Facebook is making it more convenient than ever to ignore friends on Facebook. Considering the social media network has already tested and carried out numerous features such as unfollowing friends without unfriending them, this new “snooze” feature will enable users to just temporarily unfollow friends without completely losing their stories entirely.
The Snooze option will appear in the top-right drop down menu of somebody’s post. Once the button is pressed, the user will be unfollowed for up to 30 days. In those 30 days, none of that user’s activity will be shown in the feed. Of course, the person who is being snoozed, will not be able to know that they are being snoozed in order prevent a rift in the relationship. Users will also be able to switch off the Snooze function before 30 days should they feel like. Facebook is confident that the new feature will be a good addition to its already existing noble “core News Feed values”.
The move from Facebook has been implemented so that users can remove certain unnecessary updates that they do not need in their life. Reportedly, Facebook has also received numerous requests to add a feature to occasionally ignore their friends. The feature is still new and has not been widely released just yet. The option should be actively available for everyone by the end of the week.
Considering that the platform is constantly used for occasional bursts of ranting and spamming of opinions and thoughts for any current affairs/personal issues, the new feature will be able to remove those kinds of posts until the dust has settled. Facebook is making users control their own experience on the platform, choosing to either accept or decline others updates.
The option is a better alternative to the extreme option of just permanently unfollowing friends. Facebook also did report that spending so much time on social media may not be good for one’s health, citing that there is a lot that the social network can do to deviate from the platform’s forte of being just a distraction. The study from UC San Diego and Yale said that Facebook users who have clicked on four times as many links as the average person, or have liked twice as many posts are more prone to mental health problems.
It is unclear whether this new feature changes the game in any way, but users will now have another option of just ignoring one’s updates in the future, or for 30 days at least.