Glossary
Algorithm
The ranking system a platform uses to decide which posts to show each user, and in what order, in their feed.
On social platforms, "the algorithm" is shorthand for the ranking system that decides which of the millions of possible posts to show a given user, and in what order. Because far more content is published than anyone could ever see, the feed you get is a curated selection, not a raw chronological stream. The algorithm is what does the curating.
These systems weigh many signals to predict how likely you are to find a post valuable: your past behavior (who you engage with, what you linger on), the post's early performance (engagement rate, how fast it accumulates), relevance to your interests, recency, and relationship closeness. The exact formulas are proprietary and change constantly, which is why nobody can hand you a guaranteed recipe.
For creators, the practical takeaways are steadier than the mystique suggests. Early engagement matters: a post that draws quick, genuine interaction tends to get shown to more people, which is why the first minutes after publishing are valuable. Content that keeps people on-platform (native text, images, video) is generally favored over posts that push users away via external links. And consistency compounds, because the system rewards accounts that reliably produce content people engage with.
It helps to resist over-optimizing for a system you can't fully see. Chasing every rumored "algorithm hack" tends to produce gimmicky content that ages badly. The durable strategy is making things a real audience genuinely wants to engage with; the algorithm, for all its complexity, is ultimately trying to surface exactly that. Sudden, unexplained drops in reach can also signal a shadowban rather than a normal algorithmic dip.