the rest of the business/semi-commercial profiles I followed so that now my feed while out of order, is just around 300 people and it's possible to catch up as normal.

Where Facebook started as a social network for friends and has since become more of a content platform for businesses rather than social interaction, IG has also went from looking at friends live's to basically adverts from influencers and pages just bombarding people with product images.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Now here come the complaints about a chronological timeline from people that don't understand that if you had that still you'd never see the posts from most of the people they follow as there'd be just too much content.

The urge to "catch up" with every single post on your social media feed is a bit insane.

Exactly.

I'm OK with knowing I won't see *every* post by all the people I follow on Instagram.

Just like I'm OK with not reading *every* article from all the websites and blogs I'm interested in.

Or watching *every* Youtube video from all the channels I subscribe to. Or reading *every* Tweet from all the people I follow.

Life's too short.

With new content created daily... or hourly... I can't possibly see it all. I think I'd be foolish to even try!

 

[Arran]

This feature is the materialization of the FOMO syndrome. The urge to "catch up" with every single post on your social media feed is a bit insane.

Agreed. It’s like walking into a bar thinking you have to try every bottle before you can go home. Crazy.

 

[xDENTALPLANx]

Because Instagram/Facebook has data that shows that isn't good for users. The average Facebook user would have more than 1500 posts in their feed a day (and that was 3 years ago). No one can look at that much. What's why they have to surface the best posts using an algorithm.

They have piles of data showing that giving people a chronological feed, even when they think they want it, actually causes them to engage LESS. They get burnt out by 1000 posts by the same 2 people and don't bother to look at as much, don't engage as much, and don't come back as often. As much as you think you want that, the data proves you're wrong.

The data also shows that people are engaging more with the current setup. Despite what you believe, everything shows people like the current setup more than the old and giving them the option of the old one has no benefit for these social networks.

Whilst this is seemingly true, I also wonder how much of it comes down to the fact that they can also make more money off ads when using an algorithm - incentivising companies to pay to get their posts seen

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Whilst this is seemingly true, I also wonder how much of it comes down to the fact that they can also make more money off ads when using an algorithm - incentivising companies to pay to get their posts seen

This isn't just about ads. They've made moves recently to show more posts from friends and family. They understand that people don't say to themselves, "I should go on Facebook and see what the brands I follow have to offer today." They go on Facebook to see what their friends are posting. If they see too many brand posts and not enough from friends and family, they stop coming back to Facebook and that means no money for them.

Brands were abusing the network and posting a ton of boring garbage (think about how infrequently you engaged with most brand posts), so they had to cut back the number of them that show up and only show those that see good engagement from users (an indication the post is actually worth showing someone).