That always makes me giggle, when i hear people say, "FB sucks, i don't use FB anymore, i'm only on Instagram...."
If anything I wish they would give an option in the settings to make it chronological
Unfortunately they're not measuring abandonment or annoyance. Metrics like these are the short-term gain investors of today tech, always looking into the today and ruining the tomorrow.
I've never understood the pseudo-ephemerality of instagram. Even if you save stuff, or like it, the interface makes it very difficult to recall stuff from more than a few days ago.
Hypothesis: these businesses all monetize # of interactions (even if CPI is low), which they want to maximize by structuring interactions such that there is constantly new content that encourages obsessive checking. A sense of ephemerality of content reinforces that behavior ("I have to check because there is new content and it may be gone if I wait to check").