April 12, 2018 update: Once again, Instagram has changed the algorithm for comments. Read about the changes here.
Read the original post below.
Instagram announced in March 2016 it planned to change the order of posts from having them appearing in chronological order to photos being sorted by an algorithm. Along with that change, it’s become clear that Instagram is now also using some sort of algorithm to order how comments appear. At first glance, it appears that the comments of accounts with larger followings are given top billing on the front page of the post so you see them without expanding the post. However, when you do expand the post, comments appear to fall back into chronological order.
Iconosquare, a service that provides Instagram analytics has some theories on the change:
- Instagram is testing a new comment order where the accounts with the most followers appear at the top
- Same idea but with your most engaged followers appearing at the top
- Same idea but with the most relevant comments at the top (comments with keywords, comments which are purely text, as opposed to comments which are emojis and @mentions)
As is its way, Instagram has not yet commented on the change.
By the way, in case you missed the announcement last month, Instagram now provides comment filtering to automatically hide comments that you don’t want to appear on your posts.
Here are the directions from the site:
- Go to your profile and tap
(iOS) or (Android) in the top-right. - Tap Comments.
- Tap next to Hide Inappropriate Comments to filter comments using a default list of keywords, or enter custom keywords below Custom Keywords. Custom keywords can include any words, phrases, numbers or emojis you’d like to filter out, separated by commas.
- Tap Done.
(iOS) or 
(Android) in the top-right.
