In order to make your feed on a social network more suited for you, it must populate content that you are most likely to engage upon. This is what Facebook has been championing with their News Feed algorithm where it dynamically shows content based on what it presumes are your interests.
Instagram is owned by Facebook and it was imminent they would follow its parent company’s footsteps in this regard. This is why they announced that your Instagram feed will be arranged according to the likelihood you would be interested in the content.
Apparently a typical Instagram user misses 70% of content that were posted on the timeline and this means you end up missing a lot of content that you may have end up liking or commenting on. Instagram took time to explain the algorithmic timeline:
The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.
This new change will make sure that you never miss the content that you would like on your Instagram feed. Instagram iterates that this is a sort of test at the moment where they will first focus on optimizing the order of posts.
Instagram is now the third social network after Facebook and Twitter in their quest to make the content posted on their platform more useful to their user base. Since they have to sell ads alongside the posts, populating the right content with a targeted ad will be a win for the advertisers, the platform and you as the user.