Instagram Trials New Reels Filters to Improve User Experience

Instagram appears to be testing two new search filters for the Reels tab, which would enable you to sort your recommended Reels by “Latest” or “Most Viewed.”
As you can see in this example, posted by Brent Colmer (and shared by social media expert Lindsey Gamble), some users are now seeing the new filter options from a dropdown menu in the Reels tab. For most IG users, the filters you currently have available in the Reels tab, accessible by tapping the “Reels” title, are “Following” and “Nearby”.
These new options would give you more capacity to filter the Reels that you’re shown, though they’d still presumably be displayed to you based on IG’s algorithmic matching. So you’d be filtering the most recent of the clips assigned to you, based on your interests, as opposed to seeing the latest posts submitted to the app overall.
It could be a handy option, with the “Most Viewed” enabling more users to engage with trending content, in addition to the recency display. Which could enhance overall IG engagement, though sorting by recency may also mean that more questionable content gets traction, as it hasn’t yet been moderated or reported by IG users.
That’s likely a minor concern. According to Meta’s Community Standards Enforcement Reports, the vast majority of violations are proactively detected by Meta’s systems, before any user concerns. So it’s probably able to pick these out anyway, by building in some level of moderation buffer, and its improvements on this front could be what’s enabled them to even experiment with this at all in the live environment.
As such, having additional filter options could be handy. Or no one will use them, and they won’t matter much anyway.
We’ve asked Instagram for more information on this test, and we’ll update this post if/when we hear back.
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