Instagram's Algorithm Is Still Showing Posts From New Year's Eve

Some people are opening their Instagram apps to find that it’s New Year’s all over again. The algorithm is putting photos from the holiday that happened nearly a full week ago right at the top of feeds.

Photos have been showing up out of order for months since the social media, owned by Facebook, ditched chronological order when it changed its algorithm. Users have been asking for the company to bring the chronological order back but they’ve only gotten other updates, like a new commenting feature, instead.

Users were taking to Twitter to complain about the issue with the algorithm. Users weren’t only seeing posts from their friends on their timelines, but also from brands or other companies with promotions that have since ended. Some people thought this might be a way to push advertisers on the site to pay for sponsored posts.

But for the most part people really just wanted the chronological order back so they would actually see posts when they were first put online.

Twitter was full of sarcastic comments about the annoyance.

Instagram says the point of the algorithm change was to show users what they really cared about first. The idea was that moving away from the chronological order would help users see more posts that they wanted to see.

“On average, people miss 70 percent of their feeds. It’s become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share as Instagram has grown,” said a post on the Instagram blog. But evidently, it didn’t quite work out that way as users are missing out on the posts they do want to see.