Exclusive: Instagram’s new feature finally gives you (a little) more control of your algorithm

It’s a common experience: you search for white bean soup recipes one time on Instagram, and you are bombarded with white bean soup content on the app for seemingly all eternity.

Instagram wants to fix that. Starting today, the company’s three billion users can have more control over their algorithm via a “Tune Your Algorithm” feature. It’s not quite Bluesky, or the Instagram of yore that only displayed content from accounts users followed, but it does let users select or unsubscribe from different topics. 

The new feature, which leverages AI, lets users pick topics they want to see more or less of on their explore page. Users will first be able to see a list of suggested topics that their algorithm thinks they are interested in which they can modify. Users can also share their interests to their stories, allowing their followers to see and even replicate some of their feed.

“We’re always trying to show people the best possible reels for them. After 2020 [we] slowly started figuring out how to do a good job of predicting people’s interests and showing them reels they’d be interested in,” Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product, says. “I think we do a pretty good job today, but we don’t always get it right, and we know that people’s interests change. What we really want to do is give people control over the experience that they have on Instagram.”

In designing the feature, Instagram had to balance Reels’ utility as a discovery tool with the features that give users control over what they will see. 

“The ideal Reels experience is one that helps you go deeper on the interests you already have and then discover new interests that you might not even know about. And getting that balance right is really important,” Lyons says, adding,  “[Tune your algorithm] is one input we have into your Reels experience. So even if you add a handful of different interests, that’s not going to be the only content you see. You’re still going to see other content as well.” 

Lyons also says that the feature can help Instagram’s algorithm learn about users and serve them relevant content more quickly; after she adopted a cat and tuned her algorithm to feature more kitten content, her feed immediately updated to include relevant reels. In the past, the algorithm may have needed a few days to understand she wanted to see more.

By this same measure, the feature will likely improve the ad experience, as Instagram will be able to surface more targeted content for each user based on the interests they signal.

According to Lyons, the inspiration for the feature started as a meme on Threads a couple of years ago, when users started writing posts to their respective algorithms, asking it to connect them with different interests, like writers or books. “It was just people expressing what they wanted from their Threads experience. Some of them would say, Dear Algorithm, I just don’t want to see politics anymore. I’m over it,” Lyons says.

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