CC4

When I started @nav.tries, my Instagram page for golf swing and DJ practice reels, I assumed I was building my own learning network. Looking back, design choices I never noticed built a lot of it for me.

The biggest one is the for you page. I never searched for most of the golf coaches and DJ creators I now learn from. Reels showed them to me after I watched a few videos. Bucher and Helmond (2018) describe the same shift on Twitter, which in 2016 started showing “the best Tweets first” by default, and they note Instagram was moving the same way. Their key point is that a platform has more than one kind of user. For me, a like is a way to react to a post. For advertisers, it’s a way to measure engagement. Every time I watch or like a clip, I’m also feeding the algorithm that decides what I see next.

That affects who the PLN serves. A feed tuned for engagement rewards short, flashy clips over slow, patient explanations. The platform gets watch time, polished creators get reach, and I get a stream of tips that is useful but quietly narrowed. It serves beginners who need fundamentals.

The Interaction Design Foundation (2016) explains that affordances depend on who the user is, and that some are hidden. The ranking algorithm is a hidden affordance: it shapes my network, but I never see it working.