Why this change was necessary

Like I've previously stated in an earlier blog post, the Hashtag system is broken; at least for services as big and active as Instagram. They are not very efficient at doing their jobs (searching for images nor helping people in discovering your images). Also, with their recent editing feature of allowing users to edit their Instagram captions, Instagram has most certainly seen a huge increase in people adding (spamming) hashtags to all their images like crazy - old and new.

By changing the way hashtag searches display and archive images in relation to their hashtags, they have now made the recency of when the image was posted the emphasis over the time of when the hashtag was applied to it.

Although there are obvious pros and cons to this change, I do feel like they are overall positive. It means that spammers and people abusing hashtags will no longer be as effective in doing so. Instagrammers' will also have to be more thoughtful about what hashtags are important and specific to their images as you only really get one change at this (when you post the image).

Brands and popular accounts alike who use hashtags to run competitions will benefit the most from the change. No longer can people tag all their old photos and have them count as "entries" to these competitions. This will encourage / force Instagrammers to create new images and content for Instagram competitions if they want their images to appear anywhere near the top.