It’s tough to underrate how thoroughly Facebook is woven into the fabric of society. From driving online engagement to winning Oscars to potentially swinging a presidential election, Facebook has come a long way from the .edu days of its inception.
All of this despite the fact that Facebook is, a lot of the time, unbearable to browse! Perhaps that’s a unique experience, but there’s a reason the mute function exists, and it’s because a lot of your friends and family probably post a lot of stuff you have no interest in seeing. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, of course; perhaps you tire easily of constant baby pictures, or incessant political memes, or anything in between.
However, rather than unfriending someone entirely, the mute function allows you to not hear from them. The downside? It’s sometimes easy to forget who you’ve muted; someone you perhaps just wanted to mute through, say, an election, might disappear forever.
Facebook has apparently remedied this exact problem. On Friday, they announced the introduction of a “Snooze” button, which will temporarily mute friends.
Via their release:
Over the next week, we’re launching Snooze, which will give you the option to temporarily unfollow a person, Page or group for 30 days. By selecting Snooze in the top-right drop-down menu of a post, you won’t see content from those people, Pages or groups in your News Feed for that time period.
Here’s how it works, via a cutesy-cat video. (Note that they didn’t choose a dog, because no one gets annoyed by too many dog pictures.)
What’s fascinating is that a company founded on the idea of keeping in constant contact with friends from your life or from people you wouldn’t otherwise hear from has moved on to finding as many ways as possible for users to not hear from those people.
In retrospect, that may have been inevitable.
[Facebook]
