The algorithm is the everyday name for a platform's ranking system: the machinery that decides what each person sees, in what order, out of everything it could show. There's no single algorithm anywhere, but the name stuck because the experience is singular: something invisible decides your reach.
Every feed runs the same three steps, billions of times a day.
Weights shift like weather, but the inputs never change: audience behaviour. The system holds no opinion of your content, only evidence about responses to it.
The signals that rank well everywhere are the expensive ones: watch-through, saves, shares, replies. Chasing leaked weight numbers is astrology; feeding the constants is strategy.
New posts get auditioned: shown to a batch, measured, widened or dropped. Early performance dominates, which is why posting time, opening seconds and first-hour engagement matter so much.
The per-platform details differ enough to matter, and each has a full guide: Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, kept current as the weather changes.
You can align with it: give it strong early signals and content people finish and share. Adversarial tricks decay as detection catches up; alignment compounds.
Sometimes a ranking update, more often something ordinary: format change, posting gap, colder audiences. Check your own variables before blaming the weather, and check the shadowban pattern only if non-follower reach flatlined.
Ranking judges posts by engagement, not by where the count came from. The real effect is arithmetic: silent followers dilute your test samples and ratios, which is a stock quality question.
Related terms
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.