Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge
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Last July, as the Instagram feed began to fill up with recommended posts, the company was thrown briefly into crisis. The once-familiar landscape of friends, family, and influencers you had chosen to follow had begun to be replaced by algorithmic guesses. “Make Instagram Instagram again,” opined Kylie Jenner. Many viral tweets followed in the same vein.
“When you discover something in your feed that you didn’t follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told me at the time. “You should be delighted to see it. And I don’t think that’s happening enough…