Instagram rolls out Suggested Posts

According to Official Engineering at Meta, Instagram is suggesting new content. Instagram has published a new overview of how it ranks content for its ‘Suggested Posts’, or the posts that you see in your Home feed from accounts that you don’t follow in the app.

The Instagram Feed is dominated by:

• Friends and family posts
• Some space travel magazines
• A few general news accounts
• Lots of science fiction blogs

As a user scrolls through their feed catching up with friends and family, keeping pace with general news, and sometimes taking a moment to catch up on an interesting science fiction short story.

Learn with Instagram how a user can optimize their content approach accordingly.

This element became a key focus recently, after Instagram began inserting a lot more AI-based content recommendations into user feeds, which prompted widespread user backlash, and has since seen IG scale it back, as it works to refine its algorithms.

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The Home Feed Ranking System ranks the posts from the sources you follow based on factors like engagement, relevance, and freshness. Whereas the Explore Ranking System opens you up to many other public posts which might be relevant and engaging to you.

Instagram launched Suggested Posts in Instagram to achieve this objective, which currently shows up at the end of the user’s feed.

System Overview

Information retrieval systems have a two-step design: candidate generation and candidate selection.

In the first step of candidate generation, based on a given user’s explicit or implicit interests we fetch all the candidates that a user could be possibly interested in.

In the second stage of candidate selection, typically a more heavy-weight ranking algorithm works on these candidates and selects the best subset that is finally shown to a user. Based on this understanding we are ready to dive into the design of the Suggested Posts ranking system.

Design principle

Before diving into the details of the machine learning system it is necessary to state the design principles which shall guide us along the way like a north star. “Feels Like Home.” Meaning, that scrolling through the End of Feed Recommendations should feel like scrolling down an extension of Instagram Home Feed.