Instagram have started testing the ability for everyone on Instagram to have a recommendations reset. In just a few taps, you’ll be able to clear your recommended content across Explore, Reels and Feed and start afresh.
Your recommendations will start to personalise again over time, showing new content based on the content and accounts you interact with. When resetting, you’ll also have the option to review the accounts you’re following and unfollow any that share content you no longer want to see.
I’m loving this feature – there are so many things I was interested in in the past and pages I followed which I’ve lost interest in and today simply aren’t relevant. A recommendations reset, whilst slightly annoying in the short term as the platform tries to push all sorts of stuff on me that’s not of interest, will start to learn what I’m all about in 2024, rather than a few years ago!
This new feature, which will soon roll out globally, builds on the tools we already offer to let people curate what they see in their recommendations.
For example, people can tell us they like the content recommended in their Explore page by tapping the three dots in the corner of the post and selecting “Interested.” We recently announced a new way for teens in the US, UK, Canada and Australia to choose topics they want to see more of – everything from books and travel to cooking and sports. We also offer people ways to tell us what they don’t want to see in their recommendations by selecting “Not interested” from the three-dot menu, or using our Hidden Words feature to hide content with certain words or phrases in the caption.
– Meta
Meta also offer a range of tools to help teens shape their Instagram experience, beyond recommendations. For example, teens can switch to a Following Feed to see, in chronological order, content from accounts they follow, with the most recent post first. Alternatively, they can add accounts to a Favorites list so they see content from those accounts more often and higher in their Feed, and they can see a dedicated feed of just their favorites when they want to catch up on their posts quickly.
Features like Close Friends give teens more control over who sees their Stories, while the “Your activity” section in settings lets teens see and manage all their previous interactions in one place, giving them more control over their digital footprint. We also encourage teens to regularly review their following lists, to make sure the accounts they’re following are still accounts whose content they enjoy seeing.
