Glossary
Feed
The scrolling stream of posts a platform shows a user, now almost always algorithmically ranked rather than strictly chronological.
A feed is the continuous, scrollable stream of content a platform serves to a user: the main surface where posts appear as you scroll. It's the primary place your content gets seen, which makes understanding how the feed works central to creating for social media.
The most important shift in feeds over the past decade is the move from chronological to algorithmic ordering. Early feeds simply showed posts newest-first. Today most platforms rank the feed by relevance, using an algorithm to decide which posts to surface and in what order, based on predicted interest rather than pure recency. Many platforms offer a "following" or "latest" chronological view as an option, but the default a typical user sees is ranked.
This has direct consequences for creators. Because the feed is ranked, publishing time matters less on its own than it once did. A strong post can surface hours after posting if it earns engagement, while a weak post may never appear prominently no matter when it went out. It also means your content competes for a slot against everything else the algorithm might show that user, so quality and early engagement determine visibility more than sheer volume.
Posts in the feed are usually shown in a truncated, preview state (LinkedIn's "…see more," a cut-off first line on X), with images cropped and text clipped. What a reader first encounters is the hook and whatever survives the crop, which is why previewing your post as it will render in the feed, before publishing, matters so much. A free post preview shows you where the truncation falls so your opening lands instead of getting buried.