They say it’s good for “managing complex social dynamics.”
For better or worse, Instagram is a major part of many of our lives. From outfit inspiration to keeping up to date with friends around the world to months-long conversations in the DMs, it all goes down on the ‘gram.
There’s one problem, though. What do you do when you follow someone you genuinely like, only to discover they can’t take a photo to save their life?
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Or worse, they post 20 times a day? You can’t unfollow — that would be unspeakably rude — but you’re also not happy with things as they are. This lovely but misguided person’s photos are clogging up your feed, and something has to be done.
Well, we have good news. Instagram is introducing a mute feature.
Following on from Facebook’s unfollow feature, which removes someone from your feed but leaves them on your friends list, and Twitter’s mute, which means you don’t see someone’s tweets or get notified when they interact with yours, the photo-sharing app is coming to the mute party. We’re delighted.
Here’s how it will work: when you come across an offending post in your feed, tap the three dots next to the user’s handle.
From there, select mute, and confirm when the bubble pops up. You won’t see their photos anymore, and they’ll have no idea you did anything. You’ll still be notified if they tag you in a post, or if someone tags you into the comments of one of theirs, but your feed will be free of their images.
Call us conflict-avoidant, but that sounds like bliss.
It’s not a universally popular call, though.
Dubai-based beauty ambassador and content creator Rhea Jacobs, who has almost 10,000 followers on the platform, said she probably wouldn’t use the mute feature herself.
“People who go to Instagram purely as a mood board might find it useful… I do wonder why you’d follow someone in the first place if you just want to mute, though,” she said.
Fair point. Maybe we all need to be a little more honest with ourselves.
Food blogger Laura Rooney, who has over 14,100 followers at @hungrygirl_blog, said she thinks the new tool will be helpful for decluttering our feeds.
“The reality is there are people we follow — either friends, acquaintances or for networking purposes — who create content that irks us or we simply aren’t interested in… a simple click to hide content would be ideal,” she says.
“I write about food a lot and I am well aware that many of my friends who follow me couldn’t care less about my latest bowl of ramen. They can simply hide my feed and I’ll be none the wiser.”
Avoiding those awkward ‘Did you unfollow me?’ chats just got easier, is the message here.
“This change makes it easier to personalise your feed based on what you want to see,” the company said in a statement. “[It] may be a useful tool for managing complex social dynamics.”
If you end up missing that person’s posts, you can unmute them by going to their profile and again, tapping the three dots by their handle.
The feature will be rolled out in the next few weeks, Instagram says. We’ll be refreshing our feeds in anticipation.
Images: Getty
