Instagram Rolls Out Suggested Posts to Create an Infinite Feed ⇥ theverge.com

Ashley Carman, the Verge:

Instagram is expanding its feed today with the launch of “suggested posts.” These posts, from accounts you don’t follow, will show up after you’ve reached the end of your feed and give you the option to keep scrolling with Instagram’s suggestions. Up until now, the feed has been entirely determined by users’ preferences and the people they follow.

Instagram has been testing this for a while; suggested posts began showing up in my feed earlier this year. It tried something similar about two years ago, but stopped after some time.

This time, the change seems permanent, and irritates me so much that it singularly caused me to abandon Instagram. I signed up days after it launched, and posted often. I love the creativity that it encouraged. But I do not want to see photos in my feed from accounts I do not follow, and there is no way to turn this off. This is a purely business decision — a way for Facebook to juice the amount of time people spend using Instagram, and a way to keep serving advertising — that comes at the expense of the product’s integrity. The Facebook-ification of Instagram has taken some time, but it has fully arrived now.