Instagram now gives you more control over what Reels you want to watch
Instagram’s algorithm is notorious for changing your feed with content based on what you watch on the app. It can be a little as three to five seconds of watching a reel, and your feed is suddenly flooded with similar content. This can be quite annoying, as you might not want to get your recommendations simply based on one different reel that you watched. Well, Instagram might finally have a solution for that as it plans on giving you more control over the algorithm. It will let you select the kind of content you want to see, and what you don’t want to appear in your feed.
Instagram, in a blog, announced the new feature, which gives you a new way to control your Reels experience. This feature, powered by AI, is designed to tailor your feed according to your preferences. There will be a new icon in the upper right corner with two lines and hearts. Tapping on this icon will open up to a new page for your algorithm. Here, you’ll first see a summary of the topics Instagram thinks you care about most. You can select or add topics of content that you want to see more of in your Reels. There’s another section below, where you can add topics of content that you want to “see less of” in your feed.
Once you’ve updated your choices, your Reels feed should reflect content that you’ve personally selected. There could still be some random Reel that you come across in your feed, but if it’s a topic that you’ve filtered out, then you probably won’t see it.
This feature will be available for Reels first, then expanded to the Explore section, and eventually to more areas in the app. Instagram has launched this feature in the US and will soon roll it out globally in English. The approach seems good, especially for users who want to watch Reels on topics they’re interested in. But whether this will help in solving the problem of your algorithm not switching up suddenly is something we’ll have to wait and see, once the feature is available.
