At Facebook’s F8 conference yesterday, the company noted that it’d soon update Instagram with a revamped Explore tab to make it easier to discover fresh content that you might enjoy.
The refreshed version of Explore will bring a list of topics to the top of the screen, such as ‘animals’, and ‘photography’; tapping any one of them will reveal related posts as well as a bunch of popular hashtags that you can follow.
That’s all well and good, Instagram, but I’m hoping it also tackles the problem of low-quality posts in the Explore tab. It’s been on my mind for some time now, but I was excited to learn yesterday that I’m not the only one who feels this way:
Instagram Explore is now full of memes, stolen low-res photos, repetitive posts, and shitty clips.
It used to be a photographers and photography enthusiasts paradise.
Humans. Ruin. Everything.
— Samir ? (@shadez) May 1, 2018
I’ll admit that I’m guilty of tainting the waters by searching for rubbish on Instagram, just for laughs (who doesn’t look for douchebags doing stupid things? Just me?), and not it seems like I’ve broken the app. It won’t stop surfacing crappy posts I don’t care for. As a result, I don’t use the Explore tab very much.
It’d be great to see this feature supported with either better AI or human curation, so as to filter out posts of poor quality and actually help me find interesting new creators and imagery on the platform – not just mountains of content vaguely related to things I’ve searched for or profiles I follow. That hasn’t happened for a while now, and there’s certainly an opportunity for Instagram to fix things and get people to spend more time within the app.
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It remains to be seen if the introduction of topic channels will help improve the experience; we’ll find out in the coming weeks as the new Explore tab rolls out globally.
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