Instagram has been rolling out new features lately—the most recent ones were the “Regrams” feature and the “All Caught Up” feature. Their latest update? A mute button.
The photo-sharing app has been road testing a bunch of new features, and a lot of people seemed to be intrigued by the new ‘mute’ feature. Instagram’s mute button will allow users to filter the people whose posts they don’t want to see on their feed, just like Twitter and Facebook.
But tell me, do we really need it?
As mature adults, do we still want to look like we care even if we really don’t on social media? To be honest, I’d rather mute people in real life.
Jokes aside, this new feature also has its own pros and cons. Sometimes we like to follow brands so we can check out new stuff from them but don’t want our feed to look like an online catalog; this is where the mute button can become quite handy. It works for brands (beauty, fashion, home, etc.) but not so much for people.
The tricky part comes when you don’t want to see your friend’s posts anymore, especially if she’s a friend whom you’ve been following since their birth on social media (hey, people change). Good news is that they won’t be notified when you mute them, but at least the connection is still there (uh, sort of).
But before you make a list of people you want to mute, know that the mute button (along with three other features like calendar archiving, slow-mo, and reaction to stories) is still on the testing stage.
Moral lesson: Don’t follow who you don’t want to follow. Plain and simple. Just like Facebook, why go the soft route of choosing to ‘unfollow’ when you can simply unfriend? Instagram is the same thing, but much less personal.
Header courtesy of Unsplash
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