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It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be t

It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of puppers filling your explore. :)

wastedhours 7y ago
That is one of the things I like about the YouTube one - the option to remove from your view history seemingly does have an effect on the recommendation engine.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > seemingly It definitely does. The homepage goes back to recommending a mix of my subscriptions and content generally related to them. I like to reset my Youtube viewing history a couple times a month to see which direction my viewing habits will take my recommendations this time. I'll often ratchet into new territory. This month it was Warcraft 3: Reforged gameplay (Grubby), a game I haven't played in 15+ years. The month before it was fiction book review channels. It's fun to change it up. In Youtube's recent homepage update this month, they also rolled out a "Don't recommend this channel anymore" button on the dropdown which is very welcome.
  - leobakerhytch 7y ago
    Thanks for this suggestion — will try this as a way to escape the ‘filter bubble’. To clarify: do you reset completely, retaining absolutely no likes, subscriptions, etc., or do you find it sufficient to clear your watched videos?
SnowingXIV 7y ago
Agreed, it would be preferable if you could turn it off altogether and just get a wide variety of popular posts as that seems to match the title of 'explore' more closely. I'm into lifting but my explore has turned into a flood of fit instagram models.
- zebby 7y ago
  I see this as an absolute win
- SaltyBackendGuy 7y ago
  > I'm into lifting but my explore has turned into a flood of fit instagram models. This has been my experience as well. I end up using the "Don't show images like this for this hashtag" feature but they always seem to come back.
raverbashing 7y ago
There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text) But yeah it can be off-putting.
- aspaviento 7y ago
  In my experience that button does nothing to prevent the spam of images and videos of a certain topic.
- pornel 7y ago
  This option is not working for me at all. I wonder if it's because if I see a thumbnail of something unwanted, I first have to open the post in order to access the menu, so the the app counts it as a view first, adding the unwanted post to things I "engage" with.
  - zten 7y ago
    Try long pressing and then sliding the post up. You'll get the same menu without popping into the full post view. I don't think it counts as strongly, because I've been able to eliminate a lot of things this way.
- PowerfulWizard 7y ago
  I think it is driven by likes and bookmarks, if you browse your likes and bookmarks you might see the source of certain recommendations, and unliking and unmarking should control it. (I don't actually know, but this is how I believe it works.)
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    Not entirely. Likes and saves increase the chance of seeing some types of content - but i also started seeing guns and kardashians at one point, without ever liking a gun post or a kardashian post. So simply viewing things will cause them to show up
- fwn 7y ago
  This feature currently isn't present in either the web or pwa version of Instagram. That aside, my personal experience would be vastly improved by having a "hide all images with text in it" option.
aspaviento 7y ago
That happened to me! For some reason IG decided that I was super interested in barbers of arab countries (what I assumed were arab countries) and it was constantly showing me barbershop videos and fancy men's hair cuts. I had to block all those accounts just to stop the spam (and thankfully they weren't that many).
nightski 7y ago
This is so amusing to me. I imagine their team goes to great lengths to obtain training data, clean it up and feed it to their ML algorithm. Yet the most critical input data - direct feedback from the user on the traits that shape their interests, is completely ignored/not collected.
- baddox 7y ago
  Presumably IG is optimizing for something different than what you as a user would be optimizing for. Possible candidates would be “engagement” or sad impressions or clicks. As a user you probably don’t care to maximize how many ads you see or even how much you use the app. You just want to see things that interest you. And of course there’s absolutely no reason why IG would optimize for that.
  - nightski 7y ago
    You may or may not be right. I don't use instagram because of this. But how could they possibly know how relevant the data is to even their model since they do not even collect that data in the first place?
    - baddox 7y ago
      Well, as others have noted, apparently they do have some affordance for that. But in general, the argument "why don't they collect data X to see if it's relevant to their goals" could be applied to literally any possible data X. Of course intuition must be used to focus data collection efforts.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  This is one of the reasons why I would never use such an app. If a tool would rather guess what I want (and obviously get it completely wrong) rather than ask me then I consider the tool defective and stop wasting my time with it.
wsinks 7y ago
I got hacked at one point, and I really should restart my account it's so bad. Every time I pull it up it's just big butts...
sdan 7y ago
Instagram's Explore page is encouraging narrowcasting, which is arguably very detrimental to society/users in general.
thegabriele 7y ago
Same thing happens with youtube, at least in my experience. The time i click by mistake on a video that really doesn't interests me i feel like i'm doomed.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Youtube seems heavily biased towards things I’ve viewed most recently on the homepage. I actually like Youtube’s recommendations more than any other website, especially the similar videos section on video pages themselves. It seems to recommend genuinely related videos and usually ones with a certain base level of ‘quality’. It’s good at things like picking out dates in the video title and listing other videos for that date/event.
- oefrha 7y ago
  If your watch history is on, removing that specific entry usually fixes the problem. Though, if your watch history is off and empty...
  - thegabriele 7y ago
    Thanks for the hint, gonna clean something

