New York (CNN Business)Instagram is trying to make sure you never run out of content to scroll through.
On Wednesday, the Facebook-owned platform announced "Suggested Posts," which will show up at the bottom of your feed after you've viewed all the recent posts from accounts you follow. Now when you see the notification that "you're all caught up," you'll also be presented with additional content to scroll through, which will be personalized to your interests based on the types of feed posts you like, save or comment on.
"It's like an extension of your feed," Robby Stein, who leads Instagram's consumer products, said in an interview with CNN Business.
The concept is similar to Instagram's Explore page, which already surfaces relevant content for users. By placing additional recommended content at the bottom of the primary feed, Instagram may boost the amount of time users spend on the app and also create a new place to serve ads.
While the feature could be good for Instagram's business, it arguably stands in contrast to efforts by Facebook, (FB) Instagram and other platforms to help users be more mindful of the amount of time they spend online.
In 2018, both Facebook and Instagram released tools showing how much time you spend on each app every day and the ability to set time limits. In a Facebook post that year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent."
In announcing the "Suggested Posts" feature, Instagram said it noticed some users were reaching the end of their feed and then moving to the Explore tab or the search bar to find more things to browse, while others would close out of the app entirely.
"We see people continuing to seek out more posts they're interested in after catching up with their feeds, so we wanted to learn from that and make it easier to go a little deeper for those who choose to do so," the company said.
