Hey Instagram, your algorithm is showing
Someone told me once that if a company is giving you something for free, it’s because you are the product being sold. It’s the difference between ‘customer’ and ‘consumer’: the former suggesting a transaction made between two willing parties, the latter that a vacuum is turned on.
Consumers not paying to use a free product in any other way than to become a dataset sold to coworking spaces and almond milk companies typically have little say in how that product actually performs. This gives companies carte blanche to fiddle with the offering to more deliberately impact how it works, with a bend toward making it work harder for those shelling out the funds. Thus, the current trend of offering greater “personalization” in digital services is born, manifesting in the form of marketing strategies and components of product design. In the case of social media networks, personalization increasingly takes the form of feeds curated by proprietary algorithms rather than human beings. Suddenly, the code magic behind the scenes of your favorite apps has moved into the forefront. And surprise! It’s tied to ad revenue, not improved user experiences.
Instagram, the beloved photo- and video-sharing app with 300 million daily active users, is just one example. Like all scrappy startups, Instagram started off with a novel idea (or at least a novel execution of an idea) that took off. Unfortunately, in business terms, this means demand shot up and it behooved them to mess with that sweet, sepia-filtered supply.
Four years after being acquired by Facebook, Instagram’s massive adoption rates (24 percent of all adults) make it an attractive source of revenue for its parent company. Not unrelated, Instagram recently made headlines by announcing it would be rolling out changes to its algorithm that would impact the way content shows up in a user’s feed. Rather than display posts chronologically, with newest items on top, the algorithm would now give priority to items it believes individual users want to see most. Forget the serendipity of accessing your feed as a moment in time (as in, “What are my friends up to nowish?”), your app may instead choose to show you something from many hours ago if it thinks you are more likely to want to engage with that first. This means your Instagram could turn Latergram real fast. It also means that you, the user, are being shoved into a bubble of algorithmic assumptions.
This is “personalization.” It’s the magic sauce brands like to slather all over their apps and websites and digital displays — and not for the reasons they promise their users. In truth, the motivation has less to do with offering an experience that feels oriented on unique preferences and user history, and more to do with forcing individuals into a filtered state that makes them more susceptible to targeted advertising.
And there’s no end in sight. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated and reliable, its related capabilities like image recognition, natural language processing and deep learning will take personalization to an even higher degree. With A.I. embedded into the code of social media platforms, companies don’t even need programmers to decide how to best capture eyeballs via an algorithm — the code will “learn” on its own over time and only deepen assumptions made about users. Left to their own devices, these assumption bubbles will become blinders.
Across the internet, a false choice is being made that says experiences that feel personal must also feel predatory. Understanding the consumer is all well and good, but there’s little point for a company to know an individual’s tastes and browser data if they’re only going to use it as a distraction to shield them from experiencing anything new.
Instagram and other companies pushing personalization couch it as beneficial to users, but perhaps it’s telling that marketers laud changes to the algorithm far more often. It certainly feels like an attempt to give Instagram more control over who sees what, thereby freeing them to make more promises to advertisers. But maybe that’s for the mysterious algorithm to decide.
Of course, not all personalization is inherently bad. In the case of e-commerce, for example, personalization can be a good thing — few would enjoy frequenting brick-and-mortar stores just to endlessly stroll through aisles of items they would never buy. But it doesn’t necessarily make sense in all cases. What happens when personalization goes so far as to close your eyes to something you might benefit from being exposed to? Where is the chance to find stories or read commentary not presumed to align with your worldview or preferences? And why should a news app be personalized to our individual tastes anyway? World events do not belong to any one of us, and they are not being sold.
For user personas that tend to keep the list of people they follow low and the brands almost non-existent, it is unlikely that they will miss much raw content if they’re willing to keep scrolling down for it. But they will consistently see the same familiar faces over and over again at the top and will have to work harder in the app to make sure they see the rest. This is not a travesty by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a reminder that these users have no control over how a service like Instagram works because they’re not the ones cutting the checks.
So long as brands can hide behind the banner of personalization, there’s no limit to the changes they can make to established services — and the data it might demand of its users — especially if they’re free. And at any moment they’re likely to announce new updates meant to squeeze more blood from code. What’s unclear is when, if ever, users get a say in the matter. There’s no telling what changes will impact users next, but you can bet there will be a logo change strategically launched beforehand as a distraction.
This is not to rail against Instagram in particular — they’re just one example of a company guising a quest for profits as the innocuous act of delivering personalized experiences. But truthfully, it does feel a bit off-brand that the company so instrumental in introducing you to FOMO could be so comfortable hiding what you came to see behind an algorithm that you were never supposed to.
