Aubrium Blog
Research, evidence and original analysis on how social platforms work — no listicles, no recycled advice.
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56 articles
The thousand-model machine, explained for humans
Meta's engineers describe over 1,000 models, two-tower networks, and a funnel that narrows billions of posts to hundreds. Here is what that actually means.
The minus sign — what Instagram scores against you
Meta's 2023 engineering post prints the scoring formula. The "see less" term is subtracted. Every system card lists predictions nobody talks about.
Who engages matters more than how many
A study of 54 million invitations found that five signals from five separate corners of your life beat five from one clique. The catch: it measured website sign-ups, not Instagram reach.
Social media by the numbers: the master dossier
Every platform, every user count, every source checked. The one cross-platform reference built from primary documents, updated for 2025.
Short-form video: the history, the machine, and where the format goes next
The line from Vine and Musical.ly to TikTok's For You page. What these systems actually optimize for. And where the format is heading as every platform pushes past 60 seconds.
A 61-million-person experiment on whether social proof changes behavior
One experiment on 61 million people found that seeing which specific friends had already acted made people act too. A counter on its own did nothing. The hardest evidence we have that real social proof moves behavior.
Do schedulers kill your reach? The post-from-a-real-phone myth, tested
The belief that Instagram punishes scheduled posts is everywhere. Meta runs an official API for exactly that purpose. What the documents actually say, and what nobody can source.
Saves and sends beat likes: the quiet signals that move reach
Mosseri said sends matter most. The system cards list them as one guess among many, with no published weights. The loud number everyone chases travels least.
The link tax: does putting a link in a post cost you reach?
The belief that external links tank your Instagram reach is everywhere. We went looking for where Meta documents it. Across four system cards and 44 named signals, it is not there.
