The new “mixture” of Instagram shows your friends what weird

I learned a lot about my friends when I tried “blend”, the new Instagram feature that allows you to see the other rollers flows.

I saw a friend having had a lot of videos on New York restaurants, another has obtained a lot of Italian Sloate from Brainrot AI. And I was surprised to see a overlap – two other friends of me were served the same video that I had already seen from a tween boy making an impressive choreography at Alanis Morissette in a target alley.

Instagram knows that you no longer publish on the grid. You make reels back and forth with your friends. The mixture is supposed to facilitate more of this. But the new feature also reveals something that we have already felt: our algorithms of individual coils are now the best expressions of ourselves.

Blend Lives inside the DMS – Press this new Smiley icon next to the phone icon at the top of a DM. This invites the other person to a mixture, and from there you can see what coils they see and see what you see. You can answer yourself to discuss videos while watching.

Here is the Good version of how it should work. Let’s say that I am in skateboarding and that you are in the kitchen. We start a mixture – and now I can see the kitchen videos that you are served in your coil algorithm, and I can comment on you: “Oh, wow! This recipe looks cool. Have you ever tried something like that?”

Meanwhile, you see the types of skateboard videos that I saw, and you could say: “Wow, what a beautiful Ollie, dear friend! I feel so much closer to you now that we are sharing interests! I love to connect in messaging on social media with you!”

Ok, before I understand why I think that is not really like someone uses this new feature (but also why Blend is incredible), this is why Instagram does this.

Instagram has known for some time that the DMS is the place where most of the activity occurs. Instagram boss, Adam Mosseri, said it repeatedly for the last year or two in the video addresses he gives on Instagram which are supposed to give a certain transparency on the functioning of Instagram and the algorithm.

The greatest increasing source of interaction on Instagram is that people meet with each other, that you can probably notice either because you do, or you have seen a high number of action accounts on the coils you look at, often higher than the number of comments.

The problem for Instagram is that dming is a very different type of behavior from the publication. Other users cannot see what you do if everything is hidden in the DMS.

There are several types of dming that we can assume:

• People who know each other in real life using Instagram DMS instead of the text or email.
• Foreigners melted each other to flirt, do business, etc.
• Fans messed up celebrities or major creative accounts just to say hello.

Instagram can build some features for some of these use cases (they have this kind of a bizarre chatbot thing for the Fan / Creator scenario). But most of these interactions are rather simple – just messaging.

The mixture is good for this low effort sharing via DM

But there is another situation that Instagram can really improve, and see people grow: people with modest social ties who like to communicate by sending coins that they think they are funny.

This type of messaging is also the best type for Instagram, as it increases the use of coils – and unlike DMS, Instagram can make $$$ with coils thanks to advertising.

So how can Instagram encourage people to do more of this type of messaging, where they send coins from front to back?

A few months ago, Instagram launched a new feature in Reels that shows you a flow of videos that your friends loved. It is sort of an intuitive to find, and the experience is, frankly, a little mediocre.

But and if Could you see the flow you see? Now it could be fun – that’s what the mixture is.

Your algorithm is now your personality

Now, I have my own pet theory in Blend: while Instagram moves away from people who publish their own photos and personal videos, that has not buffer people’s desire to share on themselves. The new identity version on Instagram is your own personal and tailor -made flow. And now, for the first time, you can share your flow.

We are now aware that the algorithm of the coils is a real reflection of ourselves (Tiktok too, but let’s put it aside for the moment). The videos we see are not the ones we have chosen to follow, but what is the algorithm known We love. To show someone, your flow is to show you in a way that the publication of your own photos has never been able.

“I can’t believe I see that!” Part of the coils

Here is my even more conspiratorial idea: there are a lot of viral content on coils – videos that are not supposed to be comedy videos but which are intrinsically funny because of the way they are seriously ridiculous or ignored. Sometimes it is mean, like laughing at a child or a person who seems really bad. But there are also equitable targets: people who believe in the sun, excited old people, influencers from Bro Bro Weird Hustle.

This has created a popular concept of “mythical sweaters” – strange, grinny and surprising videos that you cannot very well understand how they found themselves on your chronology. You will see this sentence or variants on “Legendary Pull” commented on this type of videos, as well as another sentence, “I built this brick by brick algorithm”, which jokes about the way the algorithm used all your views and likes to lead this strange moment.

This version of Blend does not concern the sharing of these beautiful interests of cooking and skateboarding with your friends – it is “hey my friend, you must see absolutely mad Tips I saw! “”

My theory is that Instagram is very aware of the situation of attraction of mythical coils, and the best way to improve which is to allow people to share their flows with their friends. If you have spent so much time building it in brick brick, you want to show it. (Instagram did not immediately return a request for comments to my theory.)

Instagram has long been this problem of being a place where people only show their most attractive side. Think of the peak of brunch photos and filtered selfies. Gen Z rejected this and is happy to show how strange and real they are – and part of this shows your algorithm.