Since when did Instagram stop showing “recent photos” for a search? When I do a search on Instagram, it shows only “top posts.” What if I want to come back tomorrow and see new posts for a particular search? I can’t do that anymore. It only shows the top posts. The same stuff! I don’t want to come back to that hashtag a day later and see repeated posts.
According to a Reddit post, Instagram removed “recent photo” 10 months ago. I haven’t used Instagram much in the past few years. It’s truly a bad platform for sharing and discovering photos.
For instance, today I was checking out an old bookmark for #blackwingpencils. I liked seeing what people were drawing using their Blackwing-branded pencils. I’m a Blackwing fan myself, so it’s cool to see what’s happening in the community. But man. There are only top posts for that hashtag.
Also, the notion of “searching” on Instagram is quite misleading. You can’t search ANYTHING. You can only look up hashtags. Hashtags are mashed-up words into one exact phrase. You can’t search for separate words. *shakes head* Instagram is truly an awful platform. If I’m looking to share photos, where do I go? Flickr? That site has great features (blows Instagram out of the water). But Flickr doesn’t feel current anymore.
What would be Instagram’s rationale for removing the “recent posts” within a hashtag page?
Including photos under “recent posts” allows people to discover others. Instead, only the people with a large following get seen. Booooo on Instagram! This doesn’t help smaller accounts grow their base.
Greed is the only rationale I can see. It forces people into paying to boost their posts in hopes of breaking into the “top posts” tier.
Good point, Steve! I didn’t even know that users can pay to “boost” their posts. My goodness, the whole mystery algorithm of Instagram forces people to pay just so their stuff can be seen.
I’d love for there to be an alternative photo service. Flickr isn’t it, because you have to pay $73/year to have more than 50 photos. I don’t see Imgur as a photo service, more as a place to post random stuff. Facebook? That’s not really a photo-exclusive site. I guess there isn’t any other social media photo sites…. do we count deviantart.com?
insta is well overdue some competition. I suspect they have killed the competition in recent years, which is why they have the ability to…..do what they are doing
Not only does Instagram sort only by “Most Popular” and not “Most Recent”, but they only show the top 9 or 12 most popular. (I’ve found the number fluctuates a bit).
To get more results on Instagram, use the following hack. Put this url in your browser and add your search term after the equals sign.
https://www.instagram.com/explore/search/keyword/?q=
That is a pretty neat trick, but it shows more of the top results.
I used the hashtag #blackwingpencil with this URL:
https://www.instagram.com/explore/search/keyword/?q=blackwingpencil
I can keep scrolling and scrolling (which is nice that it’s not limited to 9 or 12), but these results aren’t in chronological order. It’s still the the most engaged posts.
I tried googling around for a solution. My google query: instagram chronological order hashtag; led me to this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/14pek1y/how_do_i_see_all_posts_of_a_particular_hashtag_now/
The users all agree there is no solution. I feel really bad for this user:
Even the Instagram Graph API doesn’t allow you to sort the results. It says right in their documentation:
June 2, 2016 is the day Instagram rolled out the algorithm order. https://web.archive.org/web/20160603080416/http://blog.instagram.com/post/145322772067/160602-news
I have a lot to say about this. but some brief points…..this is a bad advert for “ai” – because if “ai” can’t remove text spam from hashtags – it can’t do anything. I suspect this is totally about instagram taking its users for total granted – seeing how much it can trash the site and the numbers keep going up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the coders met up for lunch and boasted about the bad reduction in useability, and the numbers from the “dumbass users” keep increasing.
also it’s definitely about money – pay money, get boosted. plus with 500mill or so daily users, insta can completely afford to get rid of some of them and still have plenty to train it’s AI database models
I’m not sure what you mean by “this is a bad advert for “ai” – because if “ai” can’t remove text spam from hashtags – it can’t do anything.“
I was jumping a few steps I guess. “AI” (I’m using inverted commas) is apparently being touted as the new do-anything software tech. it should be possible to use AI technology to tackle relatively “simple” problems like detecting text spam on a text platform — and if “AI” can’t detect text spam, it isn’t a good advert for what AI is capable of (a major player like instagram should be able to afford to use “AI” tech to tackle problems like this — and it would be a good advert for it). I suspect the real reason that recent hashtags are no longer available, isn’t anything to do with spam (which is the official reason instagram have given) – the real reason, is that instagram wants people to pay to be seen in search results.