Without going into too much detail, Instagram’s adding a new ‘Quiet Mode’, offering users more ways to control their in-app experience, and introducing some new tools that better enable them to take a break, along with some options to manage the content shown in your recommendations.
Keep It Down
To start, let’s tackle Instagram’s incoming ‘Quiet Mode’, which switches off all notifications, adds a ‘Quiet Mode’ notifier to your profile status, and implements an auto-responder on your DMs. Users can manually set Quiet Mode time in the app, which adds relevant alerts to let their contacts know that you’re off-grid. As Instagram explains:
“Teens have told us that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and might be looking for more ways to focus at night, while studying, and during school. You can easily customize your ‘Quiet mode’ hours to fit your schedule and once the feature is turned off, we’ll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed.”
To note further, Instagram says that anyone can use Quiet Mode tools, but it specifically prompts teens to do so if its systems detect that they’re spending a significant amount of time on the app late at night. This was a good idea, considering how easy it is for teens to get caught in the FOMO trap – they feel like they have to be online at all times, but, as various studies have shown, people also need time to rest their brains, plus the using of phones and other devices with brightly-lit screens can cause various sleeping disorders with prolonged use around bed-time.
Taking a break now and then from anything routine can offer some much-needed rejuvenation. In some ways, Quiet Mode can be a handy way to ensure people are aware that others are doing exactly that. Quiet Mode is currently available to users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK, the US, and New Zealand, with more regions coming soon.
Instagram’s also adding new self-moderation tools, including the ability to hide recommended posts based on keywords. Now, when you hide a post in your Feed, you’ll see a new ‘Don’t suggest posts with certain words’ option in the pop-up list. Tapping on this will enable you to mute topics from your recommendations and Explore listings. Instagram will also now enable you to hide multiple posts at once within Explore that you aren’t interested in.
Tapping on ‘Hide More’ during the initial alert prompt will give you the option to add a selection of posts that you don’t want to see, further informing Instagram about your content preferences. This might come in especially handy if you want to bypass Instagram’s current push for more AI recommendations.
Lastly, Instagram’s also adding a new element within its Family Center, which will enable parents to better monitor their kids’ privacy and account settings. This could help parents stay on top of the changes in their kids’ usage and inquire why any such change was made, which could be a good prompt to maintain communication with teens around safe internet use.
The Wrap
These are good additions that can have many positive impacts on younger users and will help all users better manage their in-app experience. If more people are more active in manually updating their interests. These new add-ons could help put Instagram on more even footing with TikTok when it comes to content recommendations, potentially seeing Reels become more engaging and relevant.
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