wastedhours 7y ago

That is one of the things I like about the YouTube one - the option to remove from your view history seemingly does have an effect on the recommendation engine.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
> seemingly It definitely does. The homepage goes back to recommending a mix of my subscriptions and content generally related to them. I like to reset my Youtube viewing history a couple times a month to see which direction my viewing habits will take my recommendations this time. I'll often ratchet into new territory. This month it was Warcraft 3: Reforged gameplay (Grubby), a game I haven't played in 15+ years. The month before it was fiction book review channels. It's fun to change it up. In Youtube's recent homepage update this month, they also rolled out a "Don't recommend this channel anymore" button on the dropdown which is very welcome.
- leobakerhytch 7y ago
  Thanks for this suggestion — will try this as a way to escape the ‘filter bubble’. To clarify: do you reset completely, retaining absolutely no likes, subscriptions, etc., or do you find it sufficient to clear your watched videos?

SnowingXIV 7y ago

Agreed, it would be preferable if you could turn it off altogether and just get a wide variety of popular posts as that seems to match the title of 'explore' more closely. I'm into lifting but my explore has turned into a flood of fit instagram models.

zebby 7y ago
I see this as an absolute win
SaltyBackendGuy 7y ago
> I'm into lifting but my explore has turned into a flood of fit instagram models. This has been my experience as well. I end up using the "Don't show images like this for this hashtag" feature but they always seem to come back.

raverbashing 7y ago

There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text) But yeah it can be off-putting.

aspaviento 7y ago
In my experience that button does nothing to prevent the spam of images and videos of a certain topic.
pornel 7y ago
This option is not working for me at all. I wonder if it's because if I see a thumbnail of something unwanted, I first have to open the post in order to access the menu, so the the app counts it as a view first, adding the unwanted post to things I "engage" with.
- zten 7y ago
  Try long pressing and then sliding the post up. You'll get the same menu without popping into the full post view. I don't think it counts as strongly, because I've been able to eliminate a lot of things this way.
PowerfulWizard 7y ago
I think it is driven by likes and bookmarks, if you browse your likes and bookmarks you might see the source of certain recommendations, and unliking and unmarking should control it. (I don't actually know, but this is how I believe it works.)
- kennywinker 7y ago
  Not entirely. Likes and saves increase the chance of seeing some types of content - but i also started seeing guns and kardashians at one point, without ever liking a gun post or a kardashian post. So simply viewing things will cause them to show up
fwn 7y ago
This feature currently isn't present in either the web or pwa version of Instagram. That aside, my personal experience would be vastly improved by having a "hide all images with text in it" option.

aspaviento 7y ago

That happened to me! For some reason IG decided that I was super interested in barbers of arab countries (what I assumed were arab countries) and it was constantly showing me barbershop videos and fancy men's hair cuts. I had to block all those accounts just to stop the spam (and thankfully they weren't that many).

nightski 7y ago

This is so amusing to me. I imagine their team goes to great lengths to obtain training data, clean it up and feed it to their ML algorithm. Yet the most critical input data - direct feedback from the user on the traits that shape their interests, is completely ignored/not collected.

baddox 7y ago
Presumably IG is optimizing for something different than what you as a user would be optimizing for. Possible candidates would be “engagement” or sad impressions or clicks. As a user you probably don’t care to maximize how many ads you see or even how much you use the app. You just want to see things that interest you. And of course there’s absolutely no reason why IG would optimize for that.
- nightski 7y ago
  You may or may not be right. I don't use instagram because of this. But how could they possibly know how relevant the data is to even their model since they do not even collect that data in the first place?
  - baddox 7y ago
    Well, as others have noted, apparently they do have some affordance for that. But in general, the argument "why don't they collect data X to see if it's relevant to their goals" could be applied to literally any possible data X. Of course intuition must be used to focus data collection efforts.
Nextgrid 7y ago
This is one of the reasons why I would never use such an app. If a tool would rather guess what I want (and obviously get it completely wrong) rather than ask me then I consider the tool defective and stop wasting my time with it.

wsinks 7y ago

I got hacked at one point, and I really should restart my account it's so bad. Every time I pull it up it's just big butts...

sdan 7y ago

Instagram's Explore page is encouraging narrowcasting, which is arguably very detrimental to society/users in general.

thegabriele 7y ago

Same thing happens with youtube, at least in my experience. The time i click by mistake on a video that really doesn't interests me i feel like i'm doomed.

ubercow13 7y ago
Youtube seems heavily biased towards things I’ve viewed most recently on the homepage. I actually like Youtube’s recommendations more than any other website, especially the similar videos section on video pages themselves. It seems to recommend genuinely related videos and usually ones with a certain base level of ‘quality’. It’s good at things like picking out dates in the video title and listing other videos for that date/event.
oefrha 7y ago
If your watch history is on, removing that specific entry usually fixes the problem. Though, if your watch history is off and empty...
- thegabriele 7y ago
  Thanks for the hint, gonna clean something