Instagram Platform Mechanics

1. 01 The End of Competition? (Marco Iansiti) What kind of company decides your reach: software, data and algorithms at the core HBS Digital Initiative 1 Ivy League 13 min
2. 02 Data, network effects, and competitive advantage | Andrei Hagiu Why the ranking gets better the more everyone uses it: data-enabled learning, not just network effects HBS Digital Initiative 1 Ivy League 9 min
3. 03 Stanford Seminar: Making Sense of Algorithms in News Feeds The feed is a filtered subset, not a timeline — and it is invisible to the people reading it Stanford Online 2 Peer institution 51 min
4. 04 Stanford XCS224U: NLU I Information Retrieval, Part 1: Guiding Ideas I Spring 2023 Search as a ranking problem: queries, documents, and what "relevant" means to a machine Stanford Online 2 Peer institution 18 min
5. 05 Stanford XCS224U: NLU I Information Retrieval, Part 2: Classical IR I Spring 2023 Why the literal words matter: term matching, rare-term weighting, and vocabulary mismatch Stanford Online 2 Peer institution 15 min
6. 06 The Hype Machine | Sinan Aral Share-driven distribution: how a send actually moves content, and how influence is measured HBS Digital Initiative 1 Ivy League 69 min
7. 07 Visual Marketing and the Science Behind Brand Identity and Consumer Attention The grid as identity: visual consistency, fluency, and what a profile communicates at a glance Knowledge at Wharton 1 Ivy League 16 min
8. 08 Practicum · working creator How to grow on Instagram (according to Instagram) in 2025 Refusing to guess: a working Instagram creator rebuilding her distribution strategy out of the platform's own published statements, hashtags included Jade Beason P Practitioner 10 min

Every course reserves one practicum seat, listed last and marked P. It is filled by someone who has shipped the work — here, Jade Beason — because the university lectures establish why something works and the practicum shows it being done under real constraints.