Social media is fantastic because it allows you to connect with people you want to hear from no matter where you’re from. The downside is that it can also give people you don’t want to hear from another way to communicate with you. Fortunately, Instagram is helping to address this issue with the help of a mute button.
In the past, if you wanted to stop seeing posts from someone you had to unfollow them. This was fine in many cases, but not in all of them. For example, many people have friends who are fine in real life but a little too much online. You might want to keep hearing from them in person even though you don’t want to see their posts online.
Unfortunately, some people take follows seriously and may feel insulted if they see that you’ve unfollowed them.
Muting allows you to remain a person’s follower without having to actually see the material they post. You can select to mute their posts or mute their posts and their stories. Only time will tell whether or not they’ll take the next logical step and add a feature that mutes their story but not their posts.
Some are still left wondering why it took Instagram so long to implement a feature that seems so simple. The answer might be related to Facebook’s continued decision not to add a dislike button. Certain features might be demanded by users even though they violate the philosophy of the app. Instagram was designed to provide users with an almost unending stream of visual content, and adding a mute button cuts down on the available content stream.
Still, at this point, there is so much content on the site that muting one person shouldn’t hurt the user experience for most people.
The new move is being heralded by many users who have been asking for it for quite some time. But others are concerned by the question it raises, “who is muting me?” It isn’t possible to see who might be muting you, so you’ll just have to wonder whether that person doesn’t like your posts because they don’t care for them or if they aren’t smashing that like button because they have you muted.
Life in the digital age can certainly get confusing.