Not capturing the correct order for posts in the For You feeds

[guypporter]

I am using Zeeschuimer to capture the 'For you' feeds on X, Instagram & TikTok and finding that the exported csv is not necessarily organised in the order it is observed in the browser. Our project is aiming to reporoduce the feed of a new user to track the recommendations.

Instagram performed well but did collect more data than we had observed on the feeds. More posts than observed were collected for X and the order of posts was quite mixed in order again when checking the csv. TikTok collected more posts than were observed in the feed too. It would be great to know if others have experienced this problem too.

[dale-wahl]

One thing to keep in mind is that posts are recorded by Zeeschuimer as they are loaded by a browser. There is not a method to know if the user actually looked at them or not. For example, if you open a feed and X/Insta/etc. loads 20 posts, Zeeschuimer will record these whether or not you scroll through all 20. Most sites preemptively load more posts as you scroll so it is therefore likely that your dataset will end with posts that loaded but were not seen. Does that seem to conform with your observations?

[guypporter]

Thank you. Yes that does explain the export recording more data points. Do you have any thoughts on why the order might have been interrupted?

[dale-wahl]

That seems worth exploring a bit with examples, but it could be related in some cases. Zeeschuimer collects the data as it is loaded/received by a browser, but further HTML/scripts may place the videos/posts on a page